By common measures, Manjula Martin is not a hopeful person. “In the current discussion of climate change,” she said, “‘hope’ is often used as a shorthand for returning to normal, otherwise known as business as usual.”
The sentiment pervades the writer’s new memoir, “The Last Fire Season,” but it prompts an important question, which I brought up during a video chat with Martin in late December: Why would people who feel hopeless about climate change still be motivated to do anything about it?
On a ride into the nascent park in late November, just days before it was legally declared, Thomas Walschburger, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy in Colombia, explained why it was needed so urgently. Cattle rearing, the traditional livelihood of the region and one that was easier on its rivers and soils, was giving way to a new agricultural frontier. Fields of African oil palms, and white-trunked eucalyptus trees, were encroaching ever closer to the park’s boundaries.
The sandy, acidic, nutrient-poor soils of the llanos can support these commercial crops only when doused with fertilizers and calcium carbonate. But intensive agriculture compromises the water, and the ability to sustain life, in a key transition zone between the llanos and the Amazon. The hope is that by protecting this small puzzle piece of savanna, a whole lot more can be saved.
Having had so many of their body parts appropriated for the purposes of swearing, surely women should now be free to curse at will and at length. And, indeed, various studies over the past few years suggest thatwe do; the gap between men and women when it comes to words such as “fuck” has dramatically decreased. There is, after all, nothing like letting fly a volley of profanities and oaths when you drop a brick on your toe or when a talentless oaf gets the promotion you know should have been yours.