We can’t avoid thinking about extreme heat now, even if it isn’t affecting us personally. Suddenly climate change is all over the news. The earth is hotter than ever, generating surprise and global alarm – and yet I wonder. What did we all expect? Science has been telling us about the coming climate chaos, and writers publishing cautionary tales about it all over the place.
New global heat records, and where I live in New York City, stifling smoke in the air from Canadian wildfires, have now made it all so real. And as a scientist and a writer, I have some very deep concerns about our changing environment.
When I sent geneticist David Suzuki my new novel, Brindle 24 – The Last Day in the Life of a Town to read a while back, he sent me his book in return, The Legacy, – An Elder’s Vision for our Sustainable Future. He said I had packed a lot of science into Brindle 24, and I had, wrapped around the story of three families in one small town. It is an environmental apocalypse after fracking and set in upstate New York. But I am sure his book shocked me a whole lot more than mine did him.
David Suzuki’s The Legacy is not fiction at all. It is autobiography and science, and the setting is the whole planet. In under 100 pages, he gives an expert scientist’s rendition of how humans arrived on earth and where we are going in the future – if we don’t change course.
“Leading science corroborates this ancient understanding that whatever we do to the environment…we do directly to ourselves.
David Suzuki, The Legacy
David Suzuki has popularized science for millions of readers and viewers in his lifetime, as a writer, broadcaster and a speaker. Science does not appeal to everyone, but to me, science has always been simply looking closely at something. Noticing and looking again, closer and closer, and not giving up on understanding what the natural world is telling me. Science inspires me. Sometimes the story science tells is amazing and wonderful, and sometimes it is horrifying. It depends on what you look at.
For climate crisis and global warming, the science has been too terrible for many of us to see, acknowledge and believe. I think maybe that is why, although we are burning down our house by digging up and using so much fossil fuel, we are surprised that it is hot.
As early as 30 years ago, in 1992, the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity showed that people and the environment were on a collision course heading for an ecological disaster. As many as 1,700 scientists from 71 countries signed the report, including 104 Nobel Prize winners. Since then, ever more evidence has been found and published as scientists around the world find more facts every day.
Telling people digging up and using fossil fuels causes climate chaos, as a grown up, feels a lot like it did telling my father to stop smoking as a kid, because it will give him lung cancer. He wasn’t ready to hear it, although we all knew it was true, and he died of lung cancer. Except smoking is individual and climate change is global.
Writers too have been telling us the story of implending climate chaos. I read the new Silas House novel, Lark Ascending this week, as New York City is under a veil of smoke from the Canadian wildfires buring out of control. I was light headed and dizzy at the time from the smoke. I have to say that made Lark Ascending seem even more tragic than it already is – a world literally on fire with refugees racing ahead of the flames to survive.
I’m also remembering the masterpiece cautionary tale about a natural disaster, in the Margaret Atwood novel The Year of the Flood.
We’re using up the Earth. It’s almost gone. You can’t live with such fears and keep on whistling. The waiting builds up in you like a tide.
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Let’s not wait any more.
J.J.Brown Author 
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