Just finished this book (first cited it here). Jeff did a great job covering the global breadth of troubling issues, including the depressing voluminous statistics accompanying them. Well worth your time.
I will just post below this one infuriating excerpt pertaining to desperate illegal migrants attempting to cross into the ever-hotter southwest U.S.
“El Camino del Diablo," or the Devil’s Highway, is an ancient passage in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona that runs through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a US Air Force bombing range, and the Tohono O’odham Nation reservation, and more or less directly over the grave of writer and desert hell-raiser Edward Abbey. The Devil’s Highway is a haunted place. Stories of people struggling in the desert’s merciless heat, tongues swollen from lack of water, stumbling, hallucinating, stripping off their clothes, go back centuries. Here among the saguaro cactus and ironwood trees, suffering from heat is an ancient and tragic ritual. Here, heat is not so much an engine of migration as a migration barrier, a thermal wall that blocks or kills anything that attempts to cross it, just as warm water in a river is a migration barrier for spawning salmon in the Pacific Northwest.
One person who understands all this as well as anyone is John Orlowski, a member of No More Deaths, a humanitarian group that helps migrants in their dangerous journey across the US/ Mexican border. Orlowski is in his early sixties, with a shock of white hair and a deep desert tan. He has the strong, lanky build of a lifelong mountain climber (he has scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan three times), with a nose that tilts off to the right like it was broken in a fight back in the day. While other men his age settle into retirement in a condo in Florida or the Rockies, Orlowski moved to Ajo (pop. 3,600), an old copper mining town on the Mexican border about two hours from Tucson, to help migrants get safely across the desert.
I met Orlowski one morning for breakfast at the Agave Grill, a restaurant in Ajo decorated with watercolors of saguaro cactuses and rattlesnakes. “Ajo is a heavily militarized place,” Orlowski told me. Besides the fifteen sheriffs in this sparsely populated county, there is a new US Border Patrol station just outside of town, where five hundred Border Patrol agents work. Still, the desert around here is vast, and the migrants are many. Over coffee, Orlowski explained how the border police use helicopters to patrol the most remote parts of the borderlands. If they spot a group of migrants, they use a technique called dusting, in which they lower the helicopter down to thirty or forty feet above the migrants, kicking up a huge dust storm and scattering the migrants. “When they are alone, they are much more vulnerable,” Orlowski said. It is a brutal technique. Many of the people who die have gotten separated from their families and travel companions and end up wandering alone in the desert. In the last three decades, No More Deaths estimates that more than nine thousand people have died here on the Devil’s Highway, virtually all of them from dehydration and heat exhaustion.
Orlowski pointed out that there are lots of Border Patrol agents in places where it is easy to cross. And far, far fewer in places where it is hot and dangerous to cross. “Part of their strategy is to funnel migrants through the hottest, most dangerous regions of the border,” Orlowski explained.
“So, basically, the US Border Patrol has figured out a way to weaponize heat,” I said.
“Yes, that’s one way to think about it,” he replied.
After we finished breakfast, we got into his dusty pickup and headed out into the desert. In the back, he was carrying plastic jugs of water, cans of beans, and other food items that can survive for weeks in the desert. We drove through Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, where saguaro cacti stand like worshippers with arms raised to the heavens. The rocky peaks of Growler Mountains, harsh and mean-looking, watched over us in the distance. We eventually turned down a dirt road and drove parallel with the border. In some places, the border itself is just a 4x4 fence that you could easily walk over or under. In other places, a tall, grotesquely ugly metal barrier (Trump’s wall) had gone up. Every once in a while, I’d see a white cross, which marked the spot where human remains had been found.
After about forty-five minutes of bouncing along the dirt road, we pulled off and parked. It felt like we were a thousand miles from anything soft, cool, or kind. We loaded jugs of water into backpacks and headed out for a spot on the top of a nearby mountain where Orlowski knew migrants cross. I had prepared for the hike pretty well, I thought, with a wide-brimmed hat, sunglasses, and pants and a long-sleeve shirt with UVF protection. Still, I felt the heat immediately and began to sweat. I saw more white crosses. As we plodded along, I worried about stepping on human remains that had been turned to near dust by the heat. A few days earlier, the body of Gurupreet Kaur, a six-year-old girl from India who was crossing the border with her mother and other family members, was discovered within a few hundred yards from where we were hiking. We found lots of evidence that people had been through here recently: a worn Nike running shoe, a shirt, a plastic bag, a phone charging cord, a few black plastic one-gallon water bottles (they are black so they don’t reflect light and the Border Patrol doesn’t see them from far away). As we headed up the mountain, I couldn’t help but notice the austere beauty of the desert: red flowers of the prickly pear cactus in bloom, and spiny ocotillos, their long, slender branches like octopus tentacles.
After about an hour of hiking, we reached the mountaintop. Orlowski and his fellow volunteers at No More Deaths had dropped water and beans here about a week earlier. Now the supplies were gone—a sure sign that migrants had come through. We pulled six gallon jugs of water out of our backpacks. “Agua Pura,” Orlowski scribbled on the jugs with a marker. He unloaded an eight-pack of SunVista pinto beans out of his backpack and left that too. In the distance, I saw towers of the US Border Patrol’s alert beacons. A helicopter skimmed by. We could see south to Mexico, and north toward Tucson and Phoenix. I was exhausted. I was hot. I sat on a rock beside Orlowski and tried to imagine wanting to come to America so badly that I would walk for five or six days across this ghostly boneyard of heat. And the hotter it gets, the more treacherous this passage will become. Migration itself becomes a deadly gamble.
Orlowski pointed toward the Growler Mountains in the distance. “Between here and there, I’m sure there are dozens of people crossing right now, you just can’t see them,” he said. “Just like the heat, they are invisible.””
The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell [pp. 92-98]
I'M GONNA KEEP UP MY ONGOING RANT
Yeah, and spare me the Perfectionism Fallacy.
UPDATE
It’s not just hot. Climate anomalies are emerging around the globe.
July was packed with weather anomalies, but some were so abnormal they sent a wave of consternation through the scientific community
A glimpse of a more tumultuous future seemed on full display throughout July, a month packed with weather anomalies that exceeded any definition of normal…
But some events were so abnormal that they sent a wave of consternation through the scientific community. Antarctic sea ice is at a historically low level for this time of year, according to federal data. Sea surface temperatures across the North Atlantic have been “off the charts,” Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service reported, noting that the figures set records for this time of year “by a very large margin.” Water temperatures off the coast of South Florida rose to unfathomable levels in recent days, leading scientists to fear for the fate of the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States.
“On the one hand, we knew these things were going to happen. These have been the predictions for a long time,” said Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
And yet, she said, “this year, in particular, has seemed so extreme. … The size of the anomalies is surprising.”…
More to come...
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