I am writing this in the hopes that it will enable my mind to move past this swirling horror on to solutions, without just brushing this aside, pretending it did not happen.
It’s May. At this time, my grandmother used to insist that we must not yet plant anything, as the last frost was likely still to come this week. Grandmothers all over Europe say this, though the precise day in the week they give as the likeliest bet depends on how far North you live, and your altitude—conveniently, the days of this week are associated with remembrance days for individual saints, so each region picked one ice saint as a general rule for the occurrence of the last frost. It would work most years to enable you to plant early enough to get a full crop, but late enough so your seedlings would not be killed by frost, though you could be really unlucky, and still get a frost in June.
These hundreds of years of experience have become pointless with climate change; their use died with my grandmother, they no longer predict anything. The weather is now volatile and random, but above all, no longer frosty. I already planted outside in April. Frost did not touch my plants, though several of them are now showing signs of heat stress, and despite my watering, a few small ones I missed have died of draught.
I was cycling through the city back from the gym today thinking of this, cycling while never in shade, angry at the heat that I was experiencing longer than usual today; a marathon blocking paths had many people turned around repeatedly. I was wondering, not for the first time, why the heck there was no solar panel tunnel over these cycling paths—I’ve seen them done, they’d give us shade and protection from rain, but we’d still get light from the side, and they would harvest so, so much energy we desperately need. Wondering why I was not beneath an avenue of trees, storing carbon, cleaning the air, sheltering animals, protecting us from draughts and floods. Edible chestnuts would do; they are adapted to Italy, and predicted to survive this mess, and the food would come in handy for us and the animals, without making a mess of the bike path. But this sunlight, this free energy just being gifted to us by the sky each day—it no longer enables vibrant plant growth, nor have we utilised it to power our hospitals. It just heats the cyclists and the sealed tarmac, and pushes our city to temperatures much higher than the nearby forest; it is not just wasted, but turned into harm. I found it inconvenient, but kept thinking, this is no mere nuisance; this winter, we will run out of energy, and this summer, we will have fatalities due to the fucking heat. This failure to stop burning fossil fuels, and to fail to implement strategies that would generate green energy, capture carbon and protect us from our collapsing climate, this idiotic failure to do what we have known for so long we must, the simple failure here to do proper city planning, is literally going to get people killed.
And then I had to turn, because the path was blocked for a marathon, and passing a spot where I had been five minutes ago, I saw a man lying on the ground. Out of the blue, as one says, beneath the blue, blue sky that felt as though it had cracked without warning, letting horror spill through. I had literally just thought this, and yet the reality of it hit me like a ton of bricks.
He was already surrounded by professional paramedics trying to keep him alive, and clearly failing. They did not need me, and I sure as hell would not impede their work, but felt stuck, unable to just continue as though this was not happening, cheerfully continuing this day like any other when it could be his last, but also not wanting to stare and invade on a moment so incredibly vulnerable. I just stopped, at a loss, feeling helpless. In the end, I just made sure I was not blocking anything and keeping a respectful distance, but I stayed standing there, holding my bike, unsure what to do with it.
I have no idea if it was the heat that felled him. I know heat makes fatal cardiovascular incidents significantly likelier, but for all I know, it was completely unrelated.
I do know he was conscious still, and terrified, though he began to slip in and out of consciousness as his breathing stopped, then returned with a gasp, only to falter again, and longer this time. Come back again with a jolt. Fail again. Straining with panic and his very last effort to do something as simple as keep his heart beating and his lungs breathing, and no longer managing. They were compressing his chest with a machine now, and I remembered my first aid trainer having told me it was violent, and that I had not quite realised how much he meant it, the jerking body, the unmatched rhythm, the cracking ribs.
He did not seem to notice the people around him, was not responding to the paramedics, but staring at the blue sky, his head moving as though searching for something in it. He seemed confused through his fear and pain, and I do not know how much of that was his brain failing for lack of oxygen, and how much was that he had, judging from the looks of it, gone on what he thought would be a spring walk, with warm trousers and and a warm shirt and warm shoes and no hat or water bottle, as an obese, but still very much alive man in his sixties, only to now find himself on the ground in a random street, surrounded by strangers who did not care for him in particular, and just randomly, pointlessly, dying in a meaningless spot.
