Converging Crises in 2020

We've known for a long time that climate change was going cause all sorts of crises – fires, floods, famine, and disease being the most prominent. People tend to think of these as something that will happen in the future and as one-off events. But climate change is a crisis multiplier. Bad things happen on top of other bad things and then cause more bad things to happen. 

As this article in Rolling Stone points out, 2020 is the year of converging crises. 

While the fires rage and the seas swell, so too does an unprecedented pandemic that’s killed more than 200,000 people in the United States and has now even reached the Oval Office. The nation is also embroiled in its most consequential presidential election — especially when you take the climate into consideration — in its history. And then there’s widespread civil unrest in uprisings over America’s chronic and unreckoned racial crisis up against rising white nationalism and unchecked police terrorism. 

That’s how you get an unprecedented wildfire season with a shortage of firefighters because so many of the prison firefighters we’d come to rely on have fallen victim to the pandemic because of prison conditions. And it’s how you get immigrant detainees  suffering in unbearable heat with no water or power in the wake of a Category 4 hurricane, or white nationalist militias setting up checkpoints in the midst of wildfire-induced chaos. Everywhere you look there’s some calamity wrapped in a tragedy inside an injustice — like nesting dolls. 

We’re used to thinking about mass incarceration or climate change or public health or reproductive rights or immigration as singular issues. That’s why, for example, when the pandemic kicked off in the United States in earnest, there was a pernicious drop in climate coverage. As I and others pitched stories about the climate crisis, we were told, again and again, that “it wasn’t the time.” And now we’re out of time.

We live today in the age of crisis conglomeration. It is no longer useful or honest or even smart to look at any of them through a single lens. Not even the ones that have become so endemic we don’t talk about them as crises, but as systems — like mass incarceration. Or the ones we’ve tucked neatly out of our line of sight, like immigration detention, which is a refugee crisis by another name. But dealing with one crisis at a time is over. Myopia is canceled. It is a luxury, and illusion, we can no longer afford. We are either looking at all of it, or we’re looking at none of it.