The Joke That Wasn’t
For years, I had a go-to line whenever conversations turned to the climate crisis: “I don’t need to worry. I’ll probably be dead before the real collapse comes.” It was tongue-in-cheek, of course. But like many jokes, it hid something truer than I was ready to say out loud. It wasn’t that I didn’t care — it was that caring hurt. The scale of the problem made me feel irrelevant. So I laughed instead. Then the rivers dried up. In late 2022, the Mississippi River — that mighty artery of the continent — dropped so low that barge traffic stopped and drinking water systems strained. Memphis recorded the river at –10.81 feet , the lowest level ever measured. On the other side of the Atlantic, the Rhine became so shallow that cargo ships were stuck, paralyzing a key European trade route. People were literally walking across riverbeds that had carried ships for centuries. Suddenly, 2050 wasn’t some distant dystopia. It was now. And the joke wasn’t funny anymore. I started seein...