The New Yorker Radio Hour - Notes from a Warming World

Episode Date: August 2, 2022

Much of the globe has seen record-breaking temperatures in recent heat waves that seem increasingly routine. Dhruv Khullar, a contributor and a practicing physician, looks at the effects of extreme heat in India, where the capital, New Delhi, recorded a temperature this year of 122 degrees. “People are amazingly resilient,” he notes. “But I think we’re approaching that point where even the most resilient people, the type of lives that they have to live—because of climate change—are not going to be sustainable for very much longer.” And the climate activist Daniel Sherrell talks about his book “Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of the World” with Ngofeen Mputubwele. The book articulates Sherrell’s view that we can live now only by walking a tightrope between hope and despair. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Now, here is a headline from last Monday morning. Extreme heat baking U.S. likely to linger into weekend. Well, a little bit of concern, obviously, because this is just the beginning of what we think is coming to pass, you know. And now here we are. Because this isn't getting, it's not going to get any better. You know, before it gets worse, it's like we got to wake up, you know.

So hopefully the future, our future, our children. They're smarter than we were. They definitely smarter than we are. And were at their age. There's one of the baddies they have. Yeah. So, absolutely. Well, you stay cool.

All over the world, people are figuring out how to cope with temperatures that are becoming truly unlivable. London reached 104 degrees recently. Portland, Oregon last week, 102. And on the plains of Texas, it was 110 or higher. So I have morning tasks, anything that requires thought or that I know is going to be a little more difficult mentally, first thing in the morning.

And then the afternoon, hopefully you know where to work in the shade. Recently, our contributor Drew Kular was in India. The capital, New Delhi, hit 122 degrees this year. Schools and businesses changed their hours were closed entirely.

Birds fell from the sky. I have family in India. My parents are from India. And so I had always gone back over the years to visit family who still live there, my aunts and uncles,

cousins. He says that every time he visits India, it feels hotter than the last time. Drew Kular is also a practicing physician at a hospital in New York, and he's looking at the effect of extreme temperatures on our bodies. There's the obvious things that you might think about, like heat stroke and dehydration, but there's so many other ways that extreme heat affects people's health,

whether it's cardiovascular disease or respiratory disease. And so what I really wanted to do was take a trip in the middle of this heat wave and figure out what it was like on the ground. The sun is beating down. Even at this hour, we're here early in the morning, it's already 93 degrees. It's expected to rise another 10 or 15 degrees later in the afternoon. When I go to India, it is a type of heat that I almost feel like I never experience here. It is kind of scorching hot.

It's often very humid. You kind of feel like you have to be inside in air conditioning as much as possible. And you also recognize that most people don't have that opportunity. in India. So when it gets really, really hot, that's a very different calculus in India than it is in the United States. In fact, India has reported four heat waves since the beginning of summer. And its capital, New Delhi, is now dealing with a fire that has been raging on for 30 hours now at the Bhaswa landfill in the northern part of the capital. So, you know, March was one of the hottest months in the history of India and then April was one of the hottest months in the history of India.

and on April 26th, this huge landfill on the outskirts of Delhi. It's on the outskirts of Delhi, but it's only about 15 miles from the seat of the Indian government. It caught fire. As a landfill burned outside the Capitol Wednesday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned the country is getting too hot too soon. And, you know, landfills are known to catch fire. They do from time to time. There's a lot of toxic fumes and gases. but this extreme heat created a massive fire

that firefighters couldn't put out for basically weeks. More news from Delhi will after the Gazipur, Monday, the Balswa landfill unit in North Delhi is the one that has caught fire and this has been happening for the last four days or so with residents living in this area. And the toxic fumes and the heat of the landfill itself affected a lot of people's health in terrible ways. I mean, people were having trouble breathing,

people were having trouble thinking clearly, people suffered burns. And so it was a really kind of severe and dire example of what, you know, these types of extreme temperatures can inflict on a community. And that's one of the reasons that I wanted to go and see it for myself. So we're standing here at the Balzaba landfill. It looks like a mountain from afar. I thought it was a mountain, but when you get closer, You see rags, you see bottles, you see all sorts of trash.