The oxygen mask came on, but clearly did nothing. The urgency in the paramedics movements began to slow, they began to relax, their attention drifting. One of them got up and fetched some poles and plastic sheets. I wondered if he was erecting a source of shade—but surely, far too late, especially if he went about it so leisurely? - then realised he was trying to hide the dying man, and avoid a commotion—though so far, very few people had stopped. Another ambulance arrived… and the paramedics on the ground next to the man just… waved it on. A marathon volunteer stopped the second ambulance, telling them they had driven past the dying man, and the ambulance driver reassured her that the man had all the help he needed. I do not know if the volunteer took this to mean he had all he needed to be saved; he clearly did not. But nothing to be done, really, and the resources were needed elsewhere, triage.
I wondered if the man realised they had given up on him, or thought he’d be waking up in hospital, but he was likely past thinking anything at this point. You could not see him anymore. I kept wondering if, realising that they could not help him as medical professionals, a paramedic might have still at least taken his hand, so he would not die quite so alone. I wanted to hold his hand, but saw no way that trying to would not have led to an awkward and obstructive mess. And so I left, having done absolutely nothing but look while someone simply died.
I know we had 20.000 heat related deaths in Europe 2022 between June and August; I have no idea if this man was part of the 2023 group, starting early. I do know that every person in that number is a person like him, dying a needless, stupid death without dignity. Most of these deaths will be unseen to most of us. I thought I already knew what these heat deaths imply, and find now that I did not, at all.
The biodiversity collapse was known to me; I see it all around me in the animals and trees that have adapted over such long timespans to thrive perfectly in this world, and now find this world turned mad, almost overnight, leaving them shining with their camouflage wrecked in their white winter coats on the brown ground, their young starving because their food simply failed to arrive in time as everything goes out of sync, cooking and dropping out of hollows that were always safe homes for them. My greatest empathy was always with them, because they have no knowledge and technology to protect them, because they do not understand what is coming and cannot prepare, and are innocent in all this. They have never even touched fossil fuels, just had the misfortune to be around in the Anthropocene—the age of humans remaking their joint world into a death trap.
But we humans aren’t even managing to keep our own cities livable in the West, failing at using cheap, beneficial solutions that are readily known, that would protect us from the effects while also tackling the root problem. I’m in the Netherlands, and this place is set to simply drown in the long run; but at least, it will be near places that won’t and which aren’t kept apart by ever more violent border guards, and the Dutch technology to hold this off and adapt is really, really good, so we are comparably extremely lucky and well-set up to fare, if not remotely well, then at least less badly than others here. I realised that I cannot begin to conceive the deaths we will see in vast swathes of the global South, that the numbers had not really clicked to me without faces. I cannot imagine the deaths in the many parts of the world that are already hot, that have few resources to adapt, and most of all, that have not caused this crisis, but just had the fatal misfortune to share a planet with the inhabitants of Europe and the US who are still burning their future, myself included.
Seeing this man’s dying face was so awful. I can’t imagine the face of every human and every non-human animal this will kill, I think I would go mad if I made a genuine attempt. I can’t imagine what it is like on the other end of those eyes, staring at a blue sky that has become death. I can’t, I don’t want to, and yet my brain keeps trying, and I cannot make it stop.
But I need it to. My horror won’t save anyone. Only action will.
P.S.: If this text leaves you wanting to do something, and money towards tangible projects is the way you tend to approach this—this group https://www.edenprojects.org manages to get a lot of effect for your money, by employing people in very poor nations to plant trees that protect their region from flooding and provide food. This combines very cheap planting (15 cents per tree) with a setup that is likely to see the forest preserved long-term (because the community created it and depends on it), and combines carbon capture with addressing social injustice. Tree planting is generally too volatile and unpredictable to be recommendable as a reliable carbon compensation scheme, and simply enabling natural rejuvenation and non-forest wilderness is often more effective, but I think this is still a very decent project, though afaik, there is not EA evaluation yet. If you are aware of a problem with them, do tell—I have a recurring donation for my budget, and am happy to move it elsewhere if that will help more.
Donations alone won’t fix this, though; our climate is being locked into a path of likely collapse, not in a dozen years, but within the next few. The lack of political change meanwhile warrants civil disobedience to curb industry, and the social movements organising them are still very easy to join, and meanwhile present all over, and often happy to utilise particular skills (e.g. scientist rebellion). I’ve found doing something together with others in this way also helps me not despair at the future, and humanity.
And each of us has to reduce our personal footprints to a degree hard to conceive and currently still impossible to sufficiently do for most, but a significant reduction can be done already, and really has to. There are abundant calculators online advising on this, though most neglect to indicate how low it has to go for us to not use up other people’s budget, or blow past likely trigger points. But something is still better than nothing here.
Please do what you can do. Nearly noone really does, and the results are fatal to real people.
