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 couldn’t answer. I didn’t know. At the time, climate scientists could only project what might happen in the coming decades, and a prediction is never as convincing a narrative as reality. Even still, the most apocalyptic of their predictions would skip Michigan entirely. Extreme landscapes like the poles and deserts would witness the effects first, and likely most drastically, and from there, the changes would sweep toward temperate zones until every part of the Earth had been battered by our own actions, or rather, our inaction. Even in the short 21 years I’ve been here, I’ve seen a serious reduction in the amount of snowfall every year, and this past summer persisted until the end of October. But located precisely halfway between the Equator and the North Pole and insulated by mini-oceans that could never drum up a hurricane, where on Earth is more temperate, less volatile than Michigan? The Anthropocene is passing us literally and figuratively overhead, us, Michigan, the land of saltless seas, the American wet dream of industry and unspoiled nature, the upturned, outstretched palms of Mother Earth.

So to your point, Phil, how will it affect us?

Well, for one, picturesque as it is, the sky is not meant to be sepiatoned in the early afternoon. The angelic dust that wafted through the state over the summer was the product of unstoppable forest fires rampaging through previously low-risk forests thousands of miles away. Our continuous supply of freshwater flowing in every corner of the state is a blissful anomaly, not the norm. (But also, because the Great Lakes are the remnants of melted glaciers, if that water ever leaves the basin, it’s irreplaceable.) And our winters, as brutal as they can be, are a necessary phase in the yearly cycle upon which life in our area has grown to depend. They’re miserable to us but imperative for keeping the internal clocks of our flora and fauna accurately wound.

So yes, Michigan, climate change looks good on you. For now. But this is the beginning of the end for the world as we know it. I won’t pretend to know when Michigan’s climate will change to the point of being unrecognizable. After all, I’m not a scientist. I don’t dig ice cores or examine satellite images. I’m just a woman going about her life with eyes wide open. I’m just a writer who breathes meaning, context, connection into the piles of diagrams and data tables. I’m just a human, vulnerable and weak, terrified and fully at the mercy of our planet’s wrath, trembling in my snow boots at what will become of us when the mittens close their fists and say no more.

To all the Phils out there, all I can truthfully say is, I don’t know. I really have no clue how this will affect us in the long term. Our planet is so complex that I doubt anyone will really know until it happens. All I know is that the hideous seeds of change have been planted, and the beauty of the first young flowers disguise the thorny, gnarled vine that’s coming for us. Nip it. Nip it now in the bud. We have no way of knowing how deep the roots go.

We still have time to save our only home, but that window is closing fast. And “save” isn’t really the word, but rather, “mitigate the damage and maintain a habitable and comfortable world for human life.” The action extends far beyond individuals and involves reinventing our whole system for living, overhauling our faith in the permanence of the world as-is. For us, the ones of us who live separate from it all, let us not become lulled by a false sense of security, intoxicated by the sheer beauty of shifting weather patterns. Instead, let’s put out the fire before the smoke smothers us all.