The Climate Crisis Isn’t Coming, It’s Already Here

It’s getting hard these days to escape the signs of apocalypse. But it won’t be the pandemic (not this one, anyway) that spells our doom. It’ll be the climate crises, a disaster that’s not merely on its way—it’s already here. Rosecrans Baldwin embeds with the government agents and the doomsday experts preparing now for the plagues, and the panics, and the fast-approaching day when life on our warming planet finally falls apart.
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Photograph by Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

If you’ve felt something weird lately, regarding the speed of time, hear me out. If you feel like you’re “having a week” every week. If the days feel both fast and long. If your mindset feels shrunk. If the future no longer feels wide open; if the future feels confined to walking distance. If your parents turn defensive during a teleconference, or you get defensive around your kids. If you become crazed with blame. If you worry you’ll never take that trip to France. If you alternate between high-function grappling and a fog of attentional fatigue, what I've taken to calling “apocalypse brain,” with symptoms that include weariness, interiority, and a desire to drain the liquor cabinet. If you’re thinking about getting pregnant. If you’re thinking about never getting pregnant. Simply, if you can’t shake a sense that this, all of this, will soon change fundamentally, or—fuck—is changing fundamentally, and that history, geologic time, is moving a little differently at present, even crumbling in on itself.

Well, you’re right.

The whole world is undergoing a pandemic, but there was already another global catastrophe underway—the climate crisis—and for many of us, the anxiety feels similar. Sleeplessness. Sadness. Despair. And still, some months from now, COVID-19 will become yet another disease we’ve learned to deal with. The economy will begin to rebuild. You’ll no longer feel like you’re living minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, and you will take that trip to France.

What kind of France, though? Because the climate disaster will still be here, and the causes are clear, and, assuming we carry on with business as usual (there’s little reason to think we won’t), the consequences will be dire: food shortages, epidemics, and more war. Surely you realize that large chunks of our planet may be uninhabitable within 80 years. Future generations will know Miami Beach as a reef that Canadian scuba divers visit on holiday, and southern Europe as a zone of drought. Did you ever ask yourself, between building electric cars and escaping to Mars, which is Elon Musk’s plan A, which is his plan B?

In Los Angeles, where I live with my wife, the end of the world feels extra real. Southern California knows disaster intimately. We have chronic human suffering in our faces from the sidewalk tent encampments, chronic anxiety in our minds from knowing the ground may cave in underneath us at any second (via earthquake). Wildfire, air pollution, mudslides. Coastal erosion, power outages, no rain. Life here includes the normal share of school and spree shootings that afflict our country, and the dearth of affordable housing and mental health services that have turned cities of the American West, especially the City of Angels, into veritable refugee camps. Life in Los Angeles means keeping an “apocalypse bag” in your trunk.

My point is, before COVID-19, daily life in Southern California already provided all manner of full-size upsetting things to feel hopeless and helpless about. Of course, there’s nothing like the shock and terror of plague to recalibrate attention—to make one wonder what comes next.

In the last book of the Christian Bible’s New Testament, the Book of Revelation, there’s a scroll in God’s right hand that’s sealed with seven seals. As the first four are cracked open—by a seven-eyed lamb, no less—a group of horsemen are summoned. War. Pestilence. Famine. Death. Harbingers of the Last Judgment, one of whom carries a sword, one wearing a crown. I mean, typical stuff in downtown L.A. these days, but the iconography is beginning to feel globally familiar, at least a sense of trembling under horses’ hooves. Perhaps all of us, newly attuned to life-altering calamity, might begin to notice the signs, and might fairly ask: What if the Four Horsemen are here? What do we do then?


War

Aram Sahakian, general manager of the City of Los Angeles’s Emergency Management Department, grew up in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War. Everyday existence was food rations, sandbag walls, living amid rubble without power. Falling bombs were normal; sometimes they hit his school. “It matures you. Very quickly,” Sahakian said, good-naturedly. “When I was 15, I felt like I was 30 years old.”

The climate crisis has been called “our third world war.” John Kerry’s new coalition to wage it is World War Zero. The martial language emphasizes the human culpability at play. “All these disasters we see around the world—typhoons, hurricanes—they’re not natural, they’re man-made,” Sahakian said. “Rising seas, rising temperatures, fires—there’s a debate that they should be called man-made disasters, not natural disasters.”

