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mourningsickness · 6 years

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Claire Vaye Watkins’s ‘Gold Fame Citrus’

Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut novel, Gold Fame Citrus (Quercus, 2015), opens on an arid Laurel Canyon, whipped by unrelenting ‘crazy-making’ Santa Ana winds. A dry place that has birthed a host ‘countercultural’ figures – from Joni Mitchell and Jim Morrison to Marilyn Manson –, for nearly two decades “passing through” Laurel Canyon was a compulsory pitstop on the road towards superstardom. It has been mythologised in various cultural iterations – most famously Graham Nash’s ‘Our House’, written about then-lover Joni Mitchell, whose own (better) 1970 album Ladies of the Canyon also drew obvious inspiration from the neighbourhood [1].

More troublingly, the Canyon was also the setting for the brutal murder of silent film actor, Ramon Novarro on 30th October 1968. His killers, brothers Robert and Tommy ‘Scott’ Ferguson, then aged just 22 and 17 respectively, entered his home under the pretext of soliciting their sexual services, believing a vast sum of money to be hidden somewhere in the house. Novarro, a Mexican Catholic, had been one of MGM’s leading Latino stars during the 1920s and a romantic idol, having starred opposite Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo and Myrna Loy. His homosexuality remained a closely-kept secret throughout his career (Louis B. Mayer reportedly attempted to coerce him into a “lavender marriage”, which he refused), and was the cause of much internal struggle in an era when success was contingent on the presentation of normative sexuality. Then in his late 60s, Novarro had a history of arranging for prostitutes to visit his Canyon home for sex and companionship. The Fergusons obtained his number from a previous guest.

Over dinner, Novarro read the brothers’ palms; during their trial the pair proclaimed him to be a lousy fortune-teller. He was subjected to several hours of torture intended to extort the location of the money from him. Eventually, the pair left the house with 20 dollars retrieved from his bathrobe pocket, leaving Novarro to choke to death on his own blood [2]. These sinister events formed a counterpoint to the Manson Family murders of 1969, which took place roughly a year later, in Laurel Canyon’s northern counterpart – that “senseless-killing neighbourhood” Haight Ashbury [3]. Though the canyon’s entanglement with celebrity soured, it remains a popular residential location. Google informs me that, today, the area is still favoured by stars such as Moby and George Clooney. Both keep homes there.

I read Gold, Fame, Citrus not long after having read Joan Didion’s The White Album (Simon & Schuster, 1979) for the first time, which perhaps explains why I was suffering from a bout of “murder mind” [4]. One of its essays, ‘Holy Water’ takes as its focus the complex, sprawling networks of dams and aqueducts that keep Los Angeles county in water. In it, Didion (a Sacramento native) visits the Operations Control Center for the California State Water Project, one of numerous government agencies responsible for shifting the ‘trillion gallons’ of water that are pumped across the state each week. Here, she writes: ‘Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. The water I will draw tomorrow from my tap in Malibu is today crossing the Mojave Desert from the Colorado River, and I like to think about exactly where that water is. The water I will drink tonight in a restaurant in Hollywood is by now well down the Los Angeles Aqueduct from the Owens River, and I also like to think about exactly where that water is’ [5].

At the time of reading, I found this essay vaguely anticlimactic, following as it does the incendiary piece from which Didion’s book takes its title. As someone who lives in a damp English climate, her preoccupation with the bio-political regulation of water supply across the state of California felt alien to me. Coming from a place where water has always felt abundant, I couldn’t fathom the scale of these operations, nor could I place Didion’s strange anxiety. Despite the glut of climate fictions I’ve encountered, I found it hard to imagine what drought might actually look like. It felt implausible in London, a city where the gravest threat it had posed was the hosepipe ban of my childhood summers, or the ugly reservoir grazing the stretch of motorway on the way to my grandmother’s house. Reading Vaye Watkins’s climate dystopia – with its vision of a west coast drained even of groundwater – brought Didion’s essay, along with L.A,'s broader history of precarity, into stark focus.

