Leave it to the poet Robert Frost, writing more than a century ago, to capture in 9 short lines and 51 words the challenge facing the world, and perhaps its ultimate fate:
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
The poem’s Wikipedia link tells us that Frost may have had a bit of help from a scientist – not a meteorologist, but the renowned astronomer Harlow Shapley[1]. Shapley once recalled a conversation with Frost a year prior to the poem’s publication, in which Frost asked him how the world might end. Shapley provided two extreme possibilities: the sun might explode, incinerating the Earth; or perhaps the earth might survive only to slowly freeze in deep space.
(And people heap scorn on meteorologists for the uncertainties and error bars in our forecasts!)
Parallel weather events of recent days bring this poem to mind.
Start with fire – in this case, the horrific Los Angeles wildfires – a kind of perfect storm of Santa Ana winds inflicting vast damage and economic disruption on the city. The number of known fatalities continues to rise, days later. Entire subcommunities have been wiped out. Those displaced by the fire include thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, who have lost everything – whose lives are now consumed with the raw, agonizing task of finding water, food, and shelter daily – when once these basic needs had been routinely and effortlessly satisfied.
The fires, still burning as of this writing, have captured the attention of millions in this country and worldwide, but only for the moment. In the coming days the rest of the world will shift attention to other concerns. By contrast, the financial, physical and emotional toll on those displaced by the fire, and their families, will be enduring, lifelong.
It is our human nature to see this event as a one-off, but consider this quote from the author Joan Didion[2], more than fifty years ago:
Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.
Today’s Los Angeles fires are the latest but won’t be the last. They’ll not merely be succeeded, they’ll be exceeded by future disasters. Disaster and tragedy are indeed the proper words, for these disasters have a largely human cause. Extremes (high winds, heat and drought, flood, fire, cold and ice) are nature’s way of doing business. But disasters are the results of multiple human decisions made and actions taken over extended periods of time. This has already been recognized in the case of the Los Angeles fires.
And that’s just Los Angeles. America’s recent history with urban fires includes the 2023 Lahaina fire, the Camp Fire of 2018 (whose survivors are still “recovering”), and 1991 Oakland fire, just to name a few. Nor is the threat confined to the west. We can’t say we haven’t been served notice.
Turning to ice. Even as Los Angeles struggles with fire, the rest of the United States is dealing with winter. The first days of the fires coincided with a snow-and-ice storm sweeping across several central and southeastern states. The story is a familiar one. A foot of snow in places unused to such amounts, emergency declarations from state governors, downed power lines and thousands of people without power under circumstances where their need for it is greatest. People (that this, people not in the direct path of this storm) might be justified in thinking of this weather as “garden-variety,” but we don’t have to go too far back in history to encounter the North American ice storm of 2021 (think Texas), which killed hundreds and inflicted economic losses in the neighborhood of $100-200B.
A second recent winter headline was almost buried by these catastrophic events: a small spotlight on a research study showing that deaths due to cold are on the rise (NYT link here and Washington Post link here). From the New York Times:
Deaths related to cold weather have risen steadily nationwide in recent decades, new research shows, underscoring the continued risks of cold exposure even as average temperatures continue to climb.
The study, which examined data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that the rate of deaths in which cold was an underlying or contributing cause more than doubled between 1999 and 2022, with the highest mortality rates recorded in the Midwest. In 2022, 3,571 people died of causes linked to cold weather, the study’s authors said.
Hm… some ten times the death toll from the 2021 ice storm, yet receiving hardly any notice. Why? The former was an acute and visible catastrophe; the latter picked off a much larger number of victims, but individually or by twos and threes.
All of which brings us back to Robert Frost. The poet has invited us to see that our real problem might not be either fire or ice but rather accompanying or underlying emotional states of smoldering desires and frigid hatred[3]. And this too, is reflected in the societal reaction to the weather extremes. With respect to the Los Angeles fires, we see political finger-pointing, and a partisan interest in withholding urgently-needed disaster relief hostage to political ends. There’s more focus on fixing the blame than fixing the problem. Finding-fault in others may bring a sense of satisfaction (though brief and misplaced). By contrast, fixing the problem involves the sustained hard work of thoughtful, long-term stewardship of land use, developing and implementing far-sighted building codes and standards for critical water- and electrical infrastructure, and addressing underlying social inequities that often place the poorest in the greatest position of risk. In short, fixing the problem requires a unified people[4].
It’s our own juxtaposed desire and hate that together pose the greatest threat to humanity. The planet’s end will only be a belated announcement of that reality.
[1]I knew of Harlow Shapley, but did not know him personally. However, I did knew one of his four sons, Alan, who was an established figure at Boulder’s Space Environment Labs (NOAA; formerly ESSA) when I arrived there as a newly-minted Ph.D. You can find an interesting oral history of Alan Shapley on an AIP website here.
[2]From her 1968 work, Slouching Toward Bethlehem.
[3]Desire, while not hate, is neither a purely noble form of love. Instead, it’s more a self-centered, acquisitive form of attachment .
[4]Bringing to mind another poet, John Donne, who – 400 years ago – warned against thoughtlessly asking for whom the bell tolls, when in fact it tolls for each of us.