To anticipate all manner of threats, Sahakian’s department conducts large-scale drills at its headquarters in downtown L.A. For bunker fans, the building is beyond compare: blast-resistant exterior surfaces, emergency backup generators, reserve sewage-storage tanks, all poised on 40 “seismically isolated” bases so it can survive massive impact.

One winter morning, prior to the coronavirus, city and county brass gathered for a day of pretend Armageddon. The action took place in a Main Coordination Room, a high-tech bunker ballroom straight out of a disaster movie. (The department regularly turns down film requests from Hollywood, one employee said.) There was a Jumbotron, surrounded by displays. Sixteen pods were arrayed across the floor, each with half a dozen workstations clustered together and a wide-screen monitor that would rise majestically from concealment if trouble sounded. That morning, the monitors had risen. Employees from more than 30 agencies were taking part in an eight-hour simulation. I was stationed in the “Joint Information Center,” housed in a large conference room overlooking the Coordination Room. More than a dozen officers from different departments—police, fire, the airport, et al.—sat at long tables drinking coffee. No one but the simulators knew what was happening. Then a phone rang: It was Fox News—“Fox News” consisting in this case of one of the controllers running the simulation—wondering if the officials had heard something about a cyberattack. Soon an LAPD sergeant, playing his part, arrived with intelligence about two emergencies: A bus had exploded near City Hall and an explosion had taken place in a residential area. After that, news filtered in every 15 minutes or so. We learned that other incidents had occurred, in Boston and Washington. Downtown, over a thousand people were in need of evacuation. In South L.A., some 65 persons needed to be moved, including 35 disabled children, a police officer said.

One of the information officers raised her hand. “Can we say ‘children with disabilities’ instead?”

“This is the verbiage that was given to me,” the officer said sternly.

The crisis would turn out to be a multipronged siege that, in L.A., focused on the public transportation system—a cyberattack followed by a complex coordinated terrorist assault. Early in the day, one man, eyes glued to a screen, was monitoring social media. The simulators had actually mocked up a fake version of Twitter. “We’re getting people saying they’re on a bus with a terrorist,” he announced worriedly. He wanted to respond to the tweet and ask for details. At that point, none of us knew the scope of what was coming. How many terrorists? How many bombs? Were citizens armed and in the streets? “There’s no way to private message—we’ll just have to go public with it,” the guy muttered to himself.

A good reminder that, from here on out, the rough draft of history will be written on social media.

Before COVID-19, emergency preparedness was already a trend in Southern California, though it was often focused on the tangible, the touchable. Friends who live in Ojai, a small farming community/weekend resort outside L.A., reported passionate debates about the ethics of buying shotguns, for fear of looters. (In the early days of the coronavirus, gun stores around L.A. were slammed by first-time buyers.) Oprah recently put a monogrammable Prepster Emergency Backpack on her list of favorite things. Preppi, the bag’s maker, sent me its 3-Day Emergency Kit for review, “designed to fit perfectly on the bookshelf in your home or office.” All I could think was, in the event of an attack—some nukes from North Korea—wouldn’t it wind up buried under a mound of paperbacks? Sahakian told me it’s easy to fear things like missile strikes or tsunamis for their concreteness, but what about the threat we pose to one another when the effects of a disaster arrive downstream—not by “social distancing,” but by not knowing our neighbors’ names? “Some people think you buy that five-gallon bucket from Amazon that becomes a toilet seat and you’re prepared,” Sahakian said. “You’re not.” His best advice, for almost any kind of disaster: Get to know the people around you. Learn to care for them, if only out of self-interest. After all, community and social connectedness don’t come with two-day delivery. And when disaster strikes, the 911 switchboard will be inundated with calls, Sahakian said. Perhaps a childcare center somewhere is on fire with a dozen kids trapped inside—does anyone really think the city has the resources to prioritize your problems in that case? “When there’s a disaster, police and fire aren’t first responders, they’re second responders,” he said forcefully. “Make no mistake about that. First responders are a family member or a neighbor of yours.”

