My Hex on Exxon

by Tom Phillips

Sometime in the year 2000, I remember saying to my younger brother, “the world has improved.”  It was a spontaneous remark and it surprised me, considering that we'd been brought up in successive eras of doomsaying – World War Two, then the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation.  If that didn’t get us, there was always the “population bomb” that was going to make the planet uninhabitable. 

For a few years in the Reagan and Clinton eras, it seemed as though we had righted the ship. The Cold War was over, nuclear weapons were being mothballed and the threat of war was reduced to brush fires on the fringes of a New World Order.  Peace was paying dividends, and the national debt that was going to overwhelm us was actually shrinking.  For news, we had to make do with shark attacks and the president’s dallying with an intern. 

It was a window onto a future that looked brighter than we ever expected, but the window slammed down on September 11, 2001.  Since then we have been blundering our way through a Clash of Civilizations that is actually a mismatch, just as the Cold War was, and which will probably end, as the Cold War did, with a whimper and a default win for modern civilization. To some of us, the world seems to be on the verge of improving again.  

Young Woman, Go North

by Tom Phillips

October in Siberia 

Flying from New York to Tokyo and back in late October, we looked down and saw endless stretches of uninhabited, frozen land – in northern Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Russia's Kamchatka peninsula. The topography was normal –  mountains and valleys, rivers of ice – but the weather was not suited to civilization.

Meanwhile we read in the New York Times that by the year 2100, the Persian Gulf may be too hot to support human life – that spending even a few hours outdoors would overtax our capacity to ventilate and hydrate our bodies.

What is to be done?  Amidst all the hand-wringing and doomsday scenarios, one notion keeps poking at my mind.    

Would it be wrong to suggest that as global warming increases, it will open up new areas for human habitation, even as it shuts down others?  It's too late to undo the effects of 150 years of industrialization. So we may have to do what humans have always done – migrate in search of greener pastures. Such pastures are already opening up – e.g. in Greenland, the ice-­capped continent that now has a growing season on its southern fringes.

Three of our daughters have already migrated to cooler climes – two to Seattle, one to the San Francisco Bay, where high ground and the natural air conditioning of the Pacific Ocean protect cities from excessive heats and flooding.

But why not go all the way? Twenty years ago, a fellow writer at CBS News announced she was quitting and taking off for Alaska.  Asked if she was looking for a job, Maureen Clark said -- No, I'm looking for an adventure.

A Google search reveals that she eventually got both – becoming a public affairs officer for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, writing and photographing the great outdoors of the biggest, most northern state.   

Commending such a step is not to minimize the damage and suffering that are inevitable from global warming, or to suggest that nothing needs to be done.  There is no easy solution for many people, particularly the poor in low-lying tropical countries.  But for the human race as a whole, we may have to move, or die.  

A hundred years from now, the Persian Gulf could be uninhabitable, and Florida will probably be under water.  So, why not beat the rush?  To paraphrase Horace Greeley, “Young Woman, Go North.” 

Or to quote Calvin and Hobbes:  Yukon Ho!

-- Copyright 2015 by Tom Phillips 

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