Dear friends,
Usually, I love to learn new words. Sometimes, I invent them myself when I discover a gap in our shared vocabulary.
I would have preferred never to learn the term “fire hurricane,” which refers to the devastating combination of high winds and drought conditions that destroyed the town of Lahaina and chased people into the sea.
The death toll in Maui will continue to rise, as there are about 1,300 people still missing.
Contribute to Mālama Maui Nui to support initiatives that perpetuate community stewardship and protect the island. Give to Maui Strong to support rapid response and recovery.
There has been lots of troubling discussion about the slowness of the emergency response in Maui, which resonates with Christy Lefteri’s experience of talking to survivors of a 2018 wildfire in Greece.
Lefteri is the author of the forthcoming novel, The Book of Fire. She notes that people seem reluctant to locate the blame for the devastation with climate change, preferring to “blame a tangible entity – a person, a group of people, the government.”
In Mati, the fire didn’t rage so hard because someone had set off a spark – it raged so hard because years of global heating had dried up the land, part of a cascading set of unsustainable practices and inaction that had set our planet on fire. And now, two years after I first started researching and writing my book, the fires are even worse.
The more I spoke to people, including climate scientists, the more I came to see that there is often a gap that separates science from public awareness and debate. In her book Engaging With Climate Change, the psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe says that “many people who accept anthropogenic global warming continue to locate it as a problem of the future”. To my astonishment, this seemed to apply even to people who had themselves been affected directly by wildfires. Perhaps the reality is too huge and too painful, the guilt too much to bear?
Maybe we need a new word for what we are experiencing as we confront disasters of our own making. The time has passed for thinking of our role in changing the climate as unwitting and somehow innocent. Maybe it would help us to talk about our next moves.
I haven’t got a new word for us. I find that I have no words for today.
I made the mistake of reading the comments on a piece that Diana Nyad wrote about the alarming temperature increase of the waters off the coast of Florida. Some folks responded as though the issue is whether they should choose another spot for a vacation or whether warm water is actually soothing.
Do not read the comments on articles about anything.
My next move is to organize my building to prepare for curbside composting. Doing something small and near seems like the antidote to despair.
I’d love to know what you’re working on.
with love,
L