Doubtless Watkins, herself raised in the Mojave Desert, has also read ‘Holy Water’. Drawing on the ‘Water Wars’ of the 1920s for her own novel’s casting of the near-future, she reveals a similar preoccupation with how California keeps itself liquid. The Water Wars began following the construction of a 233 mile aqueduct in 1913, which saw the Owens River forcibly diverted towards a reservoir in the San Fernando Valley [6]. Following the project’s completion, the aqueduct guzzled so much water that Owens Valley, known formerly as ‘The Switzerland of California’, was effectively transformed into a desert, stoking rebellion among local farmers and ranchers, who sabotaged part of the system in 1924, laying dynamite at the Alabama Gates [7]. This inheritance is made explicit in the book’s preface, which refers to the words spoken by pioneering engineer William Mulholland over his finished project: ‘There it is. Take it’.

Hollywood, for its own part, has already mined the Water Wars narrative. Roman Polanski’s 1974 noir classic Chinatown is loosely based on legal disputes that were still ongoing in 1970, following the LADWP’s construction of an aqueduct in Inyo County that stood in direct contravention of groundwater protections. Indeed, the film’s first victim, Hollis Mulwray, is purportedly based on Mulholland (if you listen closely, you may still be able to hear the producers riffing on those names). Ironically, the film is also tangentially connected to Watkins’s novel. Her father, Paul, was a member of Charlie Manson’s notorious ‘Family’, though he left shortly before the murder of Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate, later going on to testify in court.

When we first encounter Gold Fame Citrus’s two central protagonists, Luz and Ray, holed up in the former mansion of a Hollywood starlet, we are also encountering this history. Marginalised former residents of California – descended from the feckless grifters responsible for the ‘failed experiment’ of the state – are now known derogatorily as ‘Mojavs’ (GFC, 70). Signs on elementary schools read: ‘MOJAVS NOT WELCOME. NO WORK FOR MOJAVS. MOJAVS KEEP OUT’ (GFC, 23). Those who have chosen not to ‘evac’, remaining behind in Los Angeles, are plagued by a feeling of ‘sostalgia’, a term coined by Glenn Albrecht to describe the alienation and distress brought on by environmental change that lies outside inhabitants’ control [8]. The “good vibes” of LA have endured, if in mutated form. Venice Beach has become a hotspot for raves, but also for black-market trading – of blueberries, Ovaltine, all-cotton socks and other elusive commodities.

Luz and Ray’s days are for the most part consumed with trivial tasks that elide the quiet desperation of their circumstances. Even in this carnivalesque nightmare, traditional gender roles seem to prevail: Ray digs out the ‘shitting hole’ in their backyard; procures crates of stale ration cola; kills a prairie dog that winds up in the library; while Luz (a former model) naps and plays dress-up in the starlet’s abandoned closet. In an effort to shake up this mundanity, they attend a ‘raindance’ on Venice Beach where they encounter a small, pale-haired toddler whose ‘people’ radiate bad vibes. Between them, they make a snap decision to (benevolently) kidnap her, and return to the canyon. They call the ‘baby’ (infantilised because she remains curiously underdeveloped throughout) Ig, after one of the strange sounds she makes. Fearing retribution from Ig’s ‘people’ – a disparate band of punks, seemingly not including her parents – they head east on the advice of a former comrade, Lonnie, whose compound the couple have left on bad terms (Luz having fucked Lonnie, out of obliging boredom rather than actual desire).

When they run out of gas, somewhere on a desert trail flanked by jagged salt-rock formations, Ray heads out to find help. Uttering the haunting last words “I’ll be right back”, he leaves Luz and Ig on the backseat of the oven-like car (GFC, 102). Here, the novel – along with the couple – splits. We follow Luz into the Amargosa Sea (a sprawling, hostile ocean of sand ‘blown off the Central Valley and the Great Plains) and leave Ray for dead (later it emerges he has been holed up in a subterranean prison complex, somewhere in what was formerly New Mexico) (GFC, 72). Though the Amargosa is reportedly lifeless, ‘a dead swath’, it is the source of their salvation (GFC, 72). Their rescuers form part of a lone, nomadic community, a gaggle of lost souls who have dedicated themselves to the dune sea and to their “prophet” leader, Levi. ‘Descended from a long line of dowsers’, Levi is apparently able to glean water from sand, though his methods of extraction are later revealed to be deeply suspect (GFC, 72). The cultish sway of his charisma is, clearly, reminiscent of Manson. In this aspect, Watkins’s novel reminded me of Emma Cline’s wildly successful debut The Girls (Chatto & Windus, 2016), which rehashes many of the same tropes. Like Manson, Levi himself proves to be the worst kind of mirage – an abusive narcissist preying on the vulnerability and soft-mindedness of others.

