Perspectives: Public Health Toll Of Wildfires, Hurricanes, Climate Change And COVID
Opinion pages focus on public health issues emerging from the wildfires in the West and hurricane season -- during a pandemic.
The New York Times:
I’ve Never Seen The American West In Such Deep Distress
The open road in the Big Empty part of the American West has always been therapeutic. Vacant skies, horizons that stretch to infinity, country without clutter. The soul needs to roam, too. After six months of confinement, I was a caged bird gnawing at the bars. Ahead were mountains beyond mountains, rivers that hustled out of tight canyons and winds strong enough to knock a prairie chicken down. Alas, my map was obsolete. The West of 2020 is very sick. Like much of the country, we Westerners are at each other’s throats, struggling to put our lives back together under a madman for a president. But unlike the rest of the country, we’re also choking on smoke and staring out at Martian-red skies in a world becoming uninhabitable. (Timothy Egan, 9/11)
New England Journal of Medicine:
The Climate Crisis And Covid-19 — A Major Threat To The Pandemic Response
Just as an active 2020 Atlantic hurricane season is getting under way, the entire U.S. hurricane coast, from Texas to the Carolinas, is witnessing explosive outbreaks of Covid-19 cases in communities where physical distancing restrictions have been eased. As an early wake-up call, Tropical Storm Cristobal made landfall in Louisiana on June 7, triggering coastal evacuation orders and a federal emergency declaration. Concurrently, temperatures continue to set records throughout the southern United States, while Arizona has been battling multiple historic wildfires that are also requiring communities to evacuate their homes. All this as summer had just begun. These events suggest that the United States will increasingly face complex, challenging scenarios, given the confluence of our two most pressing global health threats — the rapid emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic and the insidiously evolving climate crisis. (Renee N. Salas, James M. Shultz, and Caren G. Solomon, 9/10)
The New York Times:
A Climate Reckoning In Wildfire-Stricken California
Multiple mega fires burning more than three million acres. Millions of residents smothered in toxic air. Rolling blackouts and triple-digit heat waves. Climate change, in the words of one scientist, is smacking California in the face. The crisis in the nation’s most populous state is more than just an accumulation of individual catastrophes. It is also an example of something climate experts have long worried about, but which few expected to see so soon: a cascade effect, in which a series of disasters overlap, triggering or amplifying each other. (Thomas Fuller and Christopher Flavelle, 9/10)
