Loyal readers of this journal know that we’re preoccupied with issues of local weather change, and that we fear about the way forward for our residence planet. I respect (I actually do) Elon Musk’s notion that people, as a species, must pursue an extraplanetary answer to our environmental disaster, however I imagine in exploration for exploration’s sake, not as a pathway to a time share on Mars.
So we at The Atlantic are targeted intensely on, amongst different issues, the connection between people and the pure world they at present inhabit. We’ve got a protracted historical past of curiosity right here. The good conservationist John Muir kind of invented the national-parks system in The Atlantic. John Burroughs defended Charles Darwin in our pages. Rachel Carson wrote her earliest essays, concerning the sea, for us. And, after all, The Atlantic revealed a lot of Thoreau’s most interesting and most enduring writing.
In our lead essay this month, our senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II argues that America owes a debt to different nations for its function in accelerating local weather change, and that paying this debt could also be the easiest way for the world to avoid wasting itself. “For a minimum of the speedy future, rich Individuals shall be shielded from the worst of the local weather disaster,” he writes. “This consolation is seductive, however in the end illusory.”
Local weather change is one cause I requested our workers author George Packer, the writer of the Nationwide E-book Award–successful The Unwinding, to determine a spot that might by some means stand in for America’s basic quandaries, hypocrisies, and powers of self-correction and enchancment. Towards his higher judgment (he doesn’t like the warmth very a lot), Packer discovered himself returning time and again to Phoenix, the place, he turned satisfied, the long run is being decided—not merely our political future, however our relationship with the pure world, on which our survival relies upon. Packer’s cowl story possesses the grand sweep, capacious reporting, and highly effective perception our readers count on from him.
Though he appreciates Phoenix and understands it in a sophisticated and not-unhopeful approach, I believe Packer would have most popular the task we handed our science author Ross Andersen, who visited Greenland to analyze the technological means by way of which it might be attainable to avoid wasting otherwise-doomed glaciers. His article, “The Glacier Rescue Venture,” is fascinating, and particularly vital in a second when too many individuals imagine that catastrophic sea-level rise is inevitable.
The Atlantic has massive ambitions and a peripatetic workers, so once we heard that Australia’s koalas have been affected by each local weather change and chlamydia, we shortly dispatched Katherine J. Wu, a workers author (and a microbiologist), to Adelaide and past to deliver again a report. I imagine this marks the primary time that marsupial chlamydia has been lined in The Atlantic. Wu’s story is a revelation, illustrating the issue that even rich nations have in defending their most prized species throughout a interval of local weather instability.
Me, I went to Walden Pond. I go to often, strolling the trail that begins behind Ralph Waldo Emerson’s home and finally ends up close to the pond’s large parking zone and little seaside. Thoreau can be shocked by Walden Pond right now: extra guests, rather more noise. The noise may worsen quickly. A proposed plan to radically broaden a close-by airport for personal jets has conservationists and preservationists apprehensive that an appreciation of the sanctity and historical past of Harmony will not be unanimously shared. One doesn’t should dwell like Thoreau to know that wealth is available in many types—within the wildness of the world, as an illustration—and that returning the planet to some form of equilibrium is a common curiosity.
This editor’s observe seems within the July/August 2024 print version with the headline “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.” Whenever you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