The United Nations warns that a “climate apartheid,” thanks to the privatization of basic services and unparalleled extreme weather, may soon divide the world between those who have the resources to adapt to higher temperatures and those who don’t. Solidarity is by no measure guaranteed, or even expected. In November, the Los Angeles Fire Department led an exercise to simulate an evacuation in our neighborhood, one of the canyons above Hollywood. Officers turned out in fire trucks. An emergency communications squad set up a large antenna. A helicopter flew overhead, though frankly it could’ve been paparazzi. The moment felt adequately warlike, and yet only two of my neighbors emerged to inspect the commotion, a pair of men who stood around for a couple of minutes with their arms crossed, talking awkwardly about cleaning out their garages. None of us knew the others’ names. I hiked down the evacuation route, imagining what form of human connection, what semblance of community, I might rely upon in the event of doom. Descending the path, under a bridge, I found a homeless encampment. On one tent, someone had painted, “DIE I HATE YOU.”

A few weeks ago, I caught Sahakian during a break between meetings related to the city’s response to the coronavirus. He was eating a protein bar. The Emergency Operations Center was in full swing. He assured me, confident as ever, that his neighbor-helping-neighbor advice was still relevant. “Knock on your neighbor’s door—do they need food? Great, get some food, leave it outside the door, let them know it’s there. Helping neighbors, yes, absolutely! Just maintain that six-foot distance.”


Pestilence

The Greater Los Angeles County Vector Control District serves just over a million homes, businesses, and weed-festered lots under its assignment to defend the citizenry from certain contagions. It deploys pickup trucks to explore underground storm drains; jeeps fitted with plow blades to attack concrete channels where storm drains dump trash; a squadron of “sentinel chickens,” flocks of fowl scattered around the county, who wait to be infected and warn us of invasion. Vector Control is like a Special Ops team that few know about, fighting daily to save Los Angeles from a deadly outbreak that seems imminent. “We’re kind of the tip of the spear,” said Mark Daniel, Vector Control’s director of operations.

Coronavirus is having its moment, but the climate crisis is also happening, accelerating, getting worse. And yet the response from governments and corporations is only in the past few months sounding urgent. The threat was always too distant, too vague; a recent meme on social media said, Climate change needs to hire coronavirus’s publicist. Actually, global warming has plenty to say when it comes to viruses. One consequence is a potential to revitalize diseases like bubonic plague. In China a recent outbreak of pneumonic plague was linked to climate change, thanks to a dramatic expansion of rodent populations (caused by drought, incidentally). There’s also concern about how diseases get transmitted.

As a proud “city of sanctuary,” Los Angeles welcomes humans of all sorts—and the same can now be said for mosquitoes, specifically a genus called Aedes. According to Timothy C. Winegard, author of The Mosquito: A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator, mosquitoes have killed more people than any other single cause of death in human history. Being a “vector,” as it’s known in the industry, Aedes can carry and transmit viral diseases like yellow fever and chikungunya. It’s responsible for outbreaks of dengue in Bangladesh and Zika in Brazil. (Small comfort: According to the World Health Organization, there's no information or evidence yet that the coronavirus can be transmitted by mosquitoes.) During a visit to Vector Control’s headquarters, I noticed mosquito sculptures displayed in cabinets like so many hunting trophies. “People are saying, ‘Wait a second, do I live in Florida now?’ ” Daniel said. What makes contemporary Los Angeles County scary for Vector Control is its anthropogeography, the human geography: so many fluctuating populations, with so many people on the go. Also because, season after season, its call logs keep growing.

Tall, with a goatee and a gravelly voice, Daniel closely resembles a slightly melancholy Jeff Bridges playing The Dude in The Big Lebowski. He explained that the Aedes albopictus (or Asian tiger mosquito) is believed to have arrived in L.A. around 2001, after a surge of interest in “lucky bamboo,” a popular indoor plant that was shipped in from overseas. As exports were packed into shipping containers, Aedes albopictus tagged along. These days, Daniel said, mosquitoes should generally be considered as indiscriminate as fire: biting everyone, rich or poor, and biting more people than ever.

For Vector Control, to protect means to patrol. A pair of Daniel’s inspectors, Mary Campbell and Yessenia Curiel, rolled out to visit homes. The first was in southeast L.A. Campbell rang the doorbell, wearing a shiny badge. She liked her job because it felt like a mission, helping people avert catastrophe. For example, she pointed out a tray of jars against the side of the house. Aedes mosquitoes will breed in something as small as a bottle cap, and the eggs can lie dormant for years, only to be reanimated when adequately warm and wet. Here each jar was full of water; inside were mosquito larvae. When nobody answered, Campbell and Curiel left behind a notice saying they’d be back. People not answering the door happens a lot, Campbell explained, particularly in neighborhoods where residents potentially fear a visit from immigration. In fact, Vector Control had recently changed their uniforms to look less like law enforcement, all because they needed to speak to people. An outbreak was only a matter of time.

