I Read The Heat Will Kill You First, and We're Definitely All Going to Die of Hyperthermia

It was an eclectic week!

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My way into The Heat Will Kill You First was the author's discussion of the 2021 deaths of a family, including their dog, during a hike in the Sierra National Forest. I am high-key obsessed with the topic of People Dying on Public Lands, and when the news hit, I followed it for a couple of weeks, reading theories ranging from algae poisoning to the mafia, before the next crazy news story hit and I forgot about it.

Turns out, that family died of hyperthermia, and Goodell’s vivid description of how it happened was the perfect segue into the longer, more detailed topic of We Are All Going To Die From This Heat.

You guys, we are all going to die from this heat!

I often apologize to my kids about the state of the planet that I’ll be leaving them, as often as I irritatedly lecture them that it's the giant corporations killing the sea turtles, not plastic straws... but we still don't use plastic straws. Also, plastic recycling in general is a myth. 

The blogger's child, age five, at the Monterey Bay Aquarium

I think about the state of the planet that I'll be leaving them even more than that, how those fun, special activities that I've taken them on, all those trips to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, will one day have become once-upon-a-time adventures, never again to be repeated, since much of Monterey Bay has already died off due to warming temperatures.

Even corn, the roach plant of the Heartlands, will be negatively affected. I’ve been obsessed with how hateful corn is ever since reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (EVERYTHING is made from it! It has very little nutritional value! Cows aren’t even built to digest it, and that’s why they have to give them so many antibiotics!), so maybe it’s not the worst thing that rising temperatures will eventually kill it off... except that, you know, by the time corn is killed off, most of the good stuff will have been LONG extinct.

It’s especially horrifying that, even in these ever-worsening conditions, America’s agriculture economy is still based primarily on individual manual field labor. It’s not quite as underpaid as it was when landowners literally enslaved people and forced them to do the work, but it’s still much closer to slave wages than it is to pay commensurate with skill, value, and experience. And just like when people were enslaved to do it, manual field labor is still causing heat-related deaths, just so we can have our strawberries and cabbages and almonds whenever we want them.

One of Goodell’s most interesting claims is that one reason why ever-worsening heat, particularly deadly heat waves, isn’t taken more seriously is that it’s invisible. The world has agreed on a Richter Scale, an EF rating, hurricane categories, etc., but the world hasn’t agreed on a scale upon which one can identify the danger level of a heat wave, nor is there a good universal graphic to illustrate one on a weather map. Part of that is that one’s experience of heat is somewhat subjective, so it’s less obvious when a heat wave strikes a place that isn’t prepared for it compared to the “normal” hot temperatures of a place where people know how to live with it--or at least have air-conditioning to avoid most of it.

Goodell also makes the point that part of the subjectivity of heat is its classism. Unlike tornadoes and, to a lesser extent, hurricanes, which strike where they will (it’s still a LOT better to be rich when there’s a hurricane coming, though!), heat affects the economically disenfranchised more than those with wealth and power. If a tornado hits, you’ve got to do something, but if a heat wave hits and you’re rich, you can just turn up the air-conditioning, or take a bonus vacation north.

 
In conclusion, maybe I should buy property in northern Canada so my descendants can perhaps eke out a few more generations on our greenhouse planet. Or plant some more trees on my back forty. Or maybe just take my kids to see a glacier so they’ll have a crazy-sounding, half-believed story to tell the orphans they help chaperone in the Survival Camp.

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