The playlist is, I know, increasingly repetitive, but Earth-station has but a few records remaining on the turntable, and they will only be played louder and louder as the party winds down.
Meanwhile, the wildfires in Greece, fueled by heat and drought, have claimed more than 70 lives:
How long do you imagine it will be before we are inured to these events? At what point will they become our new normal, a story so repeated on the nightly news as to become stale? They're no longer even as seasonal as we once knew them. The wildfire season begins earlier and ends a good deal later. We now have "flash droughts" - rapid onset severe drought caused by a lack of precipitation coupled with an intense heatwave. Extended droughts are now often followed by massive flooding as we've just seen in Japan.
ReplyDeleteAll of these things end up on our evening news because there's still some novelty to them. We are still in awe of them. Death sells. And yet for how long?
As long as it still bleeds, it will lead, Mound. Weather porn is always cheaper to produce and requires less of the audience than analysis would.
DeleteA hoax perpetrated by the Chinese? We seem to no longer believe what our own eyes tell us.
ReplyDeleteWe've regressed to an infantile understanding of the world, Owen, one that only changes, I expect, when one has direct experience of the calamities depicted.
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