The Sun Also Sets

DRAGUIGNAN, France – This is likely the most important, urgent dispatch I’ve ever written, and I hope it’s wrong. But two wise sources — Solomon the Saguaro in Tucson and Emiliano the Olive Tree in Provence — concur. In 2024, we heedless humans will decide our fate.

Terrifying evidence is indisputable. Perturbed nature reacts with wild weather and deadly pathogens. Heat tops 120 degrees, 50 in Celsius, in unlikely places. Crops shrivel — or drown in floods. Warming, acidified seas rise as ice shelves melt. Carbon poisons the air.

Hardly a passing anomaly, scientists confirm, this is worsening at a pace few predicted. Yet, overwhelmed, we block out the unthinkable.

Elections this year across the world fortify false prophets whose simplistic solutions push societies far to the right. Rather than unite against common crises, most turn inward. Some enable unwinnable war.

If Donald Trump and his Republican climate deniers prevail in November, neither the meek nor greed-focused “masters of the universe” will inherit the earth. It has already begun sloughing off the two-legged species that befouls it.

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The Sonoran Desert where I grew up is a microcosm of multiple arid regions I’ve reported on since the 1960s, along with vanishing wetlands and tropical forests.

Century-old saguaros like Solomon are spectacular this May, with delicate white flowers not only on top as they usually are but also down their sides. That is a sign of desperation. Old patriarchs are trying hard to spread seed to ensure a new generation.

Cactus roots capture water near the surface. They thrive on a cycle of light winter rains, dry spells and summer monsoons. They languish in prolonged drought. Even hardy desert trees with deep tap roots now die as groundwater levels drop. And topsoil erodes.

As arable land goes, so go people. For now, Arizonans can still turn up air conditioners and hop into pools. Too few realize that many families besieging their border are fleeing famine halfway around the world. No walls or military patrols will stem their growing numbers.

I found Emiliano 40 years ago, half uprooted at a 45-degree angle. I’d bought an abandoned mountainside grove so jungled that I could barely see the periscope branches that the olive trees sent up toward sunlight.

After decades of labor, Emiliano sits majestically off the front porch among healthy trees on rock terraces built half a millennium ago. Rains were good at the right time this winter after long relentless drought. With luck, we might have the best crop ever by Thanksgiving.

If I had any sense, I’d turn off the TV, ignore the daily online deluge and reread Voltaire. Candide had it right: “Tend your garden.”

But I’m like that guy in an old New Yorker cartoon. He sits on a hillside ablaze in wildflowers amid trees in full bloom, surrounded by divebombing birds and butterflies. His wife beams a happy smile. He says something like, “Life is crap.” I can’t help it; I’m a reporter.

In our microclimate, May temperatures smacked of February. They could reach 100 in a few weeks. Last year, lingering drought killed off vast groves in Spain, the world’s largest olive producer. Wildfires devastated ancient Greek trees. Pests and disease plagued Italy.

This January, run-of-the-mill olive oil in Europe costs 50 percent more than the previous year. Those luscious green Tuscan oils that make cannellini beans leap off the plate are all but unfindable on shelves. That is just one sign of the times.

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World leaders must act together. The United States is best suited to take the lead. Yet Americans are transfixed by that buffoonish circus ringmaster. His cohorts pick our pockets while overfed elephants, as Steve Bannon puts it, “flood the zone with shit.”

Barack Obama rallied U.N. members behind the 2015 Paris accords, a crucial step toward effective action. Trump’s pledge to reject them helped him win Electoral College swing states despite a popular-vote rout. When America dropped out, other major polluters reneged on promises.

Joe Biden made climate a top priority, pouring billions into alternative energy. Despite an urgent need to replace Russian oil and gas because of the Ukraine war, he imposed curbs on the fossil-fuel industry. But among a largely feckless electorate, his popularity dropped.

A New York Times poll asked registered voters to name one thing they recall most about Trump’s presidency. His “behavior,” unspecified as good or bad, came first at 39 percent. Jan. 6 and “foreign affairs” tied at 5 percent. Covid, which needlessly killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, was last at 4 percent. Climate policy did not even make the list.

The runaway global pandemic slowed us down, revealing how quickly Earth’s ecosystem restores balance when humans butt out. And Covid showed how a single self-obsessed fool can cripple the world and yet escape accountability.

