The Amazon is Burning; the Permafrost is Thawing; Greenland is Melting. Therefore, the Earth is Heating Up and Fascists are Circling.
The Amazon is Burning; the Permafrost is Thawing; Greenland is Melting. Therefore, the Earth is Heating Up and Fascists are Circling.
Have you watched or read the news in the past few days? Or week? Or month?
If you’re reading this blog post, I’ll bet you have, because I don’t write for the apathetic.
The Amazon is on fire. We all, all over the planet, need it to survive unburned, as trees and plants, plants that bear as-yet-untapped medicines, and as the carbon dioxide scrubber for the Earth that it is. Without a healthy…
Congratulations, humans! We did it – again. We have used up another year’s worth of the Earth’s resources well before that year is up, as of today. We are thus now operating at a deficit, with deve…
Earth Overshoot Day has come 3 days earlier this year.
We have to change our habits of reproduction and consumption.
We are getting entirely too accustomed to the imagery in the news of the misery that migrants endure. For most of us, it’s not up close and personal, but that shouldn’t impede our ability to …
Fatou Bensouda, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (I.C.C.) in The Hague, Netherlands (an arm of the United Nations), has given up on her plans to pursue a case against any U.S. citizens. Chief Prosecutor Bensouda has done this because she has had her visa to the United States revoked. To be clear, the Chief Prosecutor can still have a diplomatic visa for purposes of traveling to New York City to visit the United Nations and report on her work with the ICC. What she cannot do, however, is travel freely around the United States conducting an investigation into war crimes committed by U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan from 2003 to 2004.
When I was writing my series on human overpopulation and ecosystems collapse, which is entitled Nae-Née, I knew that sooner or later, I would have commit virtual murder.
As I wrote more, I realized that if I didn’t commit virtual genocide on a global scale, I would be writing a cop-out rather than dealing with as many facets of the issue as I could think of.
Miami, Florida is just a few feet above sea level, and within a few decades, it will be level with the sea.
The water won’t stop there.
It will rise another few feet, and likely another few feet after that, for a total of at least 9 feet above its current level, before this century ends.
A novel in my Nae-Née series, Book 3 of 3, New World Order Underwater, spends a significant portion of its plot in Miami, Florida, after sea level has risen.
Infrastructure changes have been made, but most of Miami is underwater in it, and the scene is reminiscent of the opening credits of the Starz series Magic City. That is where the similarity ends. The woman swimming is having a different experience, which makes sense in disaster ecotourism.
A year after I published my story, a journalist named Jeff Goodell published a book entitled The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.
He too spends a significant portion of his book discussing Miami, Florida, and the dangers it faces in the coming decades.
So, both I and Mr. Goodell have been alert to these dangers, noticing and focusing on the situation in Miami in our respective books, and with horror.
I responded to the danger posed by the existence of a nuclear power plant just south of Miami, in Homestead, Florida, by having had it shut down, dismantled, and its radioactive contents relocated far inland, disassembled and not to be reassembled before the water could inundate it. There are, after all, plenty of other problems to describe in horrific detail in my novel
