There really is a beauty in the desolation of that
It’s something you can’t photograph you just kind of feel it when you’re there
You may have missed the subscriber-only piece from Monday and it was honestly one of my favorites in a long time. It was about the prosecution of activists trying to leave water for migrants along the border, the Boston Globe declaring racism over, MLK's thoughts on the bootless man, sprawling wealth inequality and about “waiting for the facts” to come in. Smash that button above to get access to it and all the other paywall pieces ok bye see you after the tweet.
Wildfires and tsunamis and other devastating natural disasters killed over ten thousand people in 2018 around the world and that seems bad is that bad I don’t know. I do know what the World Economic Forum thinks however and turns out as they explain in a report from early January that extreme weather and failed climate change mitigation are the two most threatening global risks for 2019. Big year for those two items they said. Keep an eye on those. While I was writing that sentence there was a weird sort of moaning sound coming from the other room and I’ve been like what the fuck is that weird sort of moaning sound coming from the other room this whole time and I just went and looked and it’s the Keurig machine I definitely shouldn’t have — but it was a gift! — and it’s probably crying out for me to put it out of its misery because it feels bad about existing. But guess what bitch so do I so get in line.
Maybe that coffee decision will be made for me before too long actually because I just read a story from Science Advances that said 60% of coffee species in the wild could go extinct in the next few decades due to climate change. Ah you thought the climate apocalypse was bad but wait until you see me without my cup of Joe haha.
Something called the CDP a U.K.-based nonprofit put out a report of their own this week where they asked a bunch of the largest companies around the world to outline their environmental impact. Doesn’t look great! they said but there’s always a silver lining.
As Bloomberg points out Bank of America is worried flooded homes will lead to defaults on mortgages, Walt Disney is worried it will be too hot and muggy in Florida for people to want to visit anymore and AT&T thinks hurricanes and fires could fuck up cell towers. Admittedly the worst part of no water is the elimination of human life on earth as we know it but there are other potential drawbacks too that maybe we aren’t thinking of like how no water means no Coca-Cola as the company said.
For their part Visa nods to the potential calamity of global warming by saying it could bring about global pandemics and armed conflict and also on top of that people would probably stop traveling so much and using their Visa card to purchase the flights which would hit them right in the ass.
“Any such decline in cross-border activity could impact the number of cross-border transactions we process and our foreign currency exchange activities, and in turn reduce our revenues,’’ Visa said.
But it’s not all bad news for the brands whom we know and love. Some of them have already thought about how the apocalypse could actually bolster their bottom line like Merck & Co. who reported that “as the climate changes, there will be expanded markets for products for tropical and weather related diseases including waterborne illness.”
I just looked up some waterborne illnesses and some of them sound horrifying like harmful algal blooms and primary amebic meningoencephalitis but on the other hand some of them are pretty funny sounding like hot tub rash.
Apple said that demand for the iPhone will remain stable in the IRL Mad Max because even in an emergency your phone “can serve as a flashlight or a siren; they can provide first aid instructions; they can act as a radio; and they can be charged for many days via car batteries or even hand cranks.’’
Google said that demand for Google Earth might increase because people around the world might want to use it to observe everywhere else being swallowed by the sea.
I sometime think it’s unfair to the next generation to describe the conditions we live in as Hell World because it’s only going to get worse every day from here on out unless something is done about climate change. Pre-Hell World maybe. While it’s heartening to see some younger politicians like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez treat it as the dire threat it actually is the rest of the Democratic field of hopefuls for president seem to be expressing the typical half measures. Yesterday Kirsten Gillibrand, who says she supports the “concept” of the Green New Deal, wouldn’t commit to, for example, getting rid of the filibuster in order force the measure through due to she’s in favor of reaching across the aisle to convince people to work together in so many words.
“If you don’t have sixty votes yet it just means you haven’t done enough advocacy,” she said. “It just means you have to work a lot harder.”
Beto O'Rourke has said he’s “supportive of the concept” of the GND and Elizabeth Warren has said she backs the “idea” all of which is admittedly a lot better than our big shimmering wet boy who is still telling people from his mind cave that the presence of snow and cold in the month of January in the north disproves climate change.
“Be careful and try staying in your house,” he tweeted this week. “Large parts of the Country are suffering from tremendous amounts of snow and near record setting cold. Amazing how big this system is. Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”
I’m going to get the Keurig and fill a warm bath and put us both out of our misery as soon as I finish writing this.
Among many of the other unnecessary and cruel consequences of the still-ongoing government shutdown is the state of disrepair and squalor many of our national parks have fallen into and that is really curious to me because who are these people who are rushing into national parks like it's a prison riot to cut down trees and piss on the birds and empty out garbage bags into the river and steal steaming pies off the windows of kindly matrons now that the dreaded park rangers are finally off duty?