Trump’s favorite measure of his success was the stock market, hardly an inclusive indicator. Biden quickly restored the economy, lifting personal incomes across the board, and he noted recently that the Dow Jones index topped 40,000.

Trump then praised himself, saying the Dow reached 30,000 during his term. But that was before Covid. When he left office, it had dropped to almost 18,000, with devastating unemployment in America and millions more migrants on the road around the world.

And yet climate collapse, post-pandemic price gouging and conflicts flaring into widening war nonetheless prompt so many lied-to Americans to want the return of the man largely responsible.

That is no surprise to anyone still reading this. The question is why – and what to do about it.

For answers, I sampled assorted experts. One was a world-class American psychiatrist with a legal background whom I’d I met here in Draguignan down the hill from my trees. He minced no words, so I’ll call him Sigmund to spare him any professional blowback.

He works with homeless and criminally violent people in Washington in between lectures and consulting abroad. His young patients, he says, have a firmer grip on reality than most coddled Americans who grow up focused on themselves, free from existential challenges.

Sigmund wastes no breath arguing with otherwise thoughtful people who initially bought Trump’s snake oil. He said most would cut off an arm before admitting to themselves, let alone others, that they were wrong.

His recommends patient, persistent discussion with eligible voters who don’t understand how American democracy works. Because farsighted Republicans worked so effectively to drop civics and critical thinking from schools since the 1980s, that is a sizeable number.

He worries most about those who abhor Trump but also oppose Biden on specious grounds and decide to make a statement with a ballot for RFK, Jr. or another also-run. In a two-person race, that favors the worse one.

Voters who like the idea of gambling again on a demented loose cannon who defies “the system,” he concludes, need to be reminded of the price their kids must pay.

It takes no training in human behavior to see what is dead obvious. A candidate who tells fossil-fuel magnates he will give them free rein to poison the planet if they pony up a billion dollars for his campaign ought to be taken at his word.

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“News media” priorities are too often skewed. When Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett smacks down a Marjorie Taylor Greene dig, scoring off her “bleach blonde bad-built butch body,” it is catnip to readers and viewers that even serious-minded editors can’t resist.

Americans need to know when, say, Rep. Andy Ogles, a Republican bonehead from Tennessee, introduces a bill that would send pro-Palestine student protesters to Gaza for a minimum six months of “community service.”

But obsession with Trump’s unhinged ravings or a clown-car Congress detract attention from the issue that dwarfs all others. Senseless debate and denial only delay building a criteria mass to demand immediate action.

“Climate change” is in part a natural phenomenon that occurs over eons. But beyond any doubt human lunacy is quickening the process at a devastating pace. Look anywhere from the ocean floor to the stratosphere for signs of impending endgame.

NOAA, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, predicts an 85 percent chance of “above-normal” Atlantic hurricane activity from June 1 to the end of November: 17 to 25 big blows. Nature is only clearing her throat.

On May 29, the mercury reached 127.9 (53.2) in New Delhi, the sprawling capital where concrete and asphalt that retain heat make nights nearly as miserable as days. Beyond human health, the toll is heavy on India’s economy.

This goes far more beyond “weather.” Take, for instance, Israel and Palestine.

I named my saguaro Solomon because he somehow seems so wise. But it is Emiliano who bears witness to the effects of human heedlessness.

During the 1990s, I traveled around the Mediterranean and through the Americas and wrote a book that began: “…Olives have oiled the wheels of civilization since Jericho built walls and ancient Greece was the morning news.”

A lot of factors feed seething hatreds that burst into flame last year. Not the least is the Israelis’ common practice of uprooting an entire grove when kids throw rocks from behind a tree.

An Ohio-born Palestinian engineer who moved to the West Bank made the point: “The olive has deep, deep roots in the ground, and we feel that our roots are as deep. The Israelis know this. We get punished for a thousand years.”

That is less hyperbolic than it sounds. Back then in the 1980s, Palestinians from Nablus murdered a local merchant who sold his old grove to Jews. Today, Jewish settlers muscling into the West Bank often start by seizing Palestinians’ olive trees.

Those disputed old Holy Land trees now succumb to the same new blights and bugs that attack groves everywhere when weather patterns change. They can survive on little rainfall. Too much weakens their resistance. With no rain or groundwater at their roots, they die.

The biggest stories don’t “break.” They build up over time, sometimes so slowly they are insufficiently noticed. When symbols of humanity that have survived so much for so long begin to finally exit the scene, it is time to worry what, and who, might be next.