I saw someone die today. A complete stranger.
I am writing this in the hopes that it will enable my mind to move past this swirling horror on to solutions, without just brushing this aside, pretending it did not happen.
It’s May. At this time, my grandmother used to insist that we must not yet plant anything, as the last frost was likely still to come this week. Grandmothers all over Europe say this, though the precise day in the week they give as the likeliest bet depends on how far North you live, and your altitude—conveniently, the days of this week are associated with remembrance days for individual saints, so each region picked one ice saint as a general rule for the occurrence of the last frost. It would work most years to enable you to plant early enough to get a full crop, but late enough so your seedlings would not be killed by frost, though you could be really unlucky, and still get a frost in June.
These hundreds of years of experience have become pointless with climate change; their use died with my grandmother, they no longer predict anything. The weather is now volatile and random, but above all, no longer frosty. I already planted outside in April. Frost did not touch my plants, though several of them are now showing signs of heat stress, and despite my watering, a few small ones I missed have died of draught.
I was cycling through the city back from the gym today thinking of this, cycling while never in shade, angry at the heat that I was experiencing longer than usual today; a marathon blocking paths had many people turned around repeatedly. I was wondering, not for the first time, why the heck there was no solar panel tunnel over these cycling paths—I’ve seen them done, they’d give us shade and protection from rain, but we’d still get light from the side, and they would harvest so, so much energy we desperately need. Wondering why I was not beneath an avenue of trees, storing carbon, cleaning the air, sheltering animals, protecting us from draughts and floods. Edible chestnuts would do; they are adapted to Italy, and predicted to survive this mess, and the food would come in handy for us and the animals, without making a mess of the bike path. But this sunlight, this free energy just being gifted to us by the sky each day—it no longer enables vibrant plant growth, nor have we utilised it to power our hospitals. It just heats the cyclists and the sealed tarmac, and pushes our city to temperatures much higher than the nearby forest; it is not just wasted, but turned into harm. I found it inconvenient, but kept thinking, this is no mere nuisance; this winter, we will run out of energy, and this summer, we will have fatalities due to the fucking heat. This failure to stop burning fossil fuels, and to fail to implement strategies that would generate green energy, capture carbon and protect us from our collapsing climate, this idiotic failure to do what we have known for so long we must, the simple failure here to do proper city planning, is literally going to get people killed.
And then I had to turn, because the path was blocked for a marathon, and passing a spot where I had been five minutes ago, I saw a man lying on the ground. Out of the blue, as one says, beneath the blue, blue sky that felt as though it had cracked without warning, letting horror spill through. I had literally just thought this, and yet the reality of it hit me like a ton of bricks.
He was already surrounded by professional paramedics trying to keep him alive, and clearly failing. They did not need me, and I sure as hell would not impede their work, but felt stuck, unable to just continue as though this was not happening, cheerfully continuing this day like any other when it could be his last, but also not wanting to stare and invade on a moment so incredibly vulnerable. I just stopped, at a loss, feeling helpless. In the end, I just made sure I was not blocking anything and keeping a respectful distance, but I stayed standing there, holding my bike, unsure what to do with it.
I have no idea if it was the heat that felled him. I know heat makes fatal cardiovascular incidents significantly likelier, but for all I know, it was completely unrelated.
I do know he was conscious still, and terrified, though he began to slip in and out of consciousness as his breathing stopped, then returned with a gasp, only to falter again, and longer this time. Come back again with a jolt. Fail again. Straining with panic and his very last effort to do something as simple as keep his heart beating and his lungs breathing, and no longer managing. They were compressing his chest with a machine now, and I remembered my first aid trainer having told me it was violent, and that I had not quite realised how much he meant it, the jerking body, the unmatched rhythm, the cracking ribs.
He did not seem to notice the people around him, was not responding to the paramedics, but staring at the blue sky, his head moving as though searching for something in it. He seemed confused through his fear and pain, and I do not know how much of that was his brain failing for lack of oxygen, and how much was that he had, judging from the looks of it, gone on what he thought would be a spring walk, with warm trousers and and a warm shirt and warm shoes and no hat or water bottle, as an obese, but still very much alive man in his sixties, only to now find himself on the ground in a random street, surrounded by strangers who did not care for him in particular, and just randomly, pointlessly, dying in a meaningless spot.