There's a few areas where the landfill, which was on fire a few weeks ago, still seems to be sending off fumes. A lot of people actually make their living at these landfills. And so what they're doing is collecting the trash, they're storing the trash, they are selling it to people who are then recycling the trash. I see not just children, but older people. some folks are taking carts, wagons down the street to try to take what they can't. It's not just these trucks that are driving up and dumping, you know, whatever trash that they want to dump there.

There are people that live there. There are schools nearby. There are people who come from other cities just to work at these landfills. I saw a gentleman just walked by. with a, well, look like a cart full of lemons that he was going to sell. You know, they're often called waste pickers or rag pickers, but in India, it's very common that people make their living at these landfills. So I went to landfill with two NGOs that support people who work at the landfill, and we walked down this kind of alley into a brick hut, these huts that line the path to the landfill.

Outside of one, I saw a man who was kind of nodding human hair that he'd collected at the landfill, and his intention was to sell them as wigs. I walked into one of these huts, and there were five or six women. And they were all dressed in kind of very colorful clothing, and they were really eager to kind of tell their story and their experience, both with the fire,

but also with the heat and gentle. generally the challenging working conditions that they endure every day. There was a woman named Saira Wano, and I'm Nelfilka, I'm up here. There was a woman named Saira, who was kind of the local boss, and she, you know, she was standing in the corner, she was dressed in kind of a blue and red sari with her head covered. You know, she answered most questions that I asked, that I asked the group, And she, you know, she had a lot to say. Her parents are from Calcutta.

And after they got married, they moved to Delhi. Sair and her siblings were all born in kind of a poor area of Delhi. You know, she says one of the reasons that she stayed in Delhi was that in the villages, they don't have these large landfills. Whereas here at the boss of a landfill, she was able to make a living, she was able to educate her children, she was able to kind of scrap together a way of life

that just wasn't possible back in her village. One of the things that they told me is that it's really hard to work in the summer because of the extreme heat. In the winter, even if parts of the landfill are on fire, they're able to wrap themselves, wrap scarves around their faces or, you know, protect themselves and are able to continue working. In the summer, that becomes really, really difficult. Some of the women try to drape a shirt over themselves, drape a shirt over their head. That makes them feel even hotter.

They take water up to the landfill and it becomes so hot, almost like boiling by the time that they're able to drink it. So it's a really challenging situation. So, you know, like no day could not go to the night in night in a

night in a admi so you know Saira told me you know up until a few years ago even she felt

like it was possible for people to comfortably work on the landfill but she said that it

doesn't feel that way anymore they're having to really change their schedules or not able to work

on the landfill during the day so a lot of them go up there in the middle of the night and that's

when they have to work it's the only time that is tolerable to work. Some of the women told me that they sleep up there, that they eat up there. So, what would have been a bad day of trouble,

it would have been, maybe TV's a disease or something badgered. So being outside in the sun, in the direct heat, all day long, as you can imagine, has kind of a terribly damaging impact on the body.

You know, these women were suffering from dehydration, from headaches, from exhaustion, rashes, fevers, you know, the smell of the garbage. It was sickening, but they couldn't even tolerate masks because it was so hot. You know, some of the people who already had respiratory issues when the fire started, they weren't even able to get out of bed because it became so difficult for them to breathe. question where they go when they have these types of symptoms? Is there anywhere they can get medical care? And they told me there wasn't. Sometimes they pool together their money and they go to a local pharmacy to buy a medication

that they think might help. But really, they have almost no access to medical care. Take it. You know, we've talked a lot of the intergovernmental panel and said, we've talked a lot about the physical health effects of extreme heat and extreme weather, but, you know, the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel on climate change, has recently highlighted the mental health effects. And I think that's something that we don't talk enough about.

