Read this column, by Gary Ferguson, to damp down your enthusiasm for where human beings and human civilization are heading today.
Ferguson's column appeared in The New York Times on Monday, May 18, 2026, and his column is titled this way: "A Water Doom Loop Is Coming." Using the words "damp down" to describe how I think you might best temper your enthusiasm for those who claim that things are going really, really well (and, yes, I am thinking of you, Andy Kessler) might reflect the fact that the entire point of Ferguson's column is that "damp" conditions are becoming scarce indeed in various environments where the presence of water has, historically, been taken for granted.
For example, in Tucson, Arizona and surrounding areas (nobody's idea of an environment rich in water) Ferguson tells us that what was already scarce is almost disappearing entirely (emphasis added):
Ecologists warn that in just 25 years, more than 70 percent of the Southwestern needle leaf evergreen forests, which include ponderosa pines, may be replaced by grass in what might qualify as the first significant post-climate-change shift in the landscape of America.
One of the biggest consequences is the loss of shade. Without the forest canopy overhead, snow can evaporate quickly instead of trickling into rivers, streams and aquifers. In the mountainous parts of the West, where roughly 70 percent of freshwater runoff originates as snowpack, that’s a huge deal, a sign of a catastrophic feedback loop that is beginning to form.
Lands that are no longer covered by snow also absorb more heat from the sun, which dries them out and leaves them more vulnerable to large wildfires. Those fires in turn put more carbon into the atmosphere, warming the climate even more. In 50 or so years, by some estimates, snow could virtually disappear from the West, making life there exceedingly difficult....
The government should treat this situation as deeply threatening to the habitability of the West. But as heat and drought battered the region this spring, the federal government, utterly dismissive of climate change, was shredding an astonishing number of forest-related conservation efforts. At the end of March, the Trump administration introduced a reckless plan to restructure the Forest Service, gutting much of the scientific research into how we might mitigate the effects of climate change on public forests. The threatened (or in some cases, abandoned) studies looked at climate-related insect and tree disease and wildfire behavior — the understanding of which is essential to public safety.
While I (and I hope you) read about ecology, and take it seriously, what I mainly write about is "politics."
We're in a "political" doom loop, too, you know! Our political representatives are failing us, so more and more we are walking away from our own participation, having decided that "politics" is corrupt and counter-productive, and not worth our effort.
I would like to suggest the opposite approach is needed, in just the same way that more scientific research on how to mitigate the impacts of global warming is needed - not less!
Image Credit:
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment!