How Climate Change Is Like Alzheimer’s
In the New York Times Magazine’s recent “climate issue,” one of the first statistics listed tells us that almost 20 percent, or one-fifth, of the planet could become nearly uninhabitable by the year 2070. Today’s twenty-year-olds will be seventy-years-old, crowded into cities teeming with climate refugees; they may be climate refugees themselves. They will have to cope with drastic weather events, food shortages, and increasing political unrest.
Naturalist and “earth advocate” Susan Cerulean writes about the ecology of Florida, which is already seeing the effects of climate change in rising waters, increasingly deadly hurricanes, and loss of habitat.
In an interview on public radio, Cerulean said, “The climate is so perturbed now that people, especially the very poor, are losing their livelihoods, their homes and places. Think about the Louisiana coast and the North Carolina coast and Haiti after Hurricane Matthew — all those rivers filled with hurricane waters flooding out the poorest of the poor of society. We can get to feeling like the Earth is our enemy, when the truth is, it is the human relationship with the planet that is actually broken — the climate, coasts, refuges.”
In her latest book, I Have Been Assigned the Single Bird, Cerulean correlates the damage inflicted on our planet with the kind of damage that Alzheimer’s inflicts on the human brain. Bit by bit, we are losing planet much the same way she saw her father lose himself to the disease of Alzheimer’s.
According to the Alzheimer’s Association, “Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease, where dementia symptoms gradually worsen over a number of years. In its early stages, memory loss is mild, but with late-stage Alzheimer’s, individuals lose the ability to carry on a conversation and respond to their environment.”
Climate change is a similarly progressive disease. Cerulean describes the hard realities facing Florida’s ecosystems. One of the most heartbreaking scenes in her book is that of the plight of a fox squirrel trapped between a chain link fence and a four-lane highway, its forest home clear cut. “That rare squirrel…was doomed to bound along the roadside until it was crushed by a car.”
The situation is just as dire for her father as Alzheimer’s encroaches on his mind and old age saps the strength from his body. She describes her father’s struggle to adapt to his limitations: “Dad felt the currents of activity flowing around him in the room and understood that little of it had to do, in that moment, with him.”
I remember how my own mother slowly lost herself to the dementia which eventually killed her. Her mind was like an island incrementally submerged under water until nothing — not even her astounding musical talent — was left.
While it’s not a direct parallel, just as Alzheimer’s erases memories from the mind of its victims, climate change is also brutally erasing the world that humanity has known since its inception. A person with Alzheimer’s loses the ability to self-regulate. Our planet is also losing that ability.
“Sitting with Dad was like sitting near wild birds,” Cerulean says. “It was like meditation practice. And what was just outside Dad’s window was a rampant stand of [invasive] kudzu vine, which in the time we were there, climbed and smothered a small forest. Watching that, watching Dad lose his faculties to the tangles and plaques of dementia, it became clear that humans are doing the very same thing to the Earth. Smothering it, taking from it, bulldozing it. And the Earth, like my Dad, can’t survive that. We’ve simply got to stop.”
