The dog days of summer are proving tough. Wildfires devastate our neighbors to the north and blotch Marin’s skies. COVID-19’s delta variant seeded more than 500 new cases in Marin in recent weeks and slapped masks back on our faces.
Many are asking, “When will this end?”
Sadly, these troubles will not disappear soon. They are part of the landscape, likely for decades. The better question is “How well will we adapt?”
The immediate cause of the wildfires is the drought, though this will pass. Unsubstantiated are concerns that climate change (due to human-induced and natural forces) will make the California drought permanent. Even people exceedingly confident in climate modeling acknowledge that these analytics cannot predict regional impacts.
One point of modeling consensus is that dry areas will likely get drier going forward, but Northern California is not such a clime. To properly interpret news coverage of the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, read “Unsettled,” a new book by Steven Koonin, the former undersecretary for science in the Obama administration.
Droughts and wildfires are not new to Northern California, yet we have not adapted to them well. Forests, on private and public lands, have not been properly managed. By some estimates, only 10% of recommended controlled burns are conducted. A lack of funding, regulatory hurdles, community fears and litigation limit action.
The most devastating maladaptation has been our management of electricity distribution in fire-prone areas. While the Pacific Gas and Electric Co. bears much of the blame, an honest assessment also recognizes that the push for renewable electricity sources coupled with downward pressure on rate increases created an unsustainable financial squeeze for the utility.
This point is crucial. Policymaking in California (and the US) prioritizes reducing carbon emissions over adapting to climate change. We are betting that colossal investments to move away from carbon will reduce our emissions dramatically, that China and other countries will follow suit quickly and that the climate models are correct. None of these are certain and failure of any one of them dooms the strategy.
Even if all three assumptions pan out, the associated environmental benefits arrive only many decades from now. While this approach is not without merit, it is a longshot proposition. In a world of limited resources, those assumptions reduce efforts to adapt.
Our adaptation to COVID-19 has been messy and is still in flux but has the potential to be successful.
Success, though, is not the near-term eradication of the virus. The polio vaccine arrived in 1954, and we are just now approaching global eradication. COVID-19 will bounce around the globe for decades as it mutates, ebbs and flows. Success will be to reduce the prevalence of the virus so that most of the world can return to “normal” most of the time.
The essential adaptation to coronavirus was the development of vaccines. A robust, for-profit pharmaceutical industry developed multiple vaccines in just months. Given this unambiguous success, calls to weaken the industry – by eliminating patent protections, for example – seem self-destructive.
Our governmental and societal adaptation to the onset of the pandemic was mildly chaotic but achieved vital stability in communities across the country. The Bay Area, certainly, was largely united in its response – early and sustained shutdowns, testing, social distancing, masking and extended remote learning.
Time will tell if this response was optimal over the short and long term, and for whom. Other regions took different paths, which was good because securing local unity amid a complex and uneven emergency was the only practical alternative to a police state.
In the post-vaccine period, Marin is leading the way in the most powerful adaptation now: 94% of our eligible population has received at least one dose of the vaccine. Other regions lag. Nationally, we do not yet have vaccine acceptance at the threshold needed to fully reclaim our ways of life within our borders. The need for boosters will make this a recurring adaptive challenge.
Our natural inclination is often to solve problems, which is admirable. At times, though, we must acknowledge that our goal must be to manage the challenges we face. Our future depends on our ability to adapt to a dramatically changing world.
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Marin Voice: Continued threat of COVID, wildfires forcing us into needed adaptation - Marin Independent Journal
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