“Heat Apocalypse” Now

AMPUS, France — “Just call me Jean de Florette,” a rueful farmer told me, displaying only a few measly carrots and potatoes on a rickety table. We both wished he was joking. Marcel Pagnol’s book on a Provence water war 100 years ago now ought to be a current-affairs bestseller.

Bargemon, an expats’ favorite retreat down the road, has run dry. People fill jugs with water trucked to the old fountain, just as in the sequel, “Manon des Sources.” Jean de Florette died blasting a well. When his daughter learned villagers had diverted his source, she took revenge.

Back then, that was just a vagary of l’eau des collines, a skein of underground water fed by melting winter snows. The Durance ran wide and deep, with a network of irrigation canals. Until recently, drillings crews provided water for rich vineyards and extensive farmers.

No longer. What French meteorologists call a heat apocalypse is a clanging alarm with echoes across much of the world. Water tables plummet, wildfires rage and and altered weather patterns shrivel crops that depend on seasons man’s heedless folly has thrown out of whack.

Data bases tell the global story in distressing detail. But wherever you happen to be, just look out the door. Earth is a closed ecosystem, and we are all very nearly screwed. Experts say it is still not too late. But they add significant ifs, which the main culprit governments ignore.

In Washington, a faithless Democratic senator, an industry-funded coal baron who represents only 1.8 million West Virginians, just thwarted Joe Biden’s ambitious plan to slow climate collapse after Democrats worked nights and lots of weekends for more than a year to satisfy him. “Rage keeps me from tears,” Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts tweeted.

A recent New York Times/Siena College polls found only 1 percent of voters named climate change as the most important issue facing America, far behind inflation and economy. Even among voters under 30, the group that will suffer most, the figure was 3 percent.

Anusha Narayanan, climate campaign director for Greenpeace USA, told the Times, “People see climate as a tomorrow problem. We have to make them see it’s not a tomorrow problem.” What sort of mass delusion prevents people from simply looking at today?

Wildfires devastate much of America’s West. Flames endanger the oldest stand of California redwoods. Tens of thousands grab what they can to flee multimillion-dollar homes and funky mountain settlements. And the damage goes far beyond lost forests and property.

Firefighters saved Kitts Peak National Observatory near Tucson. A blaze destroyed a few outbuildings, but not the largest collection of telescopes and astronomical research equipment in the Northern Hemisphere. The Tohono O’odham are not rejoicing.

The fire started below Baboquivori Peak, as sacred to the tribe as the Garden of Eden is to Christians and Jews. It is where I’itoi, their creator god, still lives. The sparse trees and cactuses provide their traditional food and fibers for weaving.

Here in Provence, fast-acting pompiers backed by Canadair tanker aircraft have spared hilltop villages and hamlets in forests. But much has changed. Some advice for those planning a holiday: bring your own water.

The daily Var-Matin, in a guide for backcountry travels, warned not to expect running streams or water in tanks at campsites. Diving is out at the Gorges de Verdon, France’s Grand Canyon. Those inviting cool deep pools are now so low that rocks lurk just under the surface.

Above all, it said, forget about matches or flicking a Bic. Tinder-dry pine needles and leaves need only a spark. If it is windy, fire can be out of control in minutes, climbing to treetops to spread fast across clearings. If not, it can smolder undetected until bursting into flame.

Wild Olives, our little place, is perched on a low mountainside along a narrow road. A lightning bolt, sun amplified by broken glass, sparks from a weed-whacker or some fool’s cigarette butt is all it takes. We keep tabs on Streak the cat, and a go-bag is ready by the door.

Twelve years ago, before the drought, was the flip side of climate chaos. Freak rains pounded down just as we arrived from Paris. The house was flooding fast until we dug a diversion ditch. Down below, 25 people died in the raging waters.

That is a minuscule fragment of the big global picture. Of course, the crisis is manmade — collective greed, ignorance and idiocy going back generations — and now it can only be mitigated by concerted efforts of leaders who think beyond their own terms in power.

This was urgent enough before Donald Trump scrapped the 2015 Paris agreement to benefit his fossil-fuel bankrollers. Now Vladimir Putin has everyone scrambling for new sources of oil, gas and coal. Even all-out war is a blip compared to a planet made unlivable by climate collapse.

“Alternative energy” is not alternative. Governments need to focus resources on ways to stop spewing carbon into the atmosphere. Hydrogen fuel cells, for one. Electric vehicles help, but mining enough lithium, copper and other metals require fossil fuel that offsets their advantage.  

Nuclear fusion, if still problematic, offers promise. Not far from Ampus, my little village, is Cadarache, Europe’s largest energy research center. Scientists expect to produce experimental power with no radioactive waste by 2025.

Whatever. But something. Like so many others, I’ve been writing about these themes for decades in Associated Press dispatches, magazine pieces and books. We need to listen, finally, to those who live close to the land.

A century after Pagnol’s cautionary tale, villagers again line up for enough trucked-in water to barely make it through the day. At the rate we’re going, that is a drop-in-the-bucket foretaste of the heat apocalypse ahead.