Post by John Michael
As a traveler, I often find myself engaged in small talk, and no topic is more frequently the subject of conversation between myself and those I meet on the road than the weather. Yesterday I was riding in a truck up the side of one of the three volcanoes that surround the Ecuadorian city of Otavalo, which is located within the country’s northern highlands. I began to speak to my driver about the rash of tornadoes that had just ravaged the American South. He remarked that it was a shame so many people had died, and then he went on to tell me something that I found very interesting.
“It never used to rain this much in Ecuador,” he admitted. “Sure, it would rain every now and then, but never every day like it does now.” He gestured toward the overhanging gray clouds and at the rain that was spattering his windshield. “Before, we would hear about things like what happened in your country, and they were just things that happened in other countries. But now, with these rains, people are dying here too.”
“People have died because of the rains?” I asked.
“Yes,” he nodded, momentarily turning from the road to look me in the eyes. “Thirteen people have died recently from floods and landslides.” He looked back at the road. “And it’s worse, because now, with all of this rain, the crops are beginning to rot before they can be harvested.”
I stared out the window at the corn-covered hills that we passed.
“We used to be so happy,” he continued, “because Ecuador was a paradise, but now things are changing.”
Five minutes after he had said these words, the rain turned to hail, and we had to pull the truck to the side of the road and wait until the storm had calmed before continuing on our journey.
The day before I had crossed the border from Colombia to Ecuador at the Colombian city of Ipiales. Located within a narrow valley in the Andes, this "city of green clouds" is about fifteen minutes away from the frontier by car. There a border station perches above the noisy river Carchi, which rushes through a steep ravine that marks the edge of Colombia within this valley.
I arrived in Ipiales in the early morning, around 4 AM, and stepped off the bus to find the air bitterly cold. I quickly hired a taxi, and my driver was kind enough to offer me a cup of aromatico, the local name for herbal tea, which I drank while he drove me to the border.
“How about this cold,” he said.
“It’s pretty extreme,” I replied, “but I like it because it wakes me up.”
He nodded sagely.
“You have to be careful with a cold this severe," he warned, "because the second that you start to feel warm again, you’ll fall right back to sleep.”
We both laughed.
“It never used to be so chilly here," he admitted. "It’s only recently, in the past few years, that we’ve experienced temperatures like this.”
He looked directly in the rearview mirror so he could see into my eyes.
“Do you think it has to do with climate change?” he asked.
I made a face and shrugged.
“I don’t know,” I replied, and then added, “maybe.”
The near coincidence of these two conversations has caused me to recall the other times that I've heard locals in South America discussing climate change and ecosystem decline.
About three months ago, in Taganga, a seaside town just outside of Santa Marta, a friend of mine asked a hostel owner about a coral reef that he had visited a few years before, where, according to him, the coral formations “were as big as trees.”
“They’re not there anymore," the hostel owner, herself an avid scuba diver, sadly replied. "That whole reef has been bleached.”
And two years earlier, in Bariloche, a resort city in the lake district of northern Patagonia, I was advised not to stay out too long without sunscreen and a hat, because the city was near the edge of a hole in the ozone layer, which made the sunlight in that area particularly intense.
In the US, we have a culture of climate change skepticism, and any proof of such change, even rigorously developed scientific data, is often the subject of intense scrutiny and merciless doubt. So I don’t expect the anecdotes that I’ve collected here to be viewed as reliable evidence that our planet's climate and ecosystems are deteriorating.
What I do want these vignettes to testify to is that human beings around the world frequently talk about climate change and ecosystem decline, and that accounts such as these are now a part of our daily lives. Climate change stories have become one of the many types of narrative that reveal who we are at this point in our history.
All over the world, and throughout human existence, when people were affected by great events, they composed stories to make sense of their experiences. Our grandparents talked about the Second World War, while our parents retold the accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement. For us, climate change may very well be the great story that we tell our children. What will your story be? How do you think it will end?