¿Cómo llorar la muerte de un árbol solitario, cuando bosques enteros se queman a mansalva? ¿Y cómo hacerlo en una nación como Chile, donde cientos de seres humanos acaban de morir y muchos más han quedado heridos en la reciente conflagración abrasadora que ha devorado miles de hectáreas y demolido innumerables viviendas en vastas regiones de mi atribulado país?
Y, sin embargo, desde el amparo de mi casa en Santiago, a cien kilómetros de las carbonizaciones, por mucho que me horrorizaba la devastación que iba cobrando ingentes vidas y medios de subsistencia, no pude evitar preocuparme por un árbol en particular, una de las tantas víctimas desapercibidas de la catástrofe.… Seguir leyendo »
This summer, as Rhodes was ravaged by wildfires and the world witnessed the destruction of precious trees and fragile ecosystems, on the opposite shore in Turkey, only miles away, ancient forests were being felled for the sake of more coal, more profit. But what the energy company hadn’t reckoned with was the resistance of local women.
Akbelen, in the province of Muğla, is a woodland of about 730 hectares (1,800 acres) that provides a natural habitat for a diverse range of flora and fauna. It is this beautiful place that YK Energy, a private energy company, has been aiming to occupy in order to expand an open-pit lignite mine to supply a thermal power plant.… Seguir leyendo »
On the drive to our cottage here in June, my wife and I collided with the dense wall of Canadian wildfire smoke. The clear spring air began turning a sickly orange in the Adirondack Mountains, the sun was reduced to a red spot, and by the time we reached Montreal the skyline was barely visible from across the St. Lawrence River. On that day, June 25, Montreal had the worst air quality in the world.
Up at our lake, we soon learned to track the sheets of smoke online as they swept across Canada, down into the United States and even across the Atlantic Ocean.… Seguir leyendo »
Hawaii has one of the most sophisticated tsunami warning systems in the world, fine-tuned over the course of almost 80 years, ever since 1946, when a 55-foot wave hit the island chain, killing 159 people.
For decades, tsunami evacuation maps have appeared in every Hawaiian telephone directory. Signs have alerted beachgoers of the hazard zones; others identified escape routes. The state now has an emergency alert system for all disasters that not only relies on sirens, which get tested on the first working day of every month everywhere in Hawaii, but also on radio and TV broadcasts. It is a system designed to save lives when disaster is about to strike.… Seguir leyendo »
La catástrofe que arrasó la semana pasada la querida población de Lahaina, al oeste de Maui, trae consigo el amargo sabor del desconcierto.
El incendio de la maleza se mezcló con unos vientos fuertes azotados por un huracán lejano y, de la noche a la mañana, la histórica ciudad había desaparecido, convertida en humo y cenizas. Un exuberante paisaje acuarelado está ahora redibujado en blanco y negro. Al menos 99 personas han muerto, y muchas más están desaparecidas.
Un huracán quemó una ciudad. Es todo muy extraño y terrible.
Vivir en Hawái el tiempo suficiente te familiariza con las catástrofes repentinas, del tipo que pueden arrasar una comunidad en una semana, un día o un instante.… Seguir leyendo »
In November 2019 I wrote about the bushfires and burnoffs and calling for better political leadership. A few weeks ago we lit the first hazard reduction burn around our house since those fires. It brought up a few memories and feelings.
It’s two years now since the first fires came. They had been near Armidale and Tenterfield for a couple of weeks; then they were much closer. A hot day, a big wind and an ember from kilometres away landed high on the Leather Jacket Ridge that runs through the middle of Wytaliba, our 3,500-acre community. Over the next week, with calmer and cooler conditions that fire burned slowly downhill to our settlement areas.… Seguir leyendo »
After the second world war, Greece’s countryside experienced two debilitating human surges – an exodus of villagers, then a most peculiar human invasion of its fringes. These two surges, aided by a weak state and abetted by the climate crisis, have turned the low-level drama of naturally redemptive forest fires into this summer’s heart-wrenching catastrophe.
