![]() found that child labor, after years of falling, was growing, “driven in part by an increase in conflicts and climate-induced disasters.” Late in 2017, a United Nations agency announced that the number of chronically malnourished people in the world, after a decade of decline, had started to grow again-by thirty-eight million, to a total of eight hundred and fifteen million, “largely due to the proliferation of violent conflicts and climate-related shocks.” In June, 2018, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. In the face of our environmental deterioration, it’s now reasonable to ask whether the human game has begun to falter-perhaps even to play itself out. But there are newer signs that human progress has begun to flag. Wars are scarcer, poverty and hunger are less severe, and there are better prospects for wide-scale literacy and education. The authorities brought in cadaver dogs, a lab to match evacuees’ DNA with swabs taken from the dead, and anthropologists from California State University at Chico to advise on how to identify bodies from charred bone fragments.įor the past few years, a tide of optimistic thinking has held that conditions for human beings around the globe have been improving. After a summer of unprecedented high temperatures and a fall “rainy season” with less than half the usual precipitation, the northern firestorm turned a city called Paradise into an inferno within an hour, razing more than ten thousand buildings and killing at least sixty-three people more than six hundred others are missing. A big fire near Los Angeles forced the evacuation of Malibu, and an even larger fire, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, has become the most destructive in California’s history. As this essay goes to press, California is ablaze. Bush, running for President, promised that he would fight “the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.” He did not, nor did his successors, nor did their peers in seats of power around the world, and so in the intervening decades what was a theoretical threat has become a fierce daily reality. I was frightened by my reporting, but, at the time, it seemed likely that we’d try as a society to prevent the worst from happening. Scientists underlined this notion a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene, the world made by man. We were spewing so much carbon into the atmosphere that nature was no longer a force beyond our influence-and humanity, with its capacity for industry and heedlessness, had come to affect every cubic metre of the planet’s air, every inch of its surface, every drop of its water. But the data were persuasive, and freighted with sadness. I was in my twenties when I wrote it, and out on an intellectual limb: climate science was still young. ![]() Thirty years ago, this magazine published “The End of Nature,” a long article about what we then called the greenhouse effect. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
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