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A few weeks ago, I repeated the drive of seventy miles along the north-south path of Hurricane Helene that I made two weeks after the storm . In the few wealthier sectors along this highway, downed trees have been removed and sawn for lumber (at a large loss) or chipped. I have heard hardwood and pine mulch is virtually free for the taking along the 200 miles from Valdosta to Augusta in Georgia. All you need is a stout truck and a way to load it. Other areas remain a complete mess.
I also saw many new roofs on the journey but just as many old roofs still covered “temporarily” with blue tarps from WalMart. Battered work trucks have been abandoned, a few still upside down or deep in the ditch. Several country church steeples were still on the ground or missing altogether, including that of the very large First Baptist Church in one of the remaining relatively prosperous small cities on the route. Further north, friends in Western North Carolina send recent photographs of utter devastation that shows few signs of recovery. Perhaps a hard lesson that there is no escape from the effects of climate change?
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Our responses, active and passive, to a warming world have been interesting. Several recent books on the subject illustrate where we are and where we might be going. They include:
- The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, David Wallace-Wells, 2019.
- Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, editors, 2023.
- What If We Get It Right? Visions of Climate Futures, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, 2024.
- Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help us Survive the Climate Crisis, Michael Mann, 2023.
- Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown, Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, 2024.
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Read the full post at Naked Capitalism.
