Code Red

A bestselling US reporter on climate change says the planet’s future depends on WWII-like fear and alarm.

- Joanne Black

David Wallace-Wells, and perhaps only he, might have found a single glimmer of solace in Nelson’s recent fires.

To talk about climate change in terms of degrees of global warming (the Earth will be 4°C warmer by the end of the century, the United Nations says) apparently is too small a number to concern many of the public. On the other hand, talking about US$600 trillion in climate-change damage might be too large a number to be relatable.

But wildfire – its ferocity, its unpredictability and the sense of vulnerability it creates – is something that every human, and probably every animal, innately understands.

“Wildfire is not just horrible in the sense of a horror movie, but also feels immediate even if you don’t live somewhere that is vulnerable to it,” Wallace-Wells tells the Listener from his home in New York. “There is something about the way those stories unfold that makes you think your life, your community, your home could possibly be threatened. I think the intimacy and immediacy of that threat is really important to wake people up.”

Waking people up to the threat of climate change is Wallace-Wells’ cause. It never used to be. He has never considered himself an environmentalist. The 36-year-old is a journalist – deputy editor of New York magazine – and came to climate change initially by reading, then writing about the subject. The more he read, the more he understood and the more he understood, the more alarmed he became. The more alarmed he became, the more he felt that if he was tipping from journalism’s prized impartiality into advocacy, then it was justified because the stakes were so high and the threat so immense.

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