Snowball Earth in the East; Pyrocene Out West
In the Northeast winter’s mostly felt like winter, a welcome change. Bitterly cold walks in the snow, frozen rivers and ponds, subzero wind chills—these have become a rarity in recent years so I enjoy them while they last.
And whether they will last meteorological winter is a different question. I keep expecting winter to flip on us—and it keeps giving—but at some point our luck may run out:
We shall see.
The recent pattern here marks quite the contrast to the out-of-control fires that have burned in the opposite corner of the country. What is there to possibly say about the catastrophic devastation Los Angeles has seen this month? From the Northeast’s vantage point maybe only that compounding disasters are our inevitable future. This single event, which has taken at this count 27 human lives and 12,000 structures, may be the costliest disaster in US history, a designation it’s sure to lose in, perhaps, months. This is not something the system can sustain. Built for a world that doesn’t really exist any longer, our constructed civilization faces a reckoning.
Lest we feel overly reassured in the Northeast, spared from the Santa Anas—fires may or may not be our lot in this part of the country in a few months. Early spring tends to bring heightened fire danger to the Northeast, an alarming prospect given that much of the region suffered a severe fire season last fall and remains in a state of drought.
Per the National Interagency Fire Center’s January 2 report, risk is considered moderate now but snowfall will be a factor in how it develops:
Significant fire potential for all Eastern Area is expected to remain normal through April. However, below normal snowpack across the northern tier of the Eastern Area was of concern at end of December and will need to be monitored heading into the spring fire season. The rest of the Eastern Area should experience near normal fire potential through the winter into the early spring season outside of any warm, dry, and windy periods.
For Earth Island Journal I recently wrote about the enormous (proposed) Telephone Gap Integrated Resource Project, which may log thousands of acres in the Green Mountain National Forest, including several hundred acres of Eastern old growth.
This is the second time I’ve written about this issue for EIJ. A quote from the previous piece gets at the heart of the issue:
Jamison Ervin, a Vermont resident who has worked in sustainable forest management and nature conservation for organizations including UNDP and the Nature Conservancy … describes the sort of logging that federal and state governments are currently undertaking as reckless. “In the last five years or so, there’s just been this sea shift in understanding of the magnitude of the planetary crisis,” she says. “We’re facing the Sixth Extinction. We’re on track to lose a million species by 2050. We’re looking at this intertwined planetary crisis of biodiversity loss, of climate change, and then, increased vulnerability to disaster, increased water [insecurity], increased food insecurity … These are intertwined issues.”
At the same time, she says, many government agencies are ramping up logging efforts, targeting “forests that are essential for carbon, essential for biodiversity, and absolutely essential for mitigating [and] avoiding floods … They’re logging as if they’re in the nineteenth century.”
I intend to continue covering this story, which extends beyond Vermont throughout the region. Suffice it to say here: Forest regeneration has been unique in the Northeast United States, which was almost entirely logged up through the nineteenth century before widely reforesting. That process has had its negatives (the spread of Lyme disease) but it’s had many more positives: cleaner air, water, more habitat for wildlife, and so on. There’s a lot of talk about high-tech, expensive, often unrealistic “climate solutions” these days. Well, one solution that literally requires doing nothing is not cutting down the forests. The science is pretty clear that the older the forests are, the better they are for all the things we claim to value, like biodiversity, carbon sequestration, flood resilience, and more. Given the ubiquity of private logging, we have no shortage of wood or young forests. So the fact that simply not logging is a losing battle even on the limited public lands in this part of the country is, in my view, extraordinarily short-sighted, and it must change. Read the latest story in full here.
I don’t have much new to say about the political shift that will inaugurate this week, which I characterize as a marker of ecological reckoning as much as anything else, but more or less on the topic, for CounterPunch I wrote an extended review of the forthcoming book Owned by
. It’s an interesting and very timely book in which Higgins traces out the rise of reactionary tech billionaires and the near-simultaneous transformations of once putatively left-wing journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi into right-wing mouthpieces. Both are writers I used to read and respect and for whom I now feel something closer to contempt, as I’ve written about several times. The review is paywalled (an affordable subscription to CP+ supports indie media) but here’s an excerpt:Higgins has done a sort of service for those of us who have watched Greenwald and Taibbi in disbelief, as they’ve contorted themselves into more and more ridiculous positions in obvious deference to wealth and power—particularly wealth and power in the tech sector—and aligned themselves with an ascendant right. Both have repeatedly justified the transformation (a transformation that, to varying degrees, they also deny, instead blaming shifts in liberal culture) under the guise of rejecting corporate censorship and hegemonic liberalism, surfing the same wave of anti–cancel culture hysteria that has degraded public conversation more generally and simplified potentially meaningful debates around power and the consolidation of media into a more easily digestible pill of “liberal elites are muffling conservative voices.” And, of course, both men have gotten very rich doing it.