Last week after I sent off my column about why I wrote Last Days in Ocean Beach, a novel about living on the border between dread and wonder in the Anthropocene, the news cycle was full of coincidental but eerie echoes.  A

Los Angeles Times story observed of the recent floods in Kauai, “A Hawaiian island got about 50 inches of rain in 24 hours. Scientists warn it’s a sign of the future,” while the Washington Post reported, “’Fallen off a cliff’: Scientists have never observed so little ice in the Bering Sea in spring.”

And then, flying underneath the radar while the Trump circus dominated the headlines as always, there was this story, also in the Post , “Earth’s atmosphere just crossed another troubling threshold”   [Read more…]

Last Days in Ocean Beach is an effort to capture the mood of deep unease and uncertainty that permeates our era and informs the thinking of many writers, artists, and intellectuals, even if they are not quite saying it out loud.  It was written before the election of Donald Trump, but it is clear that his election only underlines the chasm between the cartoon reality driving much of our social, cultural, and political discourse and the unrelentingly grim truth that we are killing the world whether many of us want to admit it or not.  

As Bill McKibben put it, “physics doesn’t care about political realities,” like who won the election.  There may be a hegemonic political reality that refuses to recognize where we are, but the reality of physics and scientifically documented mass extinction proceed nonetheless.  Someday soon, we will be unable to deny it. At present, however, many of us, particularly in a place like San Diego where, as the banal tourist slogan puts it, “Happy Happens,” are satisfied to keep having a beach party at the end of the world.  Thus, the strange disconnect between the perpetual marketing of our local “paradise” and the looming threats that may eventually destroy it could not be greater than they are here in San Diego.   [Read more…]

By Jennifer Cost

I have spent a lot of time in the past thirty years kayaking, hiking, and backpacking in the western United States–in Alaska, the Sierra Nevada, the Lost Coast, the Wind River Range, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, the Beartooth/Absarokas, the Grand Canyon, the Anza Borrego Desert, and the San Juan part of the Colorado Rockies.

On every backpacking trip for the past twenty years, I have walked through or around larger and larger areas of charred forest, and from most mountaintop views, rust brown swaths of dead conifers cut through the healthier dark green forest of the surrounding mountains.

In the backcountry, I routinely scan the sky for foreboding plumes of smoke, and once a year find myself walking through a smoky haze, wondering if this hike would be my last.  I have always walked out. But for millions more of the world’s species, there is no escape from fire, drought, dying oceans, and epic deluges.   [Read more…]