Feverish Earth is calling us to act

We once did something to heal the ozone layer, but what will we do about the planet getting warmer?

- Rethabile Masilo

It's always a great moment when one discovers a hitherto unfamiliar voice, the way I just recently did. "Soon the summer / Now the pleasant purgatory / of spring is over, / Soon the choking / Humidity in the city." So asserts the speaker in Liam Rector's poem, Soon the City.

And indeed, the northern hemisphere is heating up, gearing up for summer. Those of us who live “up” here are beginning to worry, just as we do when winter comes along and we have reason to believe that it is going to be unkind.

Spring and autumn may very well be the only seasons no one complains about. One is life forcing its way out of torpor, and the other is life knocking on torpor’s door. As I type these words, the city of Paris - where I'm writing from - has reached 24°C afternoons, a slow climb from one day to another. I'm starting to dread a heatwave that I feel is headed straight towards us.

Heat in a megapolis is like coldness in a rural village, where there’s no infrastructure to block the wind: both types can be unbearable, depending on where one is. I grew up in Qoaling in Maseru, Lesotho, and I still remember the deadening cold of Lesotho winters — even at some of the country’s lower altitudes. Qoaling sits at 1,775m. The lowest point in Lesotho is at 1,400m above sea level, hence the monikers the Mountain Kingdom and the Kingdom in the Sky.

Paris, by contrast, lies mostly around 35m above sea level, with Montmartre one of its picturesque hills rising to just 130m. But when cities in these northern hemisphere countries warm up, they really do heat up. And when they cool, they drive the mercury as low as it can go.

As is often the case, Robert Frost forever has a knack for coming up with just the words to either instruct us or stir our thoughts into action. His poem Nothing Gold Can Stay reminds us that “Nature's first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf’s a flower; / But only so an hour.”