The encroaching desert, we are repeatedly told, ‘curates’ its inhabitants. Luz, already born a figurehead, has been “chosen". In another life the adult Luz was ‘Baby Dunn’. A propaganda initiative cooked up by the Bureau of Conservation, she was adopted as a symbol at birth, her life and its milestones chronicled by public media. She retains a baby book, stuffed full of newspaper clippings: “Governor Signs HSB 4579; Every Swimming Pool in California to Be Drained Before Baby Dunn Is Old Enough to Take Swimming Lessons”; “Berkeley Hydrologists: Without Evacs Baby Dunn Will Die of Thirst by 24” (GFC, 11). As the ‘fame’ of its title would suggest, the novel is preoccupied with the cult of celebrity, itself a form of self-destructiveness often wilfully sought out. The hardback cover resembles a peach melba, metallic pinks and white leaking over a desert-yellow background, invoking the pastel palettes favoured by Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan in the early 2000s. (Tellingly, its lead endorsement is a quotation from Vanity Fair). Though Watkins depicts a canyon bereft of celebrity residents, this “trashy” aesthetic nonetheless gestures towards the car-crash lifestyle that often accompanies certain brands of live-fast-die-young fame.

Like the Laurel Canyon, the Amargosa also spits out new forms of life. If our own species has struggled to adjust, then animals in Watkins’s novel appear more amenable to life in the scorched world. Midway through the novel there is an interpolated bestiary, a compendium of the Dune Sea’s flora and fauna replete with illustrations: a bioluminescent bat, the Mojave ‘Ghost Crab’, a spiny land eel, a carnivorous turtle that has evolved to walk on long legs resembling stilts. The government have led the public to believe no life exists in this “wasteland” so that it can be “nuked” without qualm, Levi begs to differ. For Luz this revelation – that there are animals where they shouldn’t be – marks a source of hope. She carries the primer around with her, reading to Ig from it like a surreal bible – evidence of weird, wonderful life. Luz’s devotion recalls the novel’s opening and her unfulfilled ‘yearn[ing] for menagerie’:

Where were the wild things seeking refuge from the scorched hills? […] Instead: scorpions coming up through the drains, a pair of mummified frogs in the waterless fountain, a coyote carcass going wicker in the ravine. And sure, a scorpion had a certain wisdom, but she yearned for fauna more charismatic. “It’s thinking like that that got us into this,” Ray said, correct (GFC, 7).

Ray’s commentary is astute: few people would shed a tear at the prospect of a future without such a scuttling, ‘repellant’ creature as the scorpion. But the imagined loneliness of a world without them is palpable here. Notably, the book begins with a ‘little live thing’ bursting onto the scene – the wild prairie dog that Luz locks in the starlet’s library. Luz’s exhilaration during this episode intimates some room for optimism in the apocalypse. Perhaps a new vision of community, grounded in a quest to be ‘part’ of something outside oneself, or a broader desire for communion both across and within species. Yet, quickly, her excitement collapses into anxiety. Having welcomed the prairie dog, she begins to fear it might be rabid. Her willingness to have Ray dispatch with the animal suggests that Watkins’s characters are, in fact, less concerned with the conservation of ‘wild things’ than with safeguarding themselves [9].

Despite its commitment to a post-humanist landscape, Gold Fame Citrus seems ultimately to offer us a humanist vision of apocalypse. And while Watkins's book works beautifully as a novel of ideas, her characters often feel tediously out of step with their circumstances. The plot can feel faltering on occasion. As Emily St. John Mandel puts it in the New York Times: ‘The work suffers occasionally from a condition fairly common to apocalyptic novels, which might be described as the “now what?” problem’ [10]. So, too, does Watkins's prose which, though wonderful at times, is also overworked, or try-hard in places (can a dune, for example, really be ‘dreadful’ with moonlight?). These linguistic flourishes, as well as its formal playfulness, are perhaps part of its charm, adding to the broader disorientation of reading the world's end. While some of these digressions I found myself wanting to ‘get through’, others work to haunting effect. In one stand-alone section, the narrator describes a desert monument, constructed as a sinister hazard-warning for generations to come:

The Landscape of Thorns was erected atop Yucca Mountain to frighten our distant and curious descendants on a primal level. It is an assembly of multilingual stone message kiosks and concrete spikes jutting from the mountain, skewering the sky…. Our young people… made rubbings from the message kiosks there… The rubbings say, This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing of value is here. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us (GFC, 220).