The next house, five minutes away by car, was in worse shape. On a street of modest suburban homes, it looked like a garden center operated by gutter punks. The front yard was a jungle of fish tanks, plants in tires. Curiel picked up a watering can lined with mosquito eggs. The owner arrived, an older gentleman, and Campbell told him that neighbors up and down the block had complained about mosquitoes. “I see them once in a while,” he said defensively. Campbell and Curiel spent several minutes gently explaining the problem. He reluctantly let them see his backyard. It was a hoarder’s rain forest of discarded furniture and brimming boxes. Campbell grabbed a bucket off the ground and switched on her flashlight. Inside were hundreds of eggs. “It’s a nightmare scenario,” she whispered.

Daniel arrived at the house in a white pickup. He tipped down his sunglasses to absorb the scene. His investigators would return in the coming weeks to check on progress. If the owner didn’t comply, there could be fines of up to $1,000 a day. And still, countywide, the battle seemed uphill, if not impossible—a challenge requiring eradication, constant education. Yet Campbell and Curiel didn’t seem at all discouraged. “What sets my team apart is their willingness to show up,” Daniel said. “These people really want to help people. That makes it worth it.” He added a moment later, sounding like the melancholiest Dude ever, “It can be enough at the end of the day.”


Famine

In 2018, according to analysis by Care International, which assessed more than a million news stories online, climate change was found to have played a significant role in the majority of the top 10 most underreported humanitarian disasters, including starvation. For most North Americans, the victims of food crises are often faceless statistics; it's not every day that your local grocery store is purged of pasta and beans. Whereas in Los Angeles, in recent years, the look of starvation, of desperation, is seemingly on every corner and under every bridge—those people variously referred to by some as “homeless” or “facing homelessness” or “residence-challenged,” “unhoused” or those “temporarily lacking permanent housing for now,” or “bums,” or “vagrants,” or “the walking dead.” At a public meeting in our neighborhood, a man at the podium made a comment about a homeless person, referring to them as a “street person,” and a woman shouted from the back, “You mean ‘a wilderness person’!”

As of a 2019 homeless count, Los Angeles County—with nearly 60,000 people unhoused—is the face of homelessness in the United States. The tents are more noticeable than palm trees, more familiar than taco trucks. And then there are the unseen: people sleeping in their cars, in garages, in cheap motels, or by the river. However named, homeless people are those who have it worst. Who scavenge for food and sneak water from garden spigots. Who struggle daily with addiction, mental illness, and guys threatening to smash in their heads with baseball bats. Forget eco-anxiety—this is existence-anxiety. A Kaiser Health News analysis of recent medical-examiner data found that the life expectancy for a homeless woman in Los Angeles is 48.

At 5 a.m. one winter morning, I left our apartment and discovered a man huddled over a campfire he’d built on the sidewalk, burning our garbage to stay warm.

The homeless problem, also called the housing problem, is the city’s great catastrophe, coronavirus or no, and nowhere is it worse, is it wilder, than on Skid Row. East of Main, south of Third, west of Alameda, north of Seventh, Los Angeles’s Skid Row provides refuge to thousands of homeless people—people living outdoors, in mission or shelter beds, or in supportive housing. The modern history of Skid Row, a transient district since the late 1800s, is mostly one of tearing down: the demolition of boarding houses and low-cost hotels, the demolition of the hopes of those who might build affordable public housing. It also has a history, counterintuitively, of people fighting to “keep Skid Row scary,” to preserve Skid Row as a containment zone, a place concentrated with services and caseworkers. Indeed, a recent threat to the residents comes from a new generation of young people who don’t mind living nearby, their downtown existence excited by a little edge (a homeless woman muttering to herself), as long as it’s not too edgy, or too threatening to property values (a homeless man shitting on their doorstep).

