Why I’m Thinking About the Sixties (the 2060s)
In February 2020, I traveled to New York to celebrate a zeroth birthday and an 80th birthday. First, I saw a close friend’s baby, who had been born only a month earlier. The next day, I went to my grandmother’s birthday party at a crowded Italian restaurant near Times Square.
I would say that this experience made me think about aging and what the alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss (of all people) called “the Great Span”: the way that seemingly distant history is only a few lifetimes away. But this would be a writer’s white lie. I think about time’s bucket brigade probably too much, and I am constantly looking for tidy anecdotes. Weeks earlier, I had already written in the notes app of my phone: “When my friend’s baby is my grandmother’s age, it will be 2100.”
My Turn: The shrinking 4,000 footers
View from the top of Osceola Courtesy
Gage and her friends on Mount Moosilauke. Courtesy
Published: 5/11/2021 8:00:06 AM
For our independent senior project during the last month of our senior year at Derryfield High School, two friends and I are hiking New Hampshire’s 4,000 footers.
As avid athletes and outdoor enthusiasts, we’re so excited to take on this project to test our limits and explore the amazing mountains in our state. I’ve always enjoyed hiking but have not been able to go very frequently, so this is a great chance to fully experience the White Mountains before we go off to college.
“It’s hard not to feel…well, it has felt like failure there,” says Allen, who recently retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, and has monitored landscape change in these mountains since he was a Ph.D. student in the late 1970s. “We saw the vulnerability. But we could not act substantively enough, quickly enough to deal with it.”
Across the Earth, people are watching the impacts of climate change play out across their homelands, the places they depend upon and love. From rising seas lapping at the shores and inundating coasts to the highest mountains, where snowpacks are dwindling and glaciers receding, we are reeling from how these changes affect every aspect of our lives. In all of this, there is room for grief. These changes are dangerous and disorienting. But building new relationships with the landscapes around us will allow us to survive and give the other species we still share this planet with the chance to thrive.
Last modified on Mon 10 May 2021 12.13 EDT
Environmental lawyer Tim Crosland has been fined £5,000 for criminal contempt of court after deliberately making public a supreme court ruling related to Heathrow airport before the result was officially announced. The judges could have jailed him for two years.
The supreme court had ruled that a planned third runway at Heathrow was legal. The runway is highly controversial, with opponents arguing that the increased carbon dioxide emissions it would cause are incompatible with the UKâs obligations to fight the climate crisis.
In Mondayâs contempt hearing, Crosland argued his deliberate breach was a reasonable measure to prevent harm from climate change, but the judges said there was âno such thing as a justifiable contempt of courtâ. Before the hearing, Crosland had said: âIf fighting for my childrenâs lives makes me a criminal, then so be it.â