WorldView Magazine: climate change
Here Comes the Sun by Bill McKibben
I was just back from my Peace Corps service in Zaire when famed climate scientist Dr. James Hansen marched up to Capitol Hill in 1988 and told Congress—for the first time—that global warming was real. Fossil fuel combustion worldwide was overloading the atmosphere with carbon, he said, and overheating the planet. A year later, author Bill McKibben published his lyrical masterpiece The End of Nature, which grappled with the economic, social, and spiritual implications of a future where natural planetary rhythms give way to rampant wildfires, incessant sea-level rise, and heat waves that trap people, plants, and animals in their...
The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue
Reading The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue feels like strolling through your hometown with an affable neighbor, one filled with a deep respect for the natural world and a pragmatic concern for its demise. On one level, Mike Tidwell recounts just a single year, 2023, in a Washington, D.C., suburb whose residents cope with the local effects of global climate change: the tombstone stumps of new-fallen trees, the sudden gaps in rich canopy across which the wind now blows “like human breath over the tops of empty bottles,” the flooding school basement, and the sidewalk berm installed as a countermeasure...
Climate Change Solutions
Patrick Gonzalez takes on responsibilities tackling climate and biodiversity with the White House. Photography by Al Golub By Steven Boyd Saum “Contributing science for solutions to global problems is one of the most important contributions that we can make as scientists,” Patrick Gonzalez (Senegal 1988–90) declared earlier this year at the Ecological Society of America’s annual conference. Now he has the opportunity to walk the talk in a new way: He has been appointed assistant director for climate and biodiversity by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). A forest ecologist and climate change scientist, he has brought...
Unleashing Climate Innovation
Audrey Zibelman takes on responsibilities as vice president at X, the Moonshot Factory, leading work to decarbonize the electrical grid. By NPCA Staff This year Audrey Zibelman (Chad 1977–79) took up a new post as vice president at X, the Moonshot Factory, where she works to develop tools and capabilities to decarbonize the electrical system. In April, as the Biden administration convened the Leaders Summit on Climate, Zibelman was invited to present steps that can be taken to counter the detrimental impacts of the climate crisis. During the summit, Zibelman announced that the U.S. and the U.K. would be joining the...
Islands in Peril
Climate change and Pacific nations heroically trying to save themselves By Mike Tidwell Dying trees, sandbagged shore. Photo for Humans of Kiribati by Raimo Kataotao At the United Nations building in New York, the national flag of every country on earth hangs from a pole outside. Whenever a new country is born — South Sudan being the latest in 2011 — a new pole is set up and a new flag raised. But what happens when a country dies? What happens, for example, if unchecked global warming wipes entire Pacific island nations off the map in the coming years? Will we have...
On the Front Lines
FIJI & BEYOND: A MacArthur Fellow takes stock of climate change loss and damage — and immediate solutions By Stacy Jupiter Under threat: Low-lying islands and coral cays, like barrier islands Wallis and Futuna, are extremely vulnerable to impacts of sea level rise. Photo by Stacy Jupiter. In August 2019, as Pacific Island leaders arrived to their annual forum leaders meeting in Tuvalu, an atoll nation of less than 12,000 people with its highest elevation at 15 feet above sea level, they were greeted by children submerged in water in a moat around a model of their sinking island holding...
Day Begins Here
Kiribati: Land is tied to identity. But the land is vanishing. By Michael Roman Kiribati is the center of the world. Here the international dateline crosses the equator. It is the only country to have territory in all four hemispheres—north, south, east, west—and the first nation to see the sunrise of each new day. It is also predicted to be one of the first nations to vanish because of global climate change: summoning powerful king tides, devastating cyclones, and prolonged droughts. In the face of all this, how does a people stay resolute and try to preserve land—and a deeply...
Dengue Fever Blues
The Marshall Islands: Climate change and healthcare By Jack Niedenthal I work with a group of health care workers whom I will forever consider to be heroic. And this is why this is so: In the Marshall Islands climate change to us is not a “threat,” it already weighs heavily upon our island lives each and every day. Climate change not only means battling periodic inundations from rising sea levels that began to become routine in 2011, but now it also means fighting numerous and unpredictable disease outbreaks. And it will undoubtedly continue in this manner well into the future. This...
Writ on Water
Tonga: Lessons and memories, hopes and fears By Siotame Drew Havea Forty years ago I started working with Peace Corps Tonga. When I came on board in the mid-1980s as training director and then associate director, our two main projects focused on education and health. We had also launched an agricultural project, focused on research and agribusiness, in the 1970s. Some of our volunteers complained of not enough happening in their structured jobs. So we made sure volunteers’ time and energy went to secondary projects focused on the environment. Volunteers worked directly with farmers and community members to plant trees—to...
Tilting with Windmills
Connect turbines from wind alley to where people need the juice, and you could transform the American energy grid. Even get us to 50 percent renewables. That was Michael Skelly’s grand vision. By Russell Gold This is not a story with a happy ending — yet. It’s a tale of former Peace Corps Volunteer Michael Skelly (Costa Rica 85-87), who set out to build an interstate energy transmission superhighway system. Over a decade, the roadblocks proved immense. Here are excerpts from Superpower: One Man’s Quest to Transform American Energy by Russell Gold. When he was 25 years old, Michael Skelly felt directionless. He wrote...
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