Skid Row has different sections, separate communities. Some people are homesteaders, some are transient. The shift to Skid Row from surrounding blocks can be disorienting. One morning, a few months back, Dan Johnson, a former literacy instructor at the Midnight Mission, one of Skid Row’s oldest social-service organizations, walked me in at a medium pace, nodding to people he knew. Tall with a droopy mustache and sad eyes, Johnson had the look of an outlaw from a spaghetti Western. Asked if he ever got used to Skid Row, he nodded and shook his head, both yes and no. “I might be numb at this point,” he said. “I’ve spent so much time aggressively loving and advocating for Los Angeles, and also bitterly hating it. Really, really hating it.”

Some blocks looked more doomsday than others. A woman in a bra and underwear was slumped over a chair. Two men were passed out, one in the street, one on the sidewalk. A young man was smoking something off flakes of aluminum foil. And there were also many examples of people assisting others: residents helping one another move belongings; people sharing food, sharing a joint in the sunlight. There were shelters, soup kitchens, employment agencies, and a long line for two guys giving haircuts under a pop-up tent. On another visit, I walked around with Suzette Shaw, who’d previously been homeless herself. She high-fived and hugged residents who recognized her. Shaw, an advocate and activist, also an ambassador for the nonprofit initiative the United State of Women, emphasized that Skid Row is a living, breathing community, not a containment zone. “Rich white people come down here, look around, and ask, How the hell can people live like this?” she said. “I tell them, Just as people become conditioned to Beverly Hills, people become conditioned to this.” A few days before I turned up, while Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign was still active, Shaw showed Beto around the neighborhood. He later suggested in a press conference that Shaw, with her empathy and compassion, be appointed the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. “We have to talk about who the people are rather than pathologizing them,” Shaw said.

To paraphrase the historian William Deverell, life on Skid Row deals less with geologic or climatic time than with human time. Just as Los Angeles began to shut down for COVID-19, I spoke to Suitcase Joe, the pseudonym of a photographer popular on Instagram who’s been shooting around Skid Row for five years. He described a scene there of cluelessness: “I’m asking people, What do you guys think of the coronavirus? What are you doing to prepare for it? Street resident after street resident are like, What are you talking about? I haven’t heard about this.” What Suitcase Joe feared most was outbreak. Plenty of residents are older and sick; people live in close contact. “If it hits Skid Row, it’s going to obliterate it,” he said.

Since we spoke, there’d been a spike in coronavirus infections among L.A.’s homeless population. Sick people were being quarantined. The city and county were working to secure thousands of beds. Pre- and post-coronavirus, the homeless population showed humanity’s capability for resilience—and also its frailties. It’s the climate crisis in a nutshell—and not just because living on a sidewalk means your life can literally be swept away. The state’s shoddy treatment of its homeless citizens demonstrates our shortsightedness, our easy tolerance for others’ suffering, the complacency that follows saying things like It can’t get any worse.

It’s getting worse.


Death

A few months ago, a friend of mine died from cancer. He was 46 years old, four years older than I am. He left behind a grieving partner and two little kids. For weeks afterward I’d find myself full of anger, right at the brink of my skin, and also a large powerlessness, so much helplessness—exactly akin to my reaction to the climate crisis and the coronavirus, anytime my fatalism gets peeled away by a photograph of collapsing ice or obituary pages. Rage and grief. Grief and rage. I want to do something; there’s nothing I can do.

The impact on mental health from COVID-19 is no joke. The coronavirus came on fast, and its destabilizing effects have been profound. But what of the low-level dread many of us have been feeling for years about the climate? What of the accumulating, frog-boiling anxiety of environmental doom? A 2017 report by the American Psychological Association said that chronic fear and fatalism may be activated just by learning about climate change. In fact, a new concept, “solastalgia,” as documented by Ash Sanders in The Believer, has emerged to describe the link between environmental suffering and psychological suffering. “The fact that the word is gaining traction means we’re in deep shit,” Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher and the word’s inventor, told Sanders. “I want it removed from the English language as quickly as possible.” Reading that reminded me how, in April 2018, David Buckel, a lawyer in New York City, had set himself on fire in Prospect Park. “Most humans on the planet now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we are doing to ourselves,” his suicide note read. An additional note for the police said, “I apologize to you for the mess.”

Not all responses to such pain, of course, are destructive. One environmental reporter I know took up surfing to handle the distress of his job, to reconnect with nature. Another went vegan, if only to feel better about himself. “Before I started school striking I had no energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone,” Greta Thunberg wrote on Twitter last August. “I just sat alone at home, with an eating disorder. All of that is gone now, since I have found a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems shallow and meaningless to so many people.” When I first saw that tweet, I sensed a deep truth resounding: that doing nothing may be, for all intents and purposes, about as meaningful to this massive disaster as doing something—but doing something sure feels a lot less bad.

