I went into town yesterday. This has become a rare occurrence rather than a daily commute. I hate to say it but I was in better condition when it was a daily commute; ninety-degree heat shouldn't bother me...
Ninety-degree heat, yes. At the Cat Sanctuary the sun beating down on the metal roof had raised the temperature on my front porch from about 75 to a little over 80 degrees Fahrenheit when I walked out the door. Not a mile further along, once I'd reached the paved highway, the dashboard thermometer of the person who offered a lift was reading 93 in the sun, 92 when the car passed through shade--and this I could believe. It was a lot hotter near the pavement than it was up on the hill, among the trees.
Local climate change is well distributed around the world but it is not global climate change. The temperature changes we're seeing are far beyond even the most alarming indicators of potential global climate change (which could happen, but I'm not likely to be here long enough to know whether it ever does). They are also very local.
I happened to be near a television set that was broadcasting the local weather news and forecast. The local weather news showed absolutely typical July weather, the weather of my childhood and, according to them, my grandparents' childhood, in the smaller towns surrounding Kingsport and Bristol: temperatures around 70, even lower at higher elevations overnight, rising up to 80 or 85 degrees Fahrenheit in the daytime. For Kingsport's weather station, which is still closer to the river than to the streets where Kingsporters actually live, overnight lows were in the 80s, the afternoon high at the weather station would be about 90, and the 90% humidity would make it feel more like 96 degrees Fahrenheit. Ten-degree difference. (Before the overpavement along Stone Drive, it was two or three degrees. Before the slum was built, it was five or six degrees.) Now remember that in Gate City I'd seen a ten-degree difference between my home, which is basically an orchard, and the paved highway. In Kingsport, around the slum, the actual temperature probably was over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
The forecast was that it's going to be like this for at least another week.
While walking along Route 23 above Gate City, I heard sirens. Not enough sirens for a fire or police call. Only one vehicle was using only one siren, only intermittently. So someone was being taken to the hospital. Likely that would be some older person, out of condition, who'd pushed perself to work outside in the heat.
I walked very, very slowly in the 93-degree heat. Well, I walked at the pace I usually use around the house, not hurrying, not dawdling, in between patches of shade, where I sat down and rested while the wind off the passing traffic dried off the sweat. I managed to get into town with unsoaked clothing.
You get a choice, Gentle Readers. How deadly hot do you want summers to be? If you don't want your local summers to be hotter, let trees replace some of the existing construction and paving in your neighborhood. If you want to cash in on anybody's greedhead ideas about "housing," buckle up and brace for longer, hotter summers than you've ever survived before.
That television set was braying about a "need," not in Kingsport but further into Tennessee, for labor in a new quarrying project that was apparently an unwelcome surprise to local people. It was anticipated that people willing to work on this project would not be local and would not want to live in the neighborhood they were about to make ugly. During about an hour of television exposure I heard two commercial ads from different real estate speculators, and the talking head at the news department obligingly repeated and explained a line from the advertisement. Tennessee landowners could legally keep their houses while renting out their land to people who would use the land to build new "housing."
Y'all don't think your summers are hot enough already, in Tennessee?
Even in Virginia it feels to me as if doing anything useful in this weather really requires gills. I want nothing to do with "housing." If people can't live in (or renovate) existing houses that become available when people die and their heirs want to be somewhere else, that may be an indication that nature intended those people not to move into my town.
I will hear no idiocies about this having anything to do with what people look like. I don't expect to spend enough time looking at them to care if their skins are fluorescent green and they have spiral fluorescent horns instead of fingernails. (Well, if they were that unusual-looking I might at least feel curious about whether they were actors making a movie about space aliens or young people trying to start a kicky rebellious fad that would differ noticeably from any older one.
It's about how many people need to live in one place, and whether they can walk on gravel paths or think they need pavement and cars, and whether they can raise their own food in a sustainable way (not spraying, but eating, the "weeds"), and whether they can run a neighborhood biomass burner on waste without killing any trees or dumping any sewage in any condition into rivers, and whether they appreciate large farms as natural habitats for large extended families or want to ruin them with "housing" projects, i.e. slums.
Reversing the kind of climate change we can all see and feel and agree on does not require a global dictatorship at all. It requires local self-governing communities to say no to any proposed construction of new "apartment" or "town house" or "row house" buildings, to say that even temporary laborers deserve houses where each person has a room of per own and at least a plot of kitchen garden.
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