Swept Away;
Vermont and New York 2023
If you’re optimistic about the future, you’re not paying attention.”
Elizabeth Kolbert
2022
On July 9th a slow moving storm churned up the Hudson Valley sweeping away houses and flooding the Palisades Parkway. People had to swim out of their inundated cars, at least one woman drowned and many more were missing.
Water cascading down a steep cliff outside West Point washed out a huge section of highway. It looked more like a seaside rockfall on the California coast than a scene of tranquility in upstate New York. Flash floods in Poughkeepsie washed out the railway tracks and the New York bound train had to slam its engines into reverse and inch all the way back to Rhinecliff.
On Monday the storm crept into Vermont causing the worst road damage since both Hurricane Ida in 2021 and Hurricane Irene ten years before that. What had been considered hundred or thousand year storms were occurring every three to thirteen years. At the same time America’s south was suffering under triple digit temperatures in the longest heat wave on record.
The ongoing disasters were taking their toll. Young people had lived through three years of on-line schooling, three years of lockdowns and were facing a whole life of staying indoors and masking. College aged students had missed out on their in-person education and older people had seen Covid and heat related deaths trim the average life span of their age cohort by five disconcerting years.
While people used to be concerned about saving the planet for their grandchildren, now they were concerned about saving the planet for themselves.
Everyone was starting to come to the creepy realization that we have crossed a threshold and these ongoing ecological disasters will be with us for the rest of our lives. We will just have to cope as best we can.
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Bill Sargent is a NOVA consultant and author of 28 award-winning books about science and the environment. His most recent book, Backstory is a novel that follows three fictitious Boston Globe journalists as they cover Covid, the Climate and the War in Ukraine. It is available at local bookstores, and can be ordered through
http://WilliamSargent.net
, and Amazon.com.