I mean, if you have an underlying mental health problem, that could spiral out of control because of some of these events. also people who suffer from, you know, a hurricane or a drought or a wildfire. There's tremendous after effects in terms of your emotional and your mental well-being that could last for months or even years after that. You know, we tend to think of this as a problem that will affect predominantly low-income countries or middle-income countries, but climate change has inflicted lethal heat, you know, right here in the United States as well. Heat waves kill more Americans than any other extreme weather event, and that is going to get more and more common in the coming year.

So we need to do, we need to take the steps now to prepare for that. You leave with this feeling that people are amazingly resilient, that they adapt to their circumstances, that they can go through a lot and still make a life for themselves, but also at some point it becomes too much. And I think we're approaching that point where even the most resilient people, the type of lives that they have to live because of the effects of climate change, that's not going to be sustainable for very much longer. Drew Kulah practices at Wild Cornell Medicine, a hospital in New York.

And you can find his reporting from India and all his writing on COVID-19 and other subjects at New Yorker.com. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. We spoke earlier about the heat waves facing much of the world this summer.

And in even the most optimistic scenarios, climate change will continue to worsen for years to come. So unless you're truly committed to denying reality, you may be asking, how are we going to live with this? How can we live with this?

Daniel Shirell has been wrestling with these questions for most of his life. He's a climate activist and an author, a millennial born in 1990. Shirel's recent book is called Warmth, Coming of Age at the End of the World. He talked with our producer, Gauphin and Poutabuele. I came across Daniel Shirel's book, Warmth, last year, and the premise of the book is this. He's a climate activist, and so he's writing a book to his future potential child. Like a lot of people, that I know. He's like, is it ethical to have a kid when they're going to grow up in a climate disaster? And so this book is like a letter to that future kid talking about the present that we

live in now. And somehow I feel like the book creates space for me to sort of think about the state of the planet, like emotionally, in a way that I normally wouldn't. Here's Here's an excerpt from his book. It was in the early 2010s that the storms began to feel like more than just weather. They'd become semi-routineized by now. Another way to mark out the time. When a storm made landfall, footage would flash for days across every screen in the country. The more catastrophes I witnessed, the more a pattern began to reveal itself.

Maybe by the time you read this, Hurricane Morrill. Korea will have become a footnote. Its importance diluted by the accelerating chain of subsequent storms that as of now have yet to occur. I grew up in the 90s. It was the end of history. Francis Fukuyama had declared we would all work 9 to 5 and go shopping and die. And that state of affairs would be basically stable forever. And my father, who's an oceanographer, and did a lot of research in Antarctica when I was growing up, would come back and sort of

share with me like there was this thing happening down into Antarctica that would eventually come for the rest of us where the planet that we'd assumed was was a sort of stable premise of our short little lifespans was in fact going through like pretty fundamental upheavals and that was a very strange thing to learn about as a small child you know eight or nine to be like okay that seems like quite a big deal but I don't see anybody around me talking about it let alone emoting about it. And so I guess it's just not that big of a deal after all, and I'll sort of sublimated or bury it.

Yeah, I definitely hear what you're saying. And I think when you do start to take on the emotion, in my experience, that can feel super overwhelming. And that sort of makes me think of the story of Noah with the flood and how it like increases little by little like the rains and the waters arising from the deeps. and all of that. I think of that when I start to sort of like allow myself to emote

about everything that's going on, like the sheer number of things going on in the world around me. The metaphor, you spoke about the beginning of Noah and the water's descending from the heavens and rising up from the earth. And I went to Jewish Day School K through 8,

so I'm familiar with the legends of Noah. And, you know, what that really reminded me, I spent a few weeks, weeks in 2019 running creative writing workshops at the university in Tuvalu, which is a tiny, tiny nation in the Pacific, one of the lowest-lying island nations in the world. And they are experiencing right now exactly what Noah did. On the one hand, the seas are percolating up through the ground level so that the freshwater lens on which they rely for their agriculture, for their drinking

