Chris Hedges Report: Climate & Mortality

“Rolling blackouts, waves of refugees heading north and west, army everywhere, gas rationed, food scarce, the president in a huge ship offshore. In the Old City they built floodgates that kept the sea outside, blocked the ocean getting up the river, made the city an island we lived inside, a bowl that flooded up from the sewers when the storms came. In the Old City, weather was a gamble. It was hot nearly all year. Dry when you needed water. Flooding so it couldn’t be managed. Cold snaps would come and plunge you into ice, then melt and flood again. All the time everyone hoping it might turn around, until they knew it wouldn’t, until the world warmed up so fast you couldn’t catch your breath. Every year the storms were bigger – moving the ocean up into the streets.”

“We were like the people in Leningrad, Father said, in the war, the second one, when the Hermitage, a museum bigger than ours even, was left for dead in a dying city, but the curator stayed. There wasn’t much left, but in Leningrad, in the siege, in the war, the curator stayed and ate Restorer Paste to stay alive and wrap the dead and laid them in the basement until the thaw and chipped the ice off the paintings while the siege went on outside.

All that mattered was that the art remained. Even if they could have run away, across Lake Ladoga, into the edges of the Taiga Forest, and hidden with what they knew, they wouldn’t have left. They belonged to the art, and the art belonged to them, and it was a sacred duty.”