After heatwaves of unprecedented longevity, wildfires across the summer months have so far destroyed more than 100,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of ancient pine forests. They have blackened swathes of Attica, scorched parts of ancient Olympia and obliterated north Evia’s magnificent forests – whose rural communities lost their homes, not to mention their livelihoods and landscapes.… Seguir leyendo »
Six years after finding themselves at the forefront of Europe’s political crisis over refugees, thousands of Greeks are now refugees in their own country.
On July 21, a small wildfire began burning over the northern half of Evia, an island around 30 miles northeast of Athens. Over the next 20 days — most of which exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 38 degrees Celsius — it swelled into a vast conflagration, sweeping from one coastline of Evia to another and racking up a staggering balance sheet of damage: 120,000 acres of burned forest, hundreds of millions of euros in economic loss, and the wholesale evacuation of dozens of villages and thousands of islanders.… Seguir leyendo »
I have a pastime, one that used to give me considerable pleasure, but lately it has morphed into a source of anxiety, even horror: earth-watching.
Let me explain.
The earth from space is an incomparably lovely sight. I mean the whole planet, pole to pole, waxing and waning and rotating in that time-generating way it has, and not the views from the International Space Station, which is in a low orbit about 200 miles up and gives us only part of the whole.
My earth-watching, made possible by NOAA and Colorado State University websites, originates in three geostationary weather satellites parked in exceedingly high orbits above the Equator.… Seguir leyendo »
“Demasiada tierra para tan poco indio”. Así dice el gastado credo recientemente revivido por el presidente de Brasil, Jair Bolsonaro. Y, sin embargo, esos “pocos indios”, que representan 305 grupos indígenas y hablan 274 idiomas, han logrado lo que los gobiernos han intentado sin éxito durante décadas: controlar la deforestación en más de 1.150.000 kilómetros cuadrados de bosques amazónicos.
Los pueblos indígenas manejan aproximadamente la mitad de la Amazonía brasileña y año tras año sus tierras han tenido las tasas más bajas de deforestación en la región. Pero recientemente, el trabajo de los pueblos indígenas se ha vuelto más difícil, ya que el gobierno no ha hecho cumplir las protecciones constitucionales de sus derechos a la tierra.… Seguir leyendo »
In the Australian bush southwest of Sydney, a wedge-tailed eagle is gliding over the paddocks. He’s on the hunt for prey. Watch a “wedgie” for long enough and you’ll see them suddenly swoop, dive-bombing toward the ground, before lifting aloft a rabbit, wallaby or small kangaroo.
There’s no sign of that today. Today, he circles, looping over hillsides filled with blackened trees. There’s no prey to find.
We’re on Tallygang Mountain Road, in an area called Wombeyan Caves. The bushfires swept through this part of Australia in early January, during a fire season which consumed more than 12.6 million hectares (about 50,000 square miles) of bush, mainly in the country’s eastern states.… Seguir leyendo »
Cuando vuelva la temporada seca, la selva de la Amazonía arderá de nuevo, como todos los años. Por desgracia, esta vez será diferente. Los titulares internacionales del año pasado tomaron por sorpresa al presidente brasileño, Jair Bolsonaro, y a sus aliados. Con seguridad, tendrán preparados más trucos para dar respuesta a la próxima temporada de incendios. Es vital observar de cerca sus acciones.
La deforestación aumenta a un ritmo alarmante. Desde agosto de 2019 ha aumentado un 94 por ciento con respecto al año anterior, que ya había tenido el nivel más alto de deforestación en una década. A diferencia de las áreas más secas de Australia o California, en el bosque tropical no pueden originarse incendios a menos que los seres humanos talen árboles.… Seguir leyendo »
In the Old Testament, the Bible recounts the 10 Plagues of Egypt, disasters inflicted by God to force the Pharaoh to release the Israelites from slavery. In the past few months, Australia has been forced to endure plagues of its own, afflicted with terrifying bush fires, drought and smoke pollution that choked the skies. Now, the emergence of a global pandemic feels very much like another plague lapping at our shores after the summer that destroyed so much.