water is slowly getting more and more saline and basically undrinkable. So you used to be able to grow fields of taro on these islands and you just can't grow that anymore. It's essentially a food desert. They have to ship in everything from Fiji. And then on the other hand, storms in the Pacific are getting worse. And so the rain is lashing down from above and they're being squeezed. The emotional technologies they develop to deal with this, the sort of humor, the grit, the sarcasm, the Anhui, the like pure hedonistic pleasure-seeking. the mixture that they derived at, I think, is something that we've yet to develop. I think there's sometimes this fantasy with the climate crisis, with racial injustice,

with economic injustice, that there's going to be an end, you know, some final catharsis and the credits roll, and we've either won or we lost. And that various people with various crystal balls want to, you know, they make a career out of telling you it's going to go one way or another. And I think that relieves us of the burden of having to grapple with the weight and the uncertainty every day, which I find to be one of the hardest things about this. And yet, like, walking that tightrope between those two poles of despair and optimism is to me, like, part of my life's work as a climate organizer, is staying on that tightrope that I would call reality.

Here is an important piece of context, something I'd like you to know up front. Occasionally, amid all the storms, I'd feel grief. The grief had its own weather. It could come down like a squall, momentary and encompassing, impervious to forecast. This was a wait I kept private mostly, unsure of weather or how to share it. But alone, it rose up in me like a whale from a depth, almost invisible until the moment it breached, water streaming from its flanks, the most powerful thing in the world. And like with a whale, the breaches seemed to come at random, when I least expected them. I cried about it in line at the grocery store and in the bathroom at parties and by myself in the shower.

Never loudly, just a few tears, messy, and quickly stifled. I wrote a deeply anti-fatalistic book and I'm not a fatalist. But we know that it's going to get worse before it gets better. And probably, at least for the duration of my lifetime, will continue. to get worse. If it gets better, it might be a few generations hence. And so how do you sustain yourself over like those coming decades, the rollercoaster that we know we're already on? Yeah, I mean, I think, I want to say this before I forget. I think that one of the things that you said that just is stuck in my brain is emotional

technology. Because it does feel, it does feel a little bit like the technology of our emotions as to the moment and the era that we live in, particularly for like our age feels basic. Yes, yes. Totally. I mean, that's why I wrote this book, right? You know, I didn't set out to write a book. I set out first to read a book.

You know, I love literature, and it's a way I, it's like a major means of processing reality for me. and I set out to look for a book that could sort of countenance the weight of the climate crisis in the present rather than there was a whole body of science fiction and some of it very good that displaced the climate crisis

as sort of a futuristic dystopian premise from which the narrative could unspool. But I wanted to like, what does it feel like to live with it now? Like it's happening now. It made me feel lonely. You know, and it was the same loneliness I felt, you know, even as recently as five years ago,

like if I had told somebody I can't get out of bed today because the enormity of the climate crisis is sitting on my chest it just would have been like not really legible you know and I felt like the kinds of conversations I wanted to be having about this

which would have been a mechanism for sharing that weight that were like vulnerable and honest and commissitive and confused and maybe even hopeful like there weren't the cultural avenues to have those conversations and so I just spoke to myself I mean that's what a book is in a way

So I often describe it this way to people is that like climate has never been one of my things is like often the language that I use, right? And I think that I think that I think that the thing that's interesting and the thing that is interesting about reading your book is that like it almost is because whenever it's come up, I've just been like I don't even have like I don't even have a framework to deal with this in any way that's not. just like, I guess it's too late. Like, I don't even have, I don't even have basic vocabulary. I don't have subject and verb and like, you know. And so, to me, it just like reiterates that idea of like the ability, the conceptual, metaphysical, whatever, ability to grasp a thing or to grapple with a thing, you know? Yeah, totally.

