Rebecca Solnit writes:

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

This spring, when I saw the shockingly low water of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. It’s been clear for years that the overconfident planners of the 1950s failed to anticipate that, while they tinkered with the river, industrial civilization was also tinkering with the systems that fed it.

The water they counted on is not there. Lake Powell is at about a third of its capacity this year, and thanks to a brutal drought there was no great spring runoff to replenish it. That’s if “drought” is even the right word for something that might be the new normal, not an exception. The US Bureau of Reclamation is overdue to make a declaration that there is not enough water for two huge desert reservoirs and likely give up on Powell to save Lake Mead.

I got to see the drought up close when I spent a week in June floating down the Green River, the Colorado River’s largest tributary. The skies of southern Utah were full of smoke from the Pack Creek wildfire that had been burning since June 9 near Moab, scorching thousands of acres of desert and forest and incinerating the ranch buildings and archives of the legendary river guide and environmentalist Ken Slight (fictionalized as Seldom Seen Slim in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang), now 91. Climate chaos destroys the past as well as the future. As of July 6, the fire is still burning. [Continue reading…]