The Sunday Read: ‘This Isn’t the California I Married’

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 16 January 2022

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Elizabeth Weil, the author of today’s Sunday Read, writes that, in her marriage, there was a silent third spouse: California. “The state was dramatic and a handful,” Weil writes. “But she was gorgeous, and she brought into our lives, through the natural world, all the treasure and magic we’d need.” However, for Weil, there is internal conflict living in a state where wildfires have become the norm. She describes living through a discontinuity in which previously held logic fails to stand up to reality. Today, Weil analyzes the sources of California’s crisis — from the impact of colonization and the systemic erasure of Indigenous practices to the significant loss of fire-management practices and critical dryness caused by global warming. In California, as in much of the world, climate anxiety and climate futurism coalesce into trans-apocalyptic pessimism. But, in spite of the doom, Weil suggests the situation is not completely devoid of hope.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Elizabeth Wile and I'm sharing a story I wrote recently for The New York Times
0:10.2	magazine and ProPublica.
0:13.2	So I'm not a native Californian but I've lived here for about 25 years.
0:18.2	For me and I think an awful lot of people last year, so Labor Day weekend 2020 kind of
0:25.1	broke the state for a lot of us.
0:28.6	It was way too hot, it was over 100 degrees in San Francisco, which is almost unheard of,
0:34.6	and there were just fires everywhere it seemed.
0:38.7	And on the morning of September 9th, Northern California woke up to a sky that was orange.
0:45.1	And not even just a little bit orange, it was actually like blade runner level dystopia
0:49.5	orange.
0:51.0	The light looked wrong, everyone's pets were upset, every sentient being knew that something
0:56.4	was deeply, deeply.
0:58.1	Off, that the world was not okay and you couldn't dilute yourself about it any longer.
1:05.3	So I wrote this story in response to that realization, sort of as a way of trying to process
1:11.0	how to live with it.
1:16.0	We often talk about climate change as if it's something that's going to happen in the
1:19.4	future.
1:20.8	But to live in California or really to live anywhere in the world at this point is to
1:25.2	know that it's not just a future concern, it's a present concern.
1:30.5	The world or really the reality of the world is getting away from us because it's sort
1:34.6	of too terrifying to let in.
1:37.6	But you can't just close your eyes and opt out of it.
	...

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