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A review of E/The Environmental Magazine's book on climate change.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a personal account of how global warming is changing the world might be worth a thousand dry, academic studies on the subject. That's what makes "Feeling the Heat: Dispatches from the Frontlines of Climate Change" (2004, Editors of E/The Environmental Magazine) such a powerful treatise on the topic of climate change. For readers who already accept the notion that humans are behind the drastic environmental shifts we're seeing around the globe, "Feeling the Heat" provides a more up-close and personal look at the impacts of increasing temperatures, rising ocean levels and changing precipitation patterns on plants, animals and people from Alaska to Fiji, from China to Antarctica. And readers not yet convinced of the human impact on global warming -- and of global warming's current and potential impact on humans -- will, if they bother to pick up the book, find some vivid and compelling proof that something drastic and possibly devastating is indeed taking place around the planet. While similar in some respects to the travelogue-like approach taken by Elizabeth Kolbert in last year's "Field Notes from a Catastrophe," "Feeling the Heat" explores some of the less-visited destinations feeling the effects of a changing climate. In addition to the already well covered stories of melting sea ice and permafrost in Alaskan Inuit communities and increasingly swamped shorelines on Polynesian islands, for example, E/The Environmental Magazine's editors describe the changes occurring in settings likely to be more personally familiar to many readers: New York and New Jersey, California and the Pacific Northwest, Florida and the Caribbean. Their discoveries might make it harder for skeptics to hold onto their out-of-sight-out-of-mind view of global warming. Climate change, it turns out, isn't something that will harm just people "over there" on the other side of the world; it has the potential to impact every one of us, no matter how insulated and privileged we might feel today. Perhaps the most persuasive section in that regard is the chapter on Greater New York, written by E/The Environmental Magazine's editor, Jim Motavalli, and journalist Sherry Barnes. A ride in a sea kayak off Lower Manhattan reveals a rising Hudson River, while a hot summer in 1999 introduces New York City to a potentially fatal, mosquito-borne disease it never saw before: West Nile encephalitis. While rising temperatures promise enough future trouble for the city, Motavalli and Barnes conclude, it's the rising sea level that portends the most wide-reaching damage to New York and beyond: "New York has nearly 600 miles of coastline," they write. "Four of its five boroughs are located on islands, linked by vulnerable bridges, tunnels, and a subway system that, like the city's three airports, lies less than 10 feet above sea level ... if its airports are even temporarily closed by high water, air travel all over the United States will be disrupted. Low-lying highways that pass through the New York region ... carry much of the nation's truck-based freight. In a sense, then, we are all New Yorkers, and we need to pay close attention to a looming crisis that could affect the city as profoundly as the toppling of its twin towers." If that doesn't send a chill through your body and inspire you to act, it's hard to imagine what -- short of water lapping at your front step -- will.
The copyright of the article Feeling the Heat in Green/Simple Living is owned by Shirley Siluk Gregory. Permission to republish Feeling the Heat in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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