When I was in the fourth grade, my science teacher began a lesson on the biosphere with an example that made a lasting impression on me. She set a glass terrarium on the table at the front of the class. The glass rectangle held tufts of spongy green moss, gravel and sand and soil, and a water bowl disguised as a rock. If I had been a small lizard in the market for a new home, I could have done worse.
“This is the Earth,” she said. “Anything in here, we can use it, but then it’s gone. And anything we add, it’s going to be in here with us for a while.”
I’m paraphrasing, but I think I’m pretty close to the mark; that one lesson stuck with me more than anything else I learned in school. It’s a simple trick for reframing the way you look at the world — every action, whether adding or subtracting, makes some change to our environment. If we’re all just little fence lizards and five-lined skinks in a science teacher’s terrarium, I want to be one of the good guys.
By the time I was in fifth grade, I lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where my mother still lives today. She texted me last week, ecstatic that it was raining. She used three exclamation points, and excess punctuation aside, she had reason to feel relieved. At the time, there were 13 major fires in the area.
Right now the Pacific Northwest is experiencing a “once-in-a-millennium,” “record-crushing” heat wave, to quote a few headlines. Washington State DOT’s Twitter has posted videos of pavement buckling in the heat. The West is a tinderbox, and Independence Day — with all its sparky celebrations — is right around the corner. Our little terrarium is awfully hot these days, on track to get hotter by the year, and its corners are experiencing weather patterns for which they’re woefully unprepared.
To a Memphian, I’m sure it seems silly to watch others panic when faced with the kinds of temperatures we see every summer, but I would remind anyone laughing of two things: First, remember last February, when a freak cold front shut us down for a week? “We don’t have the infrastructure,” you probably explained to your Northern friends and family. “Temperatures don’t fall so far or so fast here, and we certainly don’t get this much ice in a week.” Washingtonians are as equipped to handle this heat wave as we were ready for ice and cold. Climate change is wrecking typical weather patterns, and the different regional infrastructure we have set up to prepare us for the usual weather extremes won’t be enough.
Thing number two is that it can always get hotter. You think you can handle the heat, my fellow Memphians? Oh, you sweet summer child, wait until you’ve seen 110-degree temperatures as the weekly average. Trust me, a former resident of America’s furnace, also known as Phoenix, Arizona, when I say we aren’t ready for that. Flying into Phoenix, an airplane passenger with a window seat can’t help but notice the number of swimming pools and covered carports laid out below. The houses are constructed differently, too, all pale white stucco, crouched close to the ground, and nary a grass lawn in sight. I vividly remember the many public service announcements about avoiding water waste or heat stroke. I don’t think I ever saw a house with an attic or a single window unit; whereas, I now live in the converted attic of a Midtown home and am currently listening to the gentle hum of a small window air-conditioning unit.
Now imagine Phoenix temperatures with Memphis humidity. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Southern heat.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, introduced last Thursday, cut costs by doing away with many of President Biden’s more ambitious environmental goals. The newest version of the bill still allocates funding for public transit, electric buses, and charging stations for electric vehicles, but much has been left out. Gone are the funds earmarked to help create a national standard of clean energy. Of course, this bipartisan version of the infrastructure bill might not pass, but, whether in the infrastructure bill or elsewhere, we must make a priority of combatting and preparing for climate change.
It’s our terrarium, after all. It’s up to us to make sure it’s the kind of place we want to call home.
