<
https://yaleglobalhealthreview.com/2025/05/18/a-chronically-ill-earth-covid-organizing-as-a-model-climate-response-in-los-angeles/>
"I spent the January fires in Los Angeles arguing with my mother in a hotel
room. She was shell-shocked, astonished at the scale of destruction in the
neighborhood where she raised myself and my siblings. I was surprised at her
surprise: as a lifelong Angelena and climate-literate member of generation Z,
my question had not been whether the Palisades would burn but when. As I
chatted with adults in the hotel where we’d gone to escape the smoke, though, I
found my position to be an uncommon one: people spoke of how long rebuilding
would take, how much it would cost, and how tragically odd the whole situation
had been. The crisis was acute, a burst of bad luck. It had come from a
combination of high winds and low rains – what, my little brother asked, did
global warming have to do with the speed of the wind? Outside, people wandered,
faces covered by N95s. “This feels like COVID,” said one wild-eyed woman
clutching two leashed Yorkies. “We’re all in masks.”
I offered her a handful of extras – masks, not dogs – feeling that, in a way,
she was right: the structural dimension of the climate crisis, “like COVID,”
will soon become impossible for even society’s most insulated to ignore.
Hopefully, most of us understand the climate crisis better than my little
brother – we know, for instance, that it’s existential and accelerating,
meaning the danger to places like LA will only increase as the planet heats.
And we know that it’s anthropogenic, driven by unsustainable consumption
patterns concentrated among the wealthiest citizens of the wealthiest
countries, all of which have already subjected most of this country and the
world to deadly temperatures, fire-flood cycles, rising seas, and dying crops.
But our bewildered response to crises like the LA fires tell us we may still be
accustomed to addressing the climate crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic: as a
question of how fast we can get back around to pretending like the problem is
gone."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Covid: May 22, 2025
https://www.patreon.com/posts/covid-may-22-129582799
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