One such park that is feeling the absence of federal workers is St. Marks Wildlife Refuge in Tallahassee whose name you probably don’t recognize but is the place that served as the muse for Annihilation the stunning book by Jeff VanderMeer, also made into the 2018 Alex Garland film starring Natalie Portman which was severely overlooked and you should go read the book and watch the movie now not at the same time though that would be weird. Sometimes people will ask me they’ll say Luke what is a good book and I will say Annhilation by Jeff VanderMeer and also Cherry by Nico Walker and then I’ll hope they haven’t already those because I’m out of recommendations after that my brain isn’t very good anymore.
I interviewed VanderMeer the other day because he’s starting to see some of the effects the shutdown has had on his beloved wildlife refuge and he’s encouraging people to purchase an Annihilation-themed t-shirt to support the park. You can read the piece here but I also wanted to include our broader conversation which I will now do below.
I’ve read the books and loved them so I sort of get the connection but for people who haven’t explain what this place means to you.
Not to back up too far but I grew up overseas, my family traveled a lot, and I didn’t really have a place that I thought of as a place that I was part of. Then we moved to Florida and eventually I moved up to Tallahassee in 1992. I discovered the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge and all the wilderness of north Florida and it’s the longest I’ve been in one place. I feel very much attuned to the landscape, it really speaks to me. And St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge is… are you recording or writing it down?
I’m recording
Ok cool I didn’t want to be going too fast. I’m caffeinated.
I usually type as I go but I’m feeling a little hungover this morning so…
I understand! Yeah so overtime I grew to love this place and in particular St. Marks because it is one of the most unique places on the planet honestly. It has such a diversity of landscapes going from exactly the terrains described in Annihilation, which is these pine forests to these black water swamps and then out to basically marshland and brackish water and these lakes full of alligators and then the sea. It has species you can’t find anywhere else. It’s home to this pine salamander they’re trying to save, it’s endangered elsewhere because of development. It just has an amazing biodiversity. In fact north Florida in general, the last report I read, is among the top 20 most biodiverse places in the country. And that’s gradually becoming in the world unfortunately because of development elsewhere. So north Florida has so far managed not to lose much if that makes any sense.
I think when people think about Florida we think of the beaches and maybe swamps and such but this isn’t what you normally think of when you think of Florida right?
Exactly and that’s because there’s this huge difference between north Florida and south Florida. I think a lot of people think about south Florida and Miami and palm trees, and we do have some palm trees up here, but our terrain is more, in a way, interesting than that because it has those aspects but it also has aspects of what you might think of as Georgia, then also has the coastline. It’s very unique. And then in the refuge you have places with reeds and things that almost remind you of the Pampas of Argentina or something. It’s quite fascinating. And in the winter with the thistles and things there are parts of the park where you might think you’re in Scotland. It’s very strange.
Did your inspiration for the weirdness in the book come from this sense of place? Does it feel eerie, like a place that doesn’t belong?
Yeah it does feel like a place out of time. It also feels very prehistoric when you’re way out in the marsh flats. There are little islands and trees among the reeds and the mud. There’s something really prehistorical about it. There really is a beauty in the desolation of that. It can be very silent, it can have the light in it that’s like a Turner painting or something. It’s something you can’t photograph you just kind of feel it when you’re there. Part of it is the stillness and the wind and everything too. But the direct inspiration for the entire path that the expedition takes in Annihilation with some minor tweaks and supernatural elements so to speak, is the thirteen mile hiking trail that I do out there taking me through all those terrains.
How did your attention turn to the shutdown? Are you in touch with the park there? Did they reach out to you?
Basically what happened is over time Annihilation came to their attention and I was going into the store there and the nature center there anyway. I can’t remember what the first contact was, but we had been in contact in general because they were thrilled about the book kind of a giving a shout out to St. Marks. They were looking for an item to add to their store and they suggested this Area X t-shirt. To be honest a lot of people suggested a lot of products related to Annihilation and I always take it with a grain of salt in part because I want things to look a certain way connected to the series. They showed me this design and I was like holy crap the design is amazing, the cause is great, wonderful. And because of the t-shirt I’ve grown to know the people connected to the Friends of the St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge better which has been wonderful because they’re all really committed to environmental causes. They’re really fun interesting people. And most of them are not paid employees they’re volunteers. They’re manning the shop as volunteers because they believe in the place. That’s why it’s doubly troubling when something like this comes along and you realize with federal funding cuts and everything literally what they’re making at the store, which is volunteer run, is helping fund endangered species programs. So it’s really vital.
We’ve seen stories about parks getting overrun with trash.. is that happening there?