More terrifying still this is based on a real project, backed by the Trump administration [11] .The abject horror of such a prospect, however, is offset by the narcissism of protagonists who seem consistently absorbed with more pedestrian concerns. Critics have praised Watkins for the fact that her characters undergo no redemptive arc, that they end just as fucked up as at they were at the beginning. Certainly, she does not subscribe to a conformist restitution narrative; the end of the world is not a case for new beginnings here. In this sense, the novel marks a departure from the Roland Emmerich fantasy of the post-apocalyptic world “cleansed” and primed for rejuvenation, or the Spielberg disaster-logic of a bad patriarch becoming good [12]. Gratingly though, the same heteronormative, patriarchal dynamics one might expect of a less conceptually interesting text persist: the love triangle that dominates Book Two, alongside Luz’s guilt over her past sexual betrayal, make it feel almost soapy at times. She worries frequently too about her attractiveness, particularly her attractiveness to men – her 'fat Chicana ass', her thin top lip, her filthy hair. Perhaps it’s wishful thinking to hope that I would be hung up on loftier things in the apocalypse (certainly my browser history, with its tally of eBay visits and skincare vlogs, would suggest otherwise). But I’m unsure that bushy brows, or my boyfriend’s enjoyment of my emaciated breasts, is what would keep me awake at night in a future where my primary liquid intake consisted of bottles of expired cola.

In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Watkins expressed her irritation with the ‘traditional’ genre of dystopian fiction, suggesting that all too often:

It’s just one note. It’s just: it’s dire. We’re plod, plod, plodding along, one foot in front of the other, and the ash is grey – and it’s just the same emotional key struck again and again and again. And I wondered: how come nobody’s ever having sex in the apocalypse? Or telling jokes? [13]

I’m all for having sex in the apocalypse. But surely sex in the apocalypse (and in a world where infertility is rife) ought to be darker, messier and decidedly queerer than this? Instead, the queerest it gets is when Luz submits to an unconvincing tantric partnership with two other women – something she does mostly unwillingly – in an effort to impress the gruff, messianic figure with whom she has fallen “in love”. [14] Perhaps I was expecting something closer to the monstrous, playful sexuality that abides in the work of Angela Carter or Leonora Carrington. At the very least, I hoped that abusive men (or, indeed, ‘benevolent’ men who infantilise women with terms of endearment like ‘baby girl’) might have become extinct. Instead, women still bear the scars of men’s desire – one character in particular, Dallas, does so visibly. Far from anarchic or carnivalesque, sex in Watkins’s apocalypse doesn’t look like all that much fun.

Perhaps one cause of the enduring “brokenness” of its characters, Gold Fame Citrus subscribes to a brand of narrative determinism that dooms us to repeat our mistakes, whether personal or ecological. This transpires most strongly in the novel’s sustained focus on motherhood, together with Ray and Luz's struggle to preserve the figure of the quasi-nuclear family. In this way, the novel appears to harbour a myth of reproductive futurism, wherein survivalism is actually about fighting for our children, not ourselves. [15] It takes the discovery of a child to break through the inertia of Laurel Canyon; notably, it is only once this dream has collapsed, itself becoming unsustainable, that the novel (along with Luz and Ray’s journey) can end. In turn, like Luz before her, Ig is co-opted by a new Manson-esque “family” as a PR object – destined to become the shining face of the campaign to save the Amargosa Sea. In a future plagued by sterility a child is, by its very nature, given over to symbolism. Perhaps this reproductive cliché is unavoidable in dystopian fiction. In his book Liquid Love, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman argues that in our anxious, unsettled times even children have become ‘objects of emotional consumption’, commodities over which we deliberate long and hard before deciding whether or not to ‘invest’ [16]. The act of family-making thus entails a kind of risk assessment; as it transpires, the cost of such attachment proves too great for Luz to bear.