Since 2009, Thomas Coyne has trained people in survival techniques. Sort of a SoCal Bear Grylls, Coyne crisscrossed the Sierra Nevada for a week in 2010, living off thimbleberries, trout, and wild onions. In 2011 he trekked 135 miles from Death Valley to Mount Whitney with only a water filter, a sun hat, a tarp, a knife, and a piece of string. His clients include members of Special Operations, police officers, ordinary civilians. “Survival and preparedness is a cultural shift. It’s not the extremes anymore,” he told me. “It’s mainstream now.”

To prepare for Armageddon, or to at least feel a little more ready, a couple months ago I signed up for Coyne’s seminar in urban disaster readiness. The class was held on a Saturday morning. Lessons were planned around a “grid down” scenario: how to respond when standards like electricity and cellular networks are disabled. The lessons were largely metropolitan—how to charge your phone off the battery of an abandoned car, how to walk up to a skyscraper and siphon drinking water—but a lot was surprisingly wilderness-oriented. Because during a crisis, Coyne explained, when routine systems are disrupted, life gets wild, and survival is frequently based on improvisation.

And this would really be tested, he’d said, if I were to try his annual three-day survival class in the San Bernardino National Forest, where students went out carrying only a water bottle and a knife. You will leave with no food or water, and will consume only what is found, the materials said. Students will learn to overcome the unexpected. “We’re going to force you to problem-solve under stress so you can put that to use if you ever get in a real scenario,” Coyne said. “That way you don’t panic, you don’t think it’s hopeless.”

“You know, it’s not very common that people train under stress,” he added later. “Not at all.”

Which enables me to say that while it is also not very common to get your car stuck in snow on a December morning in Southern California, it can happen. A few weeks after the first class, at nearly 7,000 feet, about a two-hour drive east of Skid Row, the terrain was all white mountains and alpine forest. The forecast for the weekend looked grim: three days straight of rain and snow. When I arrived, other students, also stuck, were discussing what to do, until one of Coyne’s instructors, Adam Mayfield, hiked out of the woods: a tall, alarmingly handsome man with an ax and several knives hanging off his belt. “Who’s ready to suffer?” he said in a booming voice, then set about getting our cars properly parked.

To learn later that Mayfield, in addition to teaching survival skills, is a working Hollywood actor, a former star of All My Children, really only cemented the L.A.-ness of it all.

The plan described in our materials was succinct. Day 1 is an introduction to the critical skills you will use. Days 2–3 are in the field and students will receive no outside food or water. No sleeping bags or gear allowed. Our group, mostly in our 30s and 40s, included three engineers, a nurse, and a surgeon. Largely men, a few women, people who had flown in from Chicago, New York City, and Detroit. The general mood was buoyant dread. About 20 people had been expected, but only 13 showed—due to the weather conditions, Mayfield suspected. “You’re going to be really challenged this weekend,” he said. “Some of you might get dehydrated. Some of you may become mildly hypothermic. We’re trying to develop for you the closest thing we can to a true survival emergency.”

He added, “I love this.”

People don’t often talk about Los Angeles County as wild, and yet L.A. is the only metropolis in the United States split by a mountain range. “One associates New Age gauziness with California, but the flip side is that Californians are much more familiar with how violent nature can be,” Kit Rachlis, the former editor-in-chief of Los Angeles magazine and L.A. Weekly, told me. “On the one hand is the soft, beautiful Los Angeles light. On the other are the Santa Ana winds. We have forces of nature that change people’s moods—and bring fires. Crossing the street in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, or a bridge on the Seine in Paris, you just don’t feel that way.”

The first day’s tasks included building fires and learning how to “baton” wood—i.e., split logs with a knife. In the afternoon, we worked in pairs to build A-frame structures out of fallen branches—shelters we’d be sleeping in that night, albeit with sleeping bags. Then the clouds started pissing. My partner, a tech worker named Farshad, and I raced to complete our shelter, piling on a slurry of needles and branches, working by headlamps in the rain. Everyone was soaked and shivering. The temperature was in the 30s. “You can die in this kind of weather,” I heard one guy say to himself quietly. An hour later, he’d pulled the plug. “I mean, that’s a basic survival lesson, right?” he said, announcing that he was leaving. “Don’t make stupid mistakes?”

