Paper Tiger

Last summer, Trondheim experienced a weeks-long heatwave that made it difficult to go anywhere or do anything. It was atypical for the region, particularly the length, something which meant the nights really didn’t cool off that much. This summer has been the opposite, cool and rainy. Many locals I know complained, but as someone who doesn’t do well in heat, I was perfectly happy to stay put. Especially given the record-breaking heatwaves occurring…well, nearly everywhere else.

I’ve found myself thinking more than once this summer about the Maja Lunde novel The End of the Ocean (titled simply Blå, Blue, in the original Norwegian). The drought and prolific wildfires that have followed the heatwaves being experienced across Europe and North America have made it hard not to. Lunde’s novel takes place primarily in two separate time periods and regions: 2010s Norway, and 2041 southern/western Europe. 2041 southern Europe is characterized by heat, extreme drought, conflict, and spread out refugee camps where food and water are strictly rationed (for all of the Europeans who had to flee their homes due to drought/fires/conflict). The main characters in this near-future time are a father and daughter, hoping to reunite with his wife and infant son in order to make it farther north where there’s still water to be found. Northern Europe, in fact, has too much water.

“The drier our own country became, the more she talked about the countries in the north, where the rain didn’t just come once in a great while during the cold months, but also in the spring and summer. Where long-term drought didn’t exist. But where instead the opposite was true: the rain was an affliction, arriving in storms. Where rivers flooded over and dams burst, abruptly and brutally.” p. 24-25

Of course we’re not quite there yet. Although in recent years, Norway has seen more frequent extreme flooding, and the widespread drought and wildfires across Europe and North America this year really make it feel like we’re pointed in that direction.

So as I’ve looked at photos of this summer’s parched fields and wildfire smoke in the places where my friends and family members live, I have felt both immense gratitude to not be dealing with that firsthand this year, and immense fury at every governmental authority that not only chooses to not take this threat seriously, but also actively continues to support the extraction of more fossil fuels (Norway is particularly egregious on this point). This piece from the Guardian features photos from Europe, but it could just as easily be many places in North America this summer: Europe’s dry riverbeds and scorched earth – in pictures.

So much of the media tends to cover extreme heat events in upsettingly upbeat language, as well (the Guardian being an exception, as their climate change coverage tends to be pretty good). “As the south of England continues to enjoy an unusually warm and dry summer,” begins one recent piece from the BBC. As if that’s an acceptable way to describe drought and heatwaves that in May and June alone had already led to over 2,700 excess deaths in England in Wales. Likewise, when journalists choose photos of people jumping into the ocean and sunbathing to accompany pieces about extreme heat (just a few examples from NRK and the BBC), it just contributes to the problem. The public, and their elected leaders, need to take climate change seriously.

I do think this summer has been a wake-up call for many, and I have fortunately seen a corresponding shift in the discourse. The scale of the devastating fires all over has been such that much of the media coverage has been more sober and does not include photos of happy holiday-goers jumping into the water, but rather of the aftermath of fires, riverbeds drying up, and brown fields of grass in places that would normally be vivid green at this time of year.

This piece by John Valliant for TIME on this year’s fires, “What Happens When the World is on Fire,” is both very good and especially stark, but one of his ending notes struck a chord with me:

“As long as we burn fossil fuels without limits, wildfires will do the same in our forests, cities, and towns. But we are not passive bystanders, and these genuine ‘trials by fire’ are Nature’s stern invitation to mature as a society, to confront with intelligence and courage the daunting energies we’ve unleashed with our own.”

I hope that we can rise to the challenge.