As of Thursday, there were 5,133 confirmed cases of covid-19 in Australia. Most cases have been in returned travelers — people who have traveled by plane or been passengers on cruise ships — rather than from pockets of local transmission.… Seguir leyendo »
The 2019–20 fire season in Australia has been unprecedented. To date, an estimated 18 million hectares of fire has cut swathes through the bush – an area greater than that of the average European country and over five times the size of blazes in the Amazon.
This reflects previous predictions of Australian science. Since 2008 and as recently as 2018, scientific bodies have warned that climate change will exacerbate existing conditions for fires and other climatic disasters in Australia. What used to be once-in-a-generation fires now re-appear within 10–15 years with increased ferocity, over longer seasons.
In a country known for climate denial and division, debate has erupted around bushfire management and climate change.… Seguir leyendo »
Every state in Australia has been touched by fire since the season started in September. The fires have burned over 12 million acres, an area larger than Maryland. Four hundred and eighty million animals are estimated to be killed or badly injured. Thousands of people have been evacuated. At least 24 have died.
This is just the midpoint of our normal fire season, which used to run from October to March but now is almost year round.
As I write this, my parents are living without power in an evacuation center in Narooma, a town of 2,600 people on the east coast of New South Wales.… Seguir leyendo »
Apocalyptic scenes are playing out across Australia as bushfires have burned millions of acres and ravaged more than 1,000 homes in New South Wales alone.
The bright orange haze may look like something out of a dystopic science fiction film -- or even Dante's Inferno -- but this is Australia's current reality. A total of 20 people have died, and the photographs of human suffering are foreboding: native Australians have poured out of smoke-shrouded towns as the flames creep nearer, while people along the coast have taken refuge on beaches.
These are scenes from an Earth that is becoming uninhabitable amid raging wildfires, severe hurricanes and floods, record droughts and rising sea levels that have already submerged islands.… Seguir leyendo »
I'm visiting my mother in the little country town where I grew up in Gippsland, a region of Australia that's currently on fire. That's not very specific, so let me narrow it down: I'm in one of the south-easternmost parts of Australia that is currently on fire.
Gippsland is a big area, roughly two New Jerseys. The closest fire is 50 miles away from us today, lending the sky a gray hue and the sun an orange tint. The official weather forecast is: "Mostly sunny but smoky".
People here keep one eye on their phones, watching the online maps that show flames slowing chewing their way through half a million hectares to the north and east, but there's no immediate danger.… Seguir leyendo »
We know the sight by heart: corrugated iron on a low pile of ash with a chimney left standing. Another house gone. And the pattern of bushfires is part of our lives too. They burn until a cold wind blows up the coast when it buckets down dousing the flames.
But that’s not the pattern now. The downpour has been postponed officially until late January. Things are looking up: it was April. Either way the experts are saying the weeks ahead are looking dry, tinder dry.
As that news sank in this summer an unfamiliar emotion took hold in Australia: not fear so much as dread.… Seguir leyendo »
The fire situation in eastern Australia continues to rapidly escalate.
At this stage we cannot predict when this will come to an end, but with losses of lives and property mounting on the south coast of NSW, eastern Victoria, South Australia, southwestern WA and Tasmania, we now have a nationally significant catastrophe that affects city and country alike.
The magnitude of these fires alone (about 5 million hectares and rapidly rising), apart from their human and environmental consequences, simply shows us that we now confront a new, more flammable world: a coupling of people, ecosystems and fire that is now irrevocably transformed.… Seguir leyendo »
There are not many political messages that can slip through a closed window or a locked door, but that’s just what happened last week in Australia’s biggest city. Climate change didn’t just come knocking; it slithered in under every crack, filling houses and offices across Sydney with the acrid smell of burning forests.
The Sydney Opera House, whose white-tiled sails normally sparkle in the sunlight, was seen through a haze of smoke. Asthmatics were advised against exercising. Schoolchildren were kept in their classrooms, away from the smoke-filled playground.
And politicians, especially from the ruling conservative coalition, issued instructions that it was inappropriate to discuss climate change while the fires were actively being fought.… Seguir leyendo »
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