Like love or desire, natural disaster exposes our ineluctable vulnerability to external forces, whether the material impacts nature, or the whims of other. This fact was showcased only recently. Just a few months ago in January 2018, wildfires raged across California’s forests, decimating over 281,900 acres and forcing some 230,000 to evacuate their homes. The chronic drought afflicting the state seems to indicate that, more likely than not, this will only become a broader pattern of events in the future. The fires have also been shown to have long-term negative health impacts particularly for pregnant women, children, the elderly and those of lower socioeconomic status – all of whom have a greater propensity towards asthma, and other respiratory diseases. For humans then, the dystopia Watkins envisions seems already on the cusp of unfolding. And yet, despite the dryness, the desert also teems with life. Ojai Valley, California, originally settled by the Chumash tribe, lies a couple of hours away from L.A. An uncommonly fertile region, wildflowers, olives, apricots, oranges, almonds, as well as “pixie” tangerines all thrive there [17]. Though touched by the fires, this April the valley will witness a rare botanical event: “fire followers”, a particular kind of seed that is activated by exposure to flames [18]. Where most plants can take years to grow after burning, these are germinated only ‘when stimulated by intense heat’: ‘“[Flowers like] cacomite and mariposa lily have co-evolved with fire for millions of years. They’re impossible to start from seed — you literally have to set it on fire, or put it in proximity to smoke, to activate the seed”’. [19] In this parched landscape, it may be the task of the nonhuman to flourish.

Footnotes

[1] See Lisa Cholodenko’s 2002 film, Laurel Canyon.

[2] Less well-known are the 1981 ‘Four on the Floor Murders’, in which three members and one associate of the “Wonderland Gang” drug-ring died a few doors down from the home of then-California Governor, Jerry Brown.

[3] Joan Didion, The White Album (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), p. 15.

[4] See Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts (London: Vintage, 2016).

[5] Didion, p. 59.

[6] See Wikipedia for a fascinating (and more thorough) exposition of these events: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Water_Wars>

[7] A second diversion in 1941 re-routed water away from outlying farmlands and away from the Mono Lake, forcing its ecosystem (integral to sustaining the patterns of migratory birds) into a state of total depletion.

[8] Glenn Albrecht et. al, ‘Sostalgia: the distress caused by environmental change’, Australasian Psychiatry, 15 (2007), 95–98 (p. 95).

[9] Later, the trustworthiness of the bestiary and its “neo-fauna” are called into question by the fact of Levi's duplicity and psychosis. Though it is inferred that it was probably a fabrication, this remains unresolved at the novel's close.

[10] Emily St. John Mandel, ‘“Gold Fame Citrus”, by Claire Vaye Watkins’, New York Times, 2 October 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/books/review/gold-fame-citrus-by-claire-vaye-watkins.html> [Accessed 27 March 2018].

[11] For more on the Yucca Mountain revival see: <http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-stranded-nuclear-waste-20170702-htmlstory.html> and <https://knpr.org/knpr/2018-03/yucca-mountain-legislative-action-budget-request-expected-soon>

[12] See Slavoj Zizek, ‘The Family Myth of Ideology', in In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), p. 55.

[13] Alex Clark, ‘Claire Vaye Watkins: "How come nobody’s ever having sex in the apocalypse?"’, The Guardian, 31 January 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/31/claire-vaye-watkins-gold-fame-citrus> [Accessed 25 March 2018].

[14] Levi’s own interest in female pleasure is apparently so lacking that we are – in an offhand detail – he has never once performed oral sex during the length of his affair with Luz.

[15] See Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

[16] See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003).

[17] Alex Schechter, '"Fire followers" to bloom in California after deadly wildfires', 27 March 2018 <https://www.aol.com/article/weather/2018/03/27/fire-followers-to-bloom-in-california-after-deadly-wildfires/23396358/> [Accessed 5 April 2018].

[18] Schechter, '"Fire followers"'.

[19] Schechter, '"Fire followers"'.

Bibliography

Albrecht, Glenn et. al, ‘Sostalgia: the distress caused by environmental change’, Australasian Psychiatry, 15 (2007), 95–98.

