Solnit: Summer Has Become a Climate Warzone
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- Rebecca Solnit estimates 20,000 people died in extreme heat across Europe earlier this year, and reports 600 homes burned in eastern Washington with firefighters dying on both continents.
- A conflagration west of Bordeaux, described as four times the size of Paris, triggered what The New Yorker called France's largest peacetime evacuation: 220,000 people.
- Solnit details how summers have hardened even in places long accustomed to heat — Phoenix residents now suffer severe burns from falling on superheated asphalt, and New Mexico's Ruidoso has been repeatedly battered by flood and fire.
- Citing Bill McKibben's 2011 book Eaarth, Solnit frames the shift as humanity abandoning the gentle, stable climate of the last 12,000 years for a more perilous planet.
- Solnit notes summer tourism is becoming hazardous from Japan to Spain and questions whether travelers will shift peak vacations to spring and fall, and whether schools will move holidays indoors.
- The column closes by casting the climate movement as a peace movement against a self-declared war on nature, linking youth-led lawsuits against fossil fuel producers to the theft of summer's immaterial joys.
Why it matters: By naming summer's cultural loss — the freedoms and pleasures stripped by smoke-choked skies and lethal heat — alongside concrete tolls like 20,000 European deaths and France's 220,000-person evacuation, Solnit repositions climate advocacy from infrastructure defense to reclaiming the conditions of everyday life.
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