Welcome to Nor'easter
Climate & Ecology in the Northeast United States
Hello:
If you’re getting this email, it’s probably because you were on the End Talk email list. That project is more or less defunct, but I am launching something new, a regular newsletter about climate and environment in the Northeast United States: Nor’easter.
The primary focus of this newsletter will be New England and Eastern New York—though it may dip into Canada, toward the Great Lakes, parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic, etc.
I’ve written a little explanation of this project below, followed by a short musing on the brief—but startling—heat wave the region recently experienced as introduction to spring.
Please read on, subscribe (or stay subscribed), and share!
—Will
Why the Northeast?
The extremes of climate change are becoming more and more apparent, even as we grow increasingly accustomed to bizarre and unseasonable variability. As part of engaging with this reality, I think it is important to explicitly examine the trends around climate change and ecology regionally. Borders, in a very real sense, are becoming more ecologically obsolete (even as many harden politically).
Regions—the spaces defined by climate, broadly speaking—cohere in a unique way, and they deserve unique attention, particularly as we move into the future. I think we tend to see things on a national and international level (Earth experienced its hottest year in history, US emissions continue to spike, etc.)—and, I hope, on a local level. But there is a space between the two, sometimes but not always demarcated by state lines, that has an ecological and climatic connectivity worth attuning to. The intention here is to focus on that—how things fit together, and where things are going.
What will it consist of?
At the outset, newsletters—sent approximately monthly—will include a weather and climate round-up, looking at recent stories of what’s happening in the region, examining bigger trends and patterns, and trying to pull it all together. The intent will also be to have original reporting, essays, interviews, and so on as it gets going, and to increase the newsletter frequency. In time there may be a visual or audio component as well.
There will also be some emphasis on solutions. Not that there is any “solution” per se to the climate crisis. And personally, I’m wary of much of the “solutions journalism”-type approach; let’s not be too rosy about things—or even worse, as they say, greenwash. That said, there are responses and ways of relating to the environment that should be highlighted—and the intent will be to do that, in a variety of ways. This is not pure doomerism, though surely there will be plenty of that.
Is there a cost?
At the outset I intend to mostly avoid any paywall, though in the future this will selectively change. The cost, standard on this platform, will be $5/month, or less if you commit to a longer term. Should this newsletter get going, that amount will allow me to spend more time on it, expand it, and with some luck, bring in contributors.
Why climate and environment?
I put this question last because it’s fundamentally the most important. The environmental crisis—in this I include climate change, but also pollution, overdevelopment, biodiversity collapse, the agricultural crisis, and on and on—is the fundamental crisis. It’s the story now, and to be a bit blunt, it’s the only story. And to be clear, it’s not just a crisis of energy (though that’s a big part of it, because humanity has spent a century-plus building an extremely complex and energy-intensive arrangement that relies on one finite and highly polluting source). Fundamentally, and more holistically, this is a crisis of ecology, of humans’ relationship to the natural world. Our species has, en masse, attempted to cut ourselves off from nature—you might say we have hubristically sought to transcend it—and that simply isn’t possible. The long crisis we’re living, in its varied forms, is the result. There’s no easy way to reckon with or remedy what we’ve created, but we must be clear about the situation and make the effort to meet it. To invert what Margaret Thatcher once said, now there are only alternatives.
Fire in the Northeast
As we move into late April we’re finally getting some steady, soaking rain here in Northern New England. I don’t particularly enjoy the cold, wet days but I admit: we could use it.
A week and a half ago it was a different story, the last few patches of snow swiftly melting to reveal dead grass, dormant shrubs, and small trees beneath. An unseasonable start to that week—sunny, 60° F, low humidity—plus a southwest breeze with gusts upwards of 40 MPH significantly raised the risk of one thing: wildfires.
In the continental United States wildfires may be more loudly a Western story, but they are not necessarily confined to the West. Here in the Northeast wildfire risk tends to be particularly high in early–mid-spring, April and May, when snow cover disappears and before trees have leafed out. Indeed, in 1963, almost 200,000 acres in New Jersey burned in April. But the fire season technically lasts until winter, and fall can be bad too, especially if the summer’s been dry. In fact, one of the largest wildfires in recorded Northeastern history occurred in October of 1947, burning over 200,000 acres in Maine.
Like summer drought, limited snowpack is a major contributor to fire in the generally wet Northeast. Unsurprisingly, given our climate trajectory, both phenomena have been occurring more frequently, and there have been several notable large fires in recent years. 2021 saw the largest fires in Western Massachusetts in two decades. Earlier this month the largest brush fire in Rhode Island since the 1940s burned, and a fire in New Jersey the week before that burned over 4,000 acres. While the Western fires obviously dwarf these in scale and impact, the trends are unsurprisingly similar.
Which brings us back to early April. The high temperatures this month ultimately broke yet another set of records throughout the region—an increasingly banal occurrence that begins to fade, amnesiatically, almost as soon as it has passed.
But even more than the rising heat—extremely unpleasant in the height of summer, unsettling by its appearance at other times of year—the predominant feeling around climate change for me might be erraticness. The extraordinary warm spikes (and cold spikes—February’s deep polar vortex set all-time cold records in the Northeast, including one for the entire country); the sometimes severe fluctuations between high and low temperatures, often accompanied by fierce winds; the deluges and snow squalls, interspersed by rapidly accelerating drought—this chaos seems increasingly to define the experience of climate change, especially in the Northeast.
So this odd start to “spring”—to the extent four seasons really exist here anymore—feels as good an occasion as any to launch this newsletter. It’s hard to talk about climate change. It’s enormous—a “hyperobject,” per Timothy Morton, an “entity of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it defeats traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.” It is hard to process, and it’s traumatizing, whether we are facing that or not. It’s also just strange, enmeshed in the mundanity and the repetition of the kind of society and world we live in, the minute topics of focus that consume so much of our time, which day-to-day do not afford space for something so encompassing.
Fortunately, the heat spike earlier this month seems to have passed without anything acutely catastrophic, weather-wise, in this region. Which is good, but not necessarily reassuring; let’s not forget the chronic catastrophe all around. Moreover, I do feel this little hot spell may be a harbinger of the coming summer…
If you read the Q&A above, you’ll have a sense of what this newsletter is intended to do. I hope—with others’ involvement—to break into some of what I’m trying to get at around the experience of climate change. Looking hard at its very real and immediate manifestations. Once again, given the enormity of the crisis, I think that one small way of breaking it down—and perhaps an increasingly relevant way—will be to focus on this specific place, the Northeast.
Thanks for reading—please subscribe and share!