Bauman, Zygmunt, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003)

Clark, Alex, ‘Claire Vaye Watkins: "How come nobody’s ever having sex in the apocalypse?"’, The Guardian, 31 January 2016 <https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/31/claire-vaye-watkins-gold-fame-citrus>

Didion, Joan, The White Album (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009).

Schechter, Alex, '"Fire followers" to bloom in California after deadly wildfires', 27 March 2018 <https://www.aol.com/article/weather/2018/03/27/fire-followers-to-bloom-in-california-after-deadly-wildfires/23396358/>.

St. John Mandel, Emily, ‘"Gold Fame Citrus", by Claire Vaye Watkins’, New York Times, 2 October 2015 <https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/books/review/gold-fame-citrus-by-claire-vaye-watkins.html>.

Vaye Watkins, Claire, Gold Fame Citrus (London: Quercus, 2015).

Zizek, Slavoj, In Defence of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008).

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meadowsland · 7 years

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We Can’t Ignore the Health Impacts of Climate Change (Part 1)

Aedes aegypti mosquito, a carrier of the Zika virus / James Gathany / CDC

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) organized a three-day conference on climate and health. As the Trump administration took power, the conference was abruptly cancelled. So former Vice President Al Gore and his Climate Reality Project, former President Jimmy Carter, the American Public Health Association (APHA), environmental health expert Dr. Howard Frumkin, and others stepped in to fill the gap, putting on a one-day summit at the Carter Center in Atlanta last week. ASLA signed on as a member of the summit’s partnership circle, along with the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the U.S. Green Building Council. In Atlanta, Gore kicked off the conference by arguing that “too little attention is being paid to the health consequences of climate change.” And focusing on coming health impacts could be a more compelling way to persuade the public that more action is needed now. We couldn’t agree more.

“We are now using the open sky as a sewer,” Gore said. The billions of tons of carbon emissions spewed into the atmosphere have a warming effect equal to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day. If unabated, the warming effect of all of this pollution will not only lead to ecological catastrophe, but a “medical emergency.” If we continue on a “business as usual” scenario, which could eventually warm the planet by 8-12 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century, there will be dire implications for human health.

Gore and leading scientists discussed eight areas where climate change is expected to cause major human health impacts (due to time constraints, they left out discussing animal and plant health). Here below are the first four impacts; part 2 will have the rest:

Infectious Diseases: “Tropical diseases are on the move. With air travel, they can spread more easily, but with climate change, there are new areas where diseases can become endemic.” As regions warm and become more humid, diseases like Zika, Chikungunya, West Nile, Dengue Fever, malaria, and others spread by mosquitoes, can take root. Many regions not currently affected by these diseases — places thought to be north of the “mosquito line” — should worry and become better prepared. Also, average global humidity is 4-5 percent higher than 30 years ago, and those numbers are only expected to increase. With higher humidity and heat, mosquitoes increase their reproductive and metabolic rates, which means there are more mosquitoes biting more.

In India, “there were 39 million cases of Dengue fever per year.” Last year, a park in Tokyo was shut down due a Dengue Fever outbreak. And in central China, “malaria has re-emerged” for the first time in ages.

The spread of the Zika virus in the U.S,, which the CDC considers a health emergency, has already affected Puerto Rico, Miami-Dade county, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. And many scientists, Gore said, “suspect it’s now spreading up and down the Gulf Coast.” For most people, Zika causes relatively mild symptoms, such as a rash, fever, joint pain, and eye aches, for about a week and then clears up. For pregnant women, there are serious implications — the virus can cause miscarriages or fetal microcephaly and other birth defects.

Ticks, which are existing vectors for disease transmission, are also moving north. “Virtually 100 percent of Canada will be within tick range in a few decades.” And we’ll also see new species — like snails — become vectors for transmissions.

Moving onto to other worrying scenarios, Gore said “runoff from increased flooding or extreme precipitation events will damage our water supplies.” With increased temperatures and storms, we will see the spread of cholera and other water-borne diseases. According to Dr. Glenn Morris, University of Florida, who conducts research on emerging infectious diseases, after Hurricane Sandy hit Haiti, some 50 percent of the water supply was contaminated by cholera.

