Portrait of the End of the World
by Cielle Waters-Umfleet
What the climatologists failed to factor into their doomsday calculations was how Instagrammable the end of the world would be. Every other mark, they’ve hit or are hurtling toward at meteoric speed—sea level rise, stronger oceanic storms, glacial retreat, deadly heat waves—but they never predicted that the devastating wildfires in British Columbia would cast a rosy haze over the Midwest, gilding the sky with all-day sunset lighting. While the Pacific Coast sweltered and burned, I put my feet up in my suburban backyard in West Michigan, enjoying a sweet July and pondering in awe all the circumstances that had to align for the sky to turn into its own photo filter. Of all the places to be during a global catastrophe, Michigan has got to be near the top of the list. Nothing much can touch us here. Imagine a dangerous, ticking-time-bomb geographical feature, any one you want, and chances are we don’t have it. Volcanoes, fault lines, ice sheets—honestly, I’m not even sure where the nearest ones are. We do have tides, little Peewee League champs that push the shoreline back two yards. We also have earthquakes, due to the stress of being the center of a basin, but they’re mere Jell-O jiggles compared to the major seismic zones of the planet. (Fun fact: I have lived through at least three perceptible earthquakes in Michigan and have not felt any of them.) Even our wildlife struggles to inflict serious damage, as long as you leave it alone and refrain from eating it. All in all, we’re pretty snug in North America’s peninsular grasp. And one threat that barely registers here is climate change. We get the same news as everybody else here. We gawk at the same videos of cities flooding and the oceans burning, read the same startling headlines about rivers running dry and deserts creeping beyond their range. The difference is that we have the distinct privilege of scrolling past those stories as wildfire smoke floats dreamily overhead instead of living the nightmare right outside one’s front door. Our planet’s imminent climate doom rattles me to the core, but in Michigan, it’s pretty hard to view milder winters and extended summers as anything close to catastrophic. If I had to guess, which for the sake of the argument I will, I would say that that’s a major reason why people around me squeeze their eyes shut and plug their ears, why they’re able to, to protect their cloistered worldview bubbles from the naysaying climatologists. A friendly acquaintance from high school, whom I will affectionately call Phil, burst my bubble in thinking that people who listened to and understood the science would care when we struck an argument over church youth group Oreos and lemonade. Being a notorious feminist, atheist, and left-winger in a largely conservative school, such inane arguments were exhaustingly commonplace, but Phil proved to be a stubborn opponent. No matter what facts and figures I threw his way, no matter what thought experiments I tried, no matter how well I rebutted the melting ice cube argument, Phil stonewalled me on every point. Just as I was about to chalk him up as a lost cause, he asked: “Okay, but how will it affect me?” I was at a loss for words. That didn’t happen often, as long as there was a listening ear nearby. “What do you mean?”