Yeah. I think that's part of what I was trying to do with his book is I realized also that I didn't have the words. And then in some ways, words themselves were. inadequate vessels, but I was trying to use them to arrive at a place beyond language that would essentially be like a new feeling inside myself that could accommodate what seemed like an unaccommodatable reality of the climate crisis. So you're, but and it's it's sort of funny, you know, that there's the, I can imagine the response in my head, whatever like the Tucker

calls since the world is, you know, when, when they hear millennial despair, it's like, okay, go cry about it, snowflake, which is kind of honestly hilarious. But it's also wild to me to cast us as the children here, as the immature ones here, when in fact we are trying desperately to figure out how to accommodate new realities and learn to survive while they are marching blindly into oblivion. You know, I'm going to choose to treat this huge swath of people and these huge swath of the literal actual physical substrate on which we live as essentially ignorable. like it turns out you just can't do that without risking the whole thing you know like it's sort of like you have to actually see reality and so part of what you know the climate movement i think is set out to do much like the black lives matter movement is to like force the polity to like actually live in

reality and see the full picture and see the full humanity of everybody and see the the full tangibility of all ecosystems and like it's sort of like uh in ontological reorientation, because I feel like capitalism has been built on this, like, narrowing of the aperture, that, which is what allows you to create immense violence and sacrifice zones beyond the boundaries of the aperture. And so we're just, like, trying to force it wide again. But it's really hard. My dear friend Emily and I, who's featured in the book, we've been talking recently about, especially in the wake of the Glasgow cop, about the core crux model of climate change for all that.

Just to flip us back to middle school for a second. Bear with me, bear with me. And, you know, there is a huge swath of outcomes between 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and 3 degrees Celsius of warming, which is what we're currently on track for. And when I was growing up in the 90s, when nobody gave a shit about the climate crisis, we were on track for four or five degrees of warming.

That's basically like Mad Max, you know. it would have led to mass human die-off. And we still might be heading that direction, but we have bent the curve of emissions down somewhat. And so there's this vast array of outcomes and between 1.5 and 3, and for every tick of the thermometer between those two poles, you are saving or consigning millions of people to life and death.

And so Emily and I are like, okay, there are 15 tenths of a degree between 1.5 and 3 degrees Celsius. and much like the whore cruxes, each one of those things is going to involve an almost impossible seeming political mission and that the rest of our lives is going to be spent on, you know, probably all of my work for the rest of my life will maybe be some small part of shaving off one of those 15 tents. But when I imagine myself behind a veil of ignorance, like not having been born yet, and somebody were to tell me, you know, you would be born in 1990,

the year the first popular book on global warming would be released. You'll see it as you come of age. It'll transition from a niche research topic to an ongoing global catastrophe. Obviously, I would have felt grief about that, and I do feel grief about that. But also, if somebody had, you know, likewise told me that you're going to spend the rest of your life coming together with people who share your values, to try to create a polity and economy that actually traits everybody with dignity. I kind of can't think of a more meaningful way to spend a human life. Where is it that you land in your book?

Tell me about like the kind of psychic, you know, spiritual, whatever ending that you land on. Oh gosh. Give the like short version. Yeah. I don't know if I arrive at like a pithy piece of advice by the end of the book, but one of the thoughts I had as I was concluding writing it was, it clarified for me what seemed to be the chief ethical and political responsibility of being alive in the 21st century,

which was to pay active attention to the huge swaths of the natural and huge swaths of the natural and human world, that the stories I was fed as a child taught me to ignore. And that stretching those boundaries of attention outward, political attention, economic attention, cultural attention, organizing attention is the only way we're going to survive. And when I'm feeling hopeless, which I still am, often, it's always something I'll be moving through. It's never something I'm going to have left behind, I think, because there's never going to be that conclusive credit role where we've either won or lost the climate crisis. I think it's going to be a pall over my life for the rest of my life. But the fact that the path to collective survival

runs through expanding our notion of who is a person and who is deserving of love, even beyond the human species. I'm sometimes overwhelmed by the beauty of that and honored to be a part of that project. Even if I don't, I have no assurances it won't end in tragedy. Daniel Shirel's recent book is called Warmth, and he spoke last year with GoFand Imputo Buile, a producer for our program. I'm David Remnick. Thanks so much.

See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Breeda Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, and Gophane and Putabwelle. Along with Jeffrey Masters, Will Coley, and Michael May. And we had assistance from Harrison Keithline, James Napoli, Rachel Munro, and Michael Fillero. Special thanks this week to Rajesh Joshi. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.