a quote from Barry Lopez, author of one of my favorite books about the Arctic, arctic Dreams:

It is my belief that a human imagination is shaped by the architecture it encounters at an early age. The visual landscape, of course, or the depth, elevation, and hues of a cityscape play a part here, as does the way sunlight everywhere etches lines to accentuate forms. But the way we imagine is also affected by streams of scent flowing faint or sharp in the larger ocean of air; by what the North American composer John Luther Adams calls the sonic landscape; and, say, by an awareness of how temperature and humidity rise and fall in a place over a year.Over time I have come to think of these three qualities–paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place–as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.

I’ll continue my trend of bringing my outside conversations into this realm. It was my brother I was talking to this time, and one of the interesting things he brought up was the fact that, “everyone agrees that if/when the [sh*t] hits the fan, the poorest countries will feel the impact first and worst… but nobody’s trying to fix that.”
He is obviously not the first person to bring this up, but I think this is an issue that isn’t discussed enough, and I can’t overstate its importance. Especially on a moral level, I think the dynamics of this are crucial given that it is the wealthiest countries, and the U.S. in particular, who by far contribute the most to carbon emissions. It is not just the wealth of a nation that matters though - just as with natural disasters, it is the poor across the board who will bear the brunt of a changing climate.