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A Global Maui Moment
Ready, Aim, Fire!
From the earliest kingdoms to late last night, history has been the story not just of the rise of great powers but of their decline and fall. So, normally, there would be nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the aging America of Joe Biden and Donald Trump, a classic imperial power distinctly in decline and threatening to split into pieces.
As it happens, though, there's something all too new about the twenty-first-century decline and fall of that other great power of the Cold War era you know, not the Soviet Union. After all, the present downhill slide of this country is happening on a planet that itself is distinctly in trouble in terms of what's always passed for a decent human life and that, believe me, is something new under the sun. In fact, in some fashion, the scenario all of us, each in our own fashion, are now living through may be the least known ever.
Think of it, if you will, as the orange-sky scenario. I'm sure you remember when New York City's skyline went orange thanks to the smoke from hundreds of wildfires then burning across Canada that drifted our way. And though it's hardly even considered news anymore, as of August 25th, nearly three months later, there were still 1,033 active wildfires scorching that country, 656 of them "out of control." Consider that and then try to get your mind around a planet capable of producing such a phenomenon!
What's different today is that, while those particular orange skies may have been over parts of the eastern United States, what lay behind them wasn't just an all-American but a global story of decline.
Nature's War of Revenge
Let me imagine for a moment that I was on Maui in early August as that first hint of smoke entered my house (not, of course, that I have a house on that island). What followed was a fire of unprecedented severity, fueled by fierce winds from a relatively distant hurricane and invasive grasses dried by a "severe drought." That fire then burst into the town of Lahaina and burnt it to the ground, a catastrophe that caused more than 100 known deaths and left hundreds more missing.
I want to say that it was a fire "beyond compare," especially in Hawaii where, for most of its history, as Elizabeth Kolbert recently reminded us, "fire simply wasn't part of the islands' ecology." But honestly, when it comes to climate disasters, you can't say "beyond compare" about much of anything anymore. Not on this planet, not now. Yes, climate change the heat and lack of moisture had dried out that island's largely alien greenery, making it ever more combustible. There was also that hurricane, admittedly hundreds of miles away but directing brutal fire-spreading winds Maui's way. And for context, consider that, since the 1950s, the average temperature of Hawaii has risen by about two degrees and summers have become increasingly brutal in terms of heat.
Still, the fire that destroyed Lahaina 2,700 structures simply wiped out was the deadliest in the United States in more than a century. But count on one thing: 100 years from now, if there still is a United States and another terrible fire occurs, no one will be saying that it was the deadliest in "more than a century." However sad it may be to write, ever more horrific fires are now the definition of our future.
In the end, in fact, it doesn't matter whether we're talking about Hawaii or Iran, Algeria or Greece, China or Spain, Phoenix, Arizona, or the island of Sardinia. Across the planet, horrifying "natural" (though under the circumstances, they should be considered distinctly unnatural) fire, flood, and heat records were set this summer. Both June and July were the hottest versions of those months ever and 2023 is clearly rushing toward its own global heat record. So, mourn for Maui now. After all, a decade, no less a century, from now, nothing that happened this summer will be remembered as the planet's ongoing crisis only breaks yet more records and grows ever more severe. Even today, when it comes to heat, nothing not even emperor penguins in Antarctica is unaffected.
And it's not just on land (or ice) either. Don't forget the water. As Bill McKibben noted recently, "In the past hundred and fifty years, we've made the ocean soak up, on average, the heat equivalent of a Hiroshima-size nuclear bomb every second and a half; in recent years, that's increased to five or six Hiroshimas a second." Imagine that! In other words, Hurricane Idalia, the first (and undoubtedly anything but last) hurricane of Florida's present storm season, crossed startlingly heated waters that had only recently set records, gaining power from them as it hit the state as a category 4 storm.
War? It was once hell on Earth and see the conflict in the Ukraine, where there are already almost 500,000 casualties with no end in sight in so many ways it still is. However, in the end, our wars, barring the use of nuclear weapons, could prove to be next to nothing compared to nature's war of revenge on humanity. And yet, perhaps the most striking thing about us is that, from the Ukraine to Taiwan, we're proving remarkably unable to focus on what's truly new and horrific about life on this planet.
I was born 79 years ago on an Earth plunged into a global war, the second of that century. It would conclude just over a year later after my country discovered a way to end it all. I hardly need to tell you that I'm thinking about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, in the decades that followed, the vast atomic arsenals built up by the two superpowers of that era, the Soviet Union and the United States. As it happens, Russia still has a humongous nuclear arsenal and the U.S., with the second largest on the planet, is planning to put up to $2 trillion into "modernizing" it over the next three decades. Meanwhile, nine countries now possess nuclear weapons with the capacity of doing to the planet what had once been done to those two Japanese cities.
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