Well there are two things. One is it’s a little more remote than some of those parks. I would say there’s probably a slightly more local traffic to it. And those local people are very respectful to begin with. But there has been an uptick and trash, and what’s happened is the local chapter of the Sierra Club, those folks have gone out every week and cleaned up. I think they’ve even provided some toilet facilities and things like that. We have a really strong community here in general and a large part of that is a respect for the environment and a certain quality of life. Tallahassee has more tree cover except for two cities in the U.S. it’s something ridiculous like 60% tree cover over the whole city. When you fly in you can’t see it basically. That’s something that we’re very proud of, we’ve managed to create an urban landscape that’s also wild. And the St. Mark’s Wildlife Refuge is kind of a sign and symbol of everything that everybody loves around here.
What’s your opinion with what’s going on with the shutdown in general?
It feels like a terrible cynical thing. I believe to some extent Trump wants this chaos, because, and I don’t know if it’s even necessarily him that’s the most rigidly ideological about this, but I do believe there are people in his administration pushing to destroy parts of government because they believe those parts should not actually exist. Taking the longer view that’s the most troubling part of it. If it was just a petulant display by the president it would be bad enough, but thinking of it as a coordinated attack is quite chilling. You see some evidence of that in the way he opened up some of the wildlife refuges because there were planned hunts there. Or continuing to delve into oil leases in some of the parks while the shutdown is going on. So it’s quite clear where the priorities are. And this is debilitating to everyone. This hurts everyone’s quality of life.
It’s actually imperative for our own survival with climate change that we keep as much natural space as possible. It’s literally a no-brainer in terms of carbon dioxide and also with regards to having clean water and everything else. There’s a fundamental dysfunction with this administration where they either don’t care because they don’t have to suffer the consequences or they literally don’t understand how the world works.
It’s hard to know what’s scarier. So we’re reduced to, or made to stand up for our own backyards, literally sometimes, and to really fight to hold onto things. The good thing is that a lot of people are responding to that and don’t want to lose what they have, and I think we’re seeing a lot of pushback.
You write a lot about ecological stuff and weird things that are probably going to happen in the future. Are you pessimistic or optimistic? Are we gong to be around in 100 years or not?
I think the real question is should you stop caring no matter what your answer is to that question. Should you stop fighting? And the answer I have to that is no. We can’t really know what all the consequences are going to be. There are so many variables about things that could go wrong or things that could be unexpected about how climate change will play out. Yes it probably will be catastrophic, and we need to be on a war time footing so to speak to fight climate change. People need to be asked to sacrifice. I think if they’re asked the right way and understand the urgency they’ll respond to that because I do think it builds a sense of community too. But for my part the answer is I’m going down fighting no matter what. Apathy is really not an answer, especially because there are people who are on the frontlines of climate change experiencing devastation right now. It feels very privileged to just opt out and say, well, it’s all going to go down the tubes so why should I care? But to answer your question there’s a good possibility if we don’t right the course we’re going to be in huge trouble.
The LA Times just had an article about what our diets might look like in 2050. It read like something that assumes that our lives are going to be completely the same then as now except we’re going to be eating less red meat. There’s a real disconnect still about what the real time on the ground conditions could be in 2050
Yeah it’s easy for us as relatively privileged people in America. It’s going to devastate the most impoverished areas first. You know a thing or two about dystopian fiction but I can really just see it playing out exactly like that.
Yeah. The problem, especially on the coastlines, is you have very rich communities trying to protect themselves and basically telling the poor, pardon my French, to fuck off. It takes a great deal of denial, like in Miami Beach, to still be building. Or to be building pumps to take water away for flooding that won’t be able to deal with the flooding. Even some of the prep doesn’t make any sense.
Well rich people are very bad. I hope you have done well off the books though no offense. So if people buy these t-shirts what is it going to go towards?
It’s going to go towards making up at least the 5-10% deficit they make from the shop, which because of the lack of finding in some areas is absolutely critical to things like their red cockaded woodpecker program which is something they’re experimenting with where they’re creating artificial habitats for the woodpeckers because the trees that they love are very rare. Endangered salamanders. Maintenance of the park, which is huge, because there’s going to be a lot of maintenance issues after this dies down. They were already making up from a deficit because of the hurricane which caused a lot of unexpected costs with the shutdown of the shop. The other thing is in addition to buying a t-shirt you can still make a charitable donation through that contact point. You’re dealing with a volunteer, someone who is spending their time trying to keep things going even through the shutdown. And it is making a huge difference.
Do big fans go down there and go to the lighthouse from the books? It is like a destination?
It’s so surreal to me. It’s just a place that I’ve hiked in for ages. But yeah there are people who go down there just to visit the lighthouse. In fact there’s a platform for viewing the lighthouse, and someone actually wrote the words from the tower tunnel on the platform. It’s faded a bit but you’ll see from time to time on the platform lines from the book. At first I didn’t even remember that they were lines from the book. The platform is the appropriate place for it by the way because it’s in no way historical like the lighthouse, it’s new. What’s funny is they mostly use non permanent magic marker which I appreciate.
I even get people who email to say they got married in a lighthouse because of Annihilation which is quite interesting.
That’s a little weird but alright.
It is a little weird but sure.