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This article was originally published on Common Edge as Living on the Edge.
I am on the edge. Not emotionally or psychologically although this could be the case but literally, physically, spatially, geographically. As I write this, I am sitting on the balcony of a hotel room in Miami Beach, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. Behind me is the whole State of Florida and, indeed, the entire North American continent. In front of me: the boardwalk, a narrow beach, and then a lot of water and not much else between here and Mauritania, a distance of more than 4,400 miles.
This is what urban designers call an “edge” a transition between, you might say, something and nothing. Urban designers think constantly about things like edges, nodes, paths anything, as the brilliant urban designer Kevin Lynch showed us in his classic book
Apocalyptic warnings about climate change such as the U.S. Geological Survey-Cornell-University of Arizona report in 2014 that the American Southwest faced a significant risk of a 35-year megadrought grow more plausible and terrifying each year as new global temperature records are set and massive wildfires come to seem normal.
Some scientists believe the planet may already be past the tipping point. The Uninhabitable Earth: A Story of the Future, a 2019 book by American journalist David Wallace-Wells, laid out the view that there is already so much carbon in the atmosphere that global disaster is inevitable. But Wallace-Wells also wrote that thanks to technological advances, the solutions are obvious, and available referring to not just increasingly cheap green energy but to proposals to use geoengineering. For the uninitiated, geoengineering is the deliberate, large-scale intervention in the Earth s climate system to slow or reverse climate change.