Awkward silence, then Mayfield walked him out to the road and helped him get his car unstuck.

Not much sleep that night. The roof of leaves was only 12 inches from our noses. Dirt kept falling in my mouth. Snow mixed in with the roofing materials melted on my face. It was seven hours of claustrophobic water torture.

Mostly I thought about whether I was making a stupid mistake.

Saturday it rained nonstop. Temperatures were in the upper 30s, low 40s. Two more people dropped out, deciding they were in over their heads. Our reduced band set out and spent the next two hours crossing snowy hills. Even in the rain and mist, the terrain was stunning. Mayfield, smoking cigarettes like a French mountain guide, pointed out survival hacks along the way: how to purify creek water; how the bark of a willow tree can be chewed for its salicin, a chemical with properties similar to aspirin. Before we left, he had shown us how to make a fire with found materials—a branch bent into a bow, a piece of cord, a small stick for a drill, and a flat piece of wood. With a couple of minutes of sawing, he suddenly had fire in his hands. It was astonishing to see, though it would be quite difficult to replicate given the conditions outside, he explained.

Eventually we reached a clearing along a ridgeline of oaks and spruce coated in fog. None of us knew where we were. Farshad and I, plus a guy named David, scoured the area, searching for branches to build a shelter to survive the night. After two hours we had a structure. After four hours, a roof and vestibule. By that point, without food or water, we were moving pretty slow. Our gloves, socks, and boots were soaked. The cold was inside and out. That night, as we settled side by side on wet dirt and leaves, deep shivers would start in my belly and ripple to my fingers. David occasionally crawled out to do push-ups in the mud; otherwise he lay huddled. Farshad kept saying under his breath, like a death rattle, Fuuuuuuuuuuck. Around 3 a.m., Farshad said he couldn’t feel his feet anymore. His breathing sounded raggedly shallow. “This is the coldest I’ve ever felt in my life,” he said and went out for a walk. When he got back, David worked him through some squats while I announced a new plan: We’d sandwich him with our bodies, and for all our sakes the next five hours would be mandatory spooning. And it worked. After a few minutes pressed together, heat radiated at the contact points. After an hour, Farshad’s breathing seemed to return to normal. By 6 a.m., we went out and did jumping jacks of joy. Others emerged from their hobbit dens and joined us. There would be more lessons throughout the day—how to build a stretcher for an injured party, how to signal for rescue—but all anyone could talk about was the thrill of surviving, of gaining the confidence to stick it out. Leaning on those around us, in the way that disaster demands.

Social distancing will keep you alive. Social solidarity will keep you alive in a world worth living in. When I spoke to Coyne recently, while he was cooped up at home in quarantine, he said his greatest worry about the coronavirus was what will happen to the most vulnerable among us, though he also saw many reasons for hope. “There are a lot of people doing a lot of good right now. There’s people handing out supplies to the elderly, there’s people volunteering to help exposed populations, not to mention all the health-care workers,” he said. “Anything like this always brings out your local heroes.” Spooning strangers, we decided, probably wasn’t the best solution, but was the motivation so wrong?

There is vast overlap between the climate crisis and the corona crisis, and the lessons are chilling. Science must be respected. Blowhards should be feared. At the same time, look what people can do—for themselves and for each other—when urgency takes hold. After the survival class, I drove back to the city with the windows open, chugging coffee, thinking over what I’d learned. It went something like this: We may be a shortsighted species when it comes to planetary survival, but the corollary is that many people, in clear and present danger, want to help one another. Also, apocalypse brain or not, I was more resilient than I knew, though it had little to do with being tough. Hardness is a sign of fear, whereas softness, being vulnerable in front of others, being the one to extend a hand first, feels incredibly empowering. To say the Horsemen are here, that nature is not a beneficent force, that humanity in aggregate is pretty rotten, but people individually are lovely—these were my beliefs before this story and still after. But somehow, now, I’m more at ease.

Rosecrans Baldwin is a frequent contributor to GQ. His next book, about the city-state of Los Angeles, is forthcoming from MCD x FSG (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2020 issue with the title “Prepare for the End: The Climate Crisis Isn't Coming, It's Already Here.”