The oxygen mask came on, but clearly did nothing. The urgency in the paramedics movements began to slow, they began to relax, their attention drifting. One of them got up and fetched some poles and plastic sheets. I wondered if he was erecting a source of shade—but surely, far too late, especially if he went about it so leisurely? - then realised he was trying to hide the dying man, and avoid a commotion—though so far, very few people had stopped. Another ambulance arrived… and the paramedics on the ground next to the man just… waved it on. A marathon volunteer stopped the second ambulance, telling them they had driven past the dying man, and the ambulance driver reassured her that the man had all the help he needed. I do not know if the volunteer took this to mean he had all he needed to be saved; he clearly did not. But nothing to be done, really, and the resources were needed elsewhere, triage.
I wondered if the man realised they had given up on him, or thought he’d be waking up in hospital, but he was likely past thinking anything at this point. You could not see him anymore. I kept wondering if, realising that they could not help him as medical professionals, a paramedic might have still at least taken his hand, so he would not die quite so alone. I wanted to hold his hand, but saw no way that trying to would not have led to an awkward and obstructive mess. And so I left, having done absolutely nothing but look while someone simply died.
I know we had 20.000 heat related deaths in Europe 2022 between June and August; I have no idea if this man was part of the 2023 group, starting early. I do know that every person in that number is a person like him, dying a needless, stupid death without dignity. Most of these deaths will be unseen to most of us. I thought I already knew what these heat deaths imply, and find now that I did not, at all.
The biodiversity collapse was known to me; I see it all around me in the animals and trees that have adapted over such long timespans to thrive perfectly in this world, and now find this world turned mad, almost overnight, leaving them shining with their camouflage wrecked in their white winter coats on the brown ground, their young starving because their food simply failed to arrive in time as everything goes out of sync, cooking and dropping out of hollows that were always safe homes for them. My greatest empathy was always with them, because they have no knowledge and technology to protect them, because they do not understand what is coming and cannot prepare, and are innocent in all this. They have never even touched fossil fuels, just had the misfortune to be around in the Anthropocene—the age of humans remaking their joint world into a death trap.
But we humans aren’t even managing to keep our own cities livable in the West, failing at using cheap, beneficial solutions that are readily known, that would protect us from the effects while also tackling the root problem. I’m in the Netherlands, and this place is set to simply drown in the long run; but at least, it will be near places that won’t and which aren’t kept apart by ever more violent border guards, and the Dutch technology to hold this off and adapt is really, really good, so we are comparably extremely lucky and well-set up to fare, if not remotely well, then at least less badly than others here. I realised that I cannot begin to conceive the deaths we will see in vast swathes of the global South, that the numbers had not really clicked to me without faces. I cannot imagine the deaths in the many parts of the world that are already hot, that have few resources to adapt, and most of all, that have not caused this crisis, but just had the fatal misfortune to share a planet with the inhabitants of Europe and the US who are still burning their future, myself included.
Seeing this man’s dying face was so awful. I can’t imagine the face of every human and every non-human animal this will kill, I think I would go mad if I made a genuine attempt. I can’t imagine what it is like on the other end of those eyes, staring at a blue sky that has become death. I can’t, I don’t want to, and yet my brain keeps trying, and I cannot make it stop.
But I need it to. My horror won’t save anyone. Only action will.
P.S.: If this text leaves you wanting to do something, and money towards tangible projects is the way you tend to approach this—this group https://www.edenprojects.org manages to get a lot of effect for your money, by employing people in very poor nations to plant trees that protect their region from flooding and provide food. This combines very cheap planting (15 cents per tree) with a setup that is likely to see the forest preserved long-term (because the community created it and depends on it), and combines carbon capture with addressing social injustice. Tree planting is generally too volatile and unpredictable to be recommendable as a reliable carbon compensation scheme, and simply enabling natural rejuvenation and non-forest wilderness is often more effective, but I think this is still a very decent project, though afaik, there is not EA evaluation yet. If you are aware of a problem with them, do tell—I have a recurring donation for my budget, and am happy to move it elsewhere if that will help more.
Donations alone won’t fix this, though; our climate is being locked into a path of likely collapse, not in a dozen years, but within the next few. The lack of political change meanwhile warrants civil disobedience to curb industry, and the social movements organising them are still very easy to join, and meanwhile present all over, and often happy to utilise particular skills (e.g. scientist rebellion). I’ve found doing something together with others in this way also helps me not despair at the future, and humanity.
And each of us has to reduce our personal footprints to a degree hard to conceive and currently still impossible to sufficiently do for most, but a significant reduction can be done already, and really has to. There are abundant calculators online advising on this, though most neglect to indicate how low it has to go for us to not use up other people’s budget, or blow past likely trigger points. But something is still better than nothing here.
Please do what you can do. Nearly noone really does, and the results are fatal to real people.