City leaders need to start asking the tough question: How much longer can we live here" California?s deadliest, most destructive fire in history leveled a city of 26,000 residents within a matter of hours. ?Completely destroyed,? read the headlines. ?Obliterated.? ?Paradise lost.?
After a year punctuated by increasingly alarming climate reports, as well as some of the most devastating disasters for many U.S. cities, it?s been difficult to grasp the severity of what seems to be happening?and the fact that it seems to be happening faster and more frequently than we expected.
In November 2018, the Camp Fire burned 95 percent of the structures in the city of Paradise, killing 86 people.
But it was only a few weeks before the Camp Fire that a similar set of phrases were used to describe Mexico Beach, Florida, after one of the strongest hurricanes in U.S. history made landfall, killing 45 people: ?It?s all gone,? ?nothing left.? No human lives were at risk, but seeing an 11-acre Hawaiian island vanish after a rare, powerful storm swept over the state elicited the same type of responses: ?No one expected East Island to disappear this quickly.?
It?s clear now what the accelerated timeline of climate change really means is a swift, steady decline in the number of places where we will be able to make our homes, visit for pleasure, and, eventually, survive.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben described it this way in the New Yorker: ?The planet?s diameter will remain eight thou...