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Woolsey fire, near LA, seen from West Hills. California
is currently ablaze, after a record hot summer and a dry fall set the
stage for the most destructive fires in the state’s history (Kevin Cooley/The New Yorker).
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Thirty
years ago, The New Yorker published “The End of Nature,” a long article
about what it then called the greenhouse effect.
I was in my 20s
when I wrote it and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was
still young. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness.
We were spewing so much [natural and vital] carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no
longer a force beyond our influence -- and humanity, with its capacity for
industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic meter of the
planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water.
Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began
referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the "world made by Man."
I
was frightened by my reporting, but at the time it seemed likely that
we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening.
In 1988,
George H. W. Bush, running for president, promised that he would fight
“the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”
He did not, nor did
his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world,
and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has
become a fierce daily reality.
As this essay goes to press, California
is ablaze. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu,
and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills [Northern California], has become the
most destructive in California’s history.
After a summer of
unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than
half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city
called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten
thousand buildings and killing at least 63 people; more than 600 others are missing.
The authorities brought in cadaver dogs,
a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and
anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on
how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments. More
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