Vibrio aquatic pathogens, which infect shorelines and also make oysters and other shellfish extremely dangerous to eat, are also spreading. Morris, said “vibrios are extremely temperature sensitive and every one degree temperature increase can encourage their spread.” Already, the number of cases in the north Atlantic is increasing.

Morris said even slight temperature increases can increase disease transmission. “Climate change opens up new ecological niches for pathogens. These are the unexpected consequences when people play with the environment.”

Heat Stress: While flooding from storms and heavy rains is the extreme weather event that kills the most number of people worldwide, heat stress is the biggest killer in the United States, according to Gore. Mortality rates increase by 4 percent during heat waves, which are more dangerous for the elderly, children, athletes, outdoor workers, socially-isolated people, urban dwellers, the homeless, the poor, and communities of color.

For the past 17 years, the planet has just been getting warmer and warmer. Dr. Kim Knowlton, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, said 2016 was the hottest year on record, beating 2015, which at that time was the hottest year on record. Currently, New York City has about 670-1,300 heat deaths per year, with 65,000 heat emergencies. Dr. Jonathan Patz, University of Wisconsin, said New York City can expect triple the number of extreme heat days (up to 39 days) by 2045. Correspondingly, Dr. Knowlton anticipates heat deaths to also triple.

Heatwave in New York City / NY Daily News

More broadly, higher temperatures mean reduced productivity. Outdoor workers experiencing heat stress can’t work. She said with higher temperatures, the “U.S. could see a reduction in economic output of $2 trillion; by 2100, a 20 percent drop in GDP from extreme heat.”

Many places are reaching all time highs, too, Gore explained. India hit an all-time high of 123 Fahrenheit last summer, and Sydney recently reached 117 Fahrenheit. In Iran, a city hit 165 Fahrenheit, with the heat index, in 2015. What makes this all worse: “night-time temperatures are also increasing, so there is no relief.”

Gore said in these conditions “no human can be outside for more than a few hours.” The projections show that vast swathes of the Middle East and North Africa are on track to reach some of these temperatures on a regular basis. “Areas of the planet could no longer be habitable. They could become beyond the limit of human survival. Mecca and Medina are in this zone.”

Dr. Knowlton said it’s time to take into consideration the health impacts of the world’s energy choices. Moving to renewable energies now may still result in a 3-4 degree planetary temperature increase, which will be “manageable,” while a 10-15 degree increase, under current fossil fuel-driven scenarios, would be “catastrophic.”

Air Pollution: Some 6.5 million people die each year prematurely from air pollution, reports the International Energy Agency. Carbon dioxide and related co-pollutants, otherwise grouped together as small particulate matter, found in vehicle exhaust and power plant emissions are behind these deaths.

Because of air pollution, the life expectancy of those living in northern China has been cut by 5.5 years. In Henan province, it’s estimated that air pollution takes the lives of 4,000 people a day. Pollution in Beijing, China’s capital city, has reached near “unlivable levels.” It’s not just China experiencing deadly air pollution though. New studies show that 99.5 percent of Indians breathe unhealthy air, as do 94 percent of Nigerians. According to one analysis, Tehran, the capital of Iran, was rated as having the world’s worst air.

Tehran air pollution / Green Prophet

Some sources of energy are dirtier than others. For example, deaths from coal-related pollution are higher than pollution from other sources. Gore said “coal creates $216 billion in health costs per year.” (Furthermore, coal burning is heavily damaging in other ways. Mercury, which is a co-pollutant that comes out of coal, has tripled in the world’s oceans. Some 16 percent of China’s cropland is also contaminated with it).

Dr. Patrick Kinney, Boston University, said “air pollution should be at the center of the discussion on health and climate.” Warmer temperatures make smog worse, as they increase the negative impacts of ozone and strong oxidant gases. Kinney also said areas impacted by wildfire, which are expected to double with climate change, will also increase harmful smoke inhalation.

Allergens: Another form of natural air pollution that will get worse: pollen, which is expected to triple in many areas by 2040. In areas with Ragweed, there will be an increase in pollen load by 320 percent by 2100.

Ragweed pollen / NJ.com

Kinney said that in New York City, “pollen season is now coming earlier. That’s bad news for people with asthma and allergies.”

from The Dirt https://dirt.asla.org/2017/02/22/we-cant-ignore-the-health-impacts-of-climate-change-part-1/

#The Dirt

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