The New Yorker editor on Fragile Earth, a new collection of the magazine’s climate crisis writing, the continuing dangers of Trumpism – and seeing his family for the first time in a year
David Remnick has been the editor of the New Yorker since 1998. The Fragile Earth, a selection of the writing that has appeared in the magazine about climate change, is out now.
You say that as a young reporter you wrote quite a lot about dramatic weather events. Can you remember when those localised storms and fires and floods started to suggest something more apocalyptic?
When I was at the Washington Post, Len Downie, Ben Bradlee’s successor as editor, was obsessed with “weather stories” and played them big. And there was much high-minded, wise-guy joking about this, as if it were the height of ordinariness. But when I think back on it, Downie was right. Weather is what envelops and affects us all. And our decades-long heedlessness to climate change has done great damage to the world. So when we think about all of these unusual storms and fires, these are no longer “weather stories” – banalities, part of the nature of things – they aren’t merely that. They’re exacerbated by human behaviour over time and they are harbingers of worse.
from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3x77JBh
