Talk about an eye-grabbing title: I had to read this essay if for no other reason than to find out if I have to move!

Written by MartinEdic (yes, no space), the essay, “A Huge Part of the Country is No Longer Safe to Live In,” is good, and appropriately alarmist. This piece was published on June 25, 2023, on Medium.

He writes, “Huge areas of the US are rapidly becoming unlivable and rebuilding is no longer an option for many.” He is not wrong and he is in good company in this view.

He adds:

Someday we may learn the extent of the fake science and lying the fossil fuel companies have been flooding us with for decades, as they pursue never before seen profits.

Frankly, it is the crime of our lifetimes, and it did not have to happen. Legitimate scientists have been warning us that this crisis was imminent for those same decades and offering up solutions to help deal with it. But those solutions take more decades and we ignored them.

I’ll confess that the point made in this essay that I especially like is the attack on the extraction-fueled extreme wealthy. The indictments are clear and present already, if not as yet legal in nature. His message about what to do about it is less clear, even though he does cite examples of the sort of incremental changes individuals can make.

My argument is that the biggest action any of us can take is political, even if for many of us that means taking the time—and putting in the attention—to vote. Yes, the playing field is tiled by big money and clearly not in favor of the immense structural and economic changes we need to make, so now it may be me playing the optimist.

At any rate, the piece got me thinking, and that’s good, right?