CLIMATE APOCALYPSE CONTINUED
up to $1,000 a day. And still, countywide, the
battle seemed uphill, if not impossible—a chal-
lenge requiring eradication, constant educa-
tion. Yet Campbell and Curiel didn’t seem at
all discouraged. “What sets my team apart
is their willingness to show up,” Daniel said.
“These people really want to help people. That
makes it worth it.” He added a moment later,
sounding like the melancholiest Dude ever, “It
can be enough at the end of the day.”
Famine
IN 2018, according to analysis by Care
International, which assessed more than a
million news stories online, climate change
was found to have played a significant role in
the majority of the top 10 most underreported
humanitarian disasters, including starvation.
For most North Americans, the victims of food
crises are often faceless statistics, whereas in
Los Angeles, in 2020, the look of starvation, of
desperation, is seemingly on every corner and
under every bridge—those people variously
referred to by some as “homeless” or “facing
homelessness” or “residence-challenged,”
“unhoused” or those “temporarily lacking
permanent housing for now,” or “bums,” or
“vagrants,” or “the walking dead.” At a public
meeting in our neighborhood, a man at the
podium made a comment about a homeless
person, referring to them as a “street person,”
and a woman shouted from the back, “You
mean ‘a wilderness person’!”
As of a 2019 homeless count, Los Angeles
County—with nearly 60,000 people
unhoused—is the face of homelessness in the
United States. The city is dotted with tents—
encampments more noticeable than palm
trees, more familiar than taco trucks. Not to
mention the number of people sleeping in
their cars, in garages, in cheap motels, or by
the river. However named, homeless people
are those who have it worst. Who scavenge
for food and sneak water from garden spig-
ots. Who struggle daily with addiction, men-
tal illness, and guys threatening to smash
their heads in. Forget eco-anxiety—this is
existence-anxiety. A Kaiser Health News
analysis of recent medical-examiner data
found that the life expectancy for a homeless
woman in Los Angeles is 48.
At 5 a.m. one winter morning, I left our
apartment and discovered a man huddled
over a campfire he’d built on the sidewalk,
burning our garbage to stay warm.
The homeless problem, also called the hous-
ing problem, is the city’s great catastrophe,
and nowhere is it worse, is it wilder, than on
Skid Row. East of Main, south of Third, west of
Alameda, north of Seventh, Los Angeles’s Skid
Row provides refuge to thousands of homeless
people—people living outdoors, in mission or
shelter beds, or in supportive housing. The
modern history of Skid Row, a transient district
since the late 1800s, is mostly one of tearing
down: the demolition of boarding houses and
low-cost hotels, the demolition of the hopes of
those who might build a≠ordable public hous-
ing. It also has a history, counterintuitively, of
people fighting to “keep Skid Row scary,” to pre-
serve Skid Row as a containment zone, a place
concentrated with services and caseworkers.
Indeed, a recent threat to the residents comes
I am. He left behind a grieving partner and
two little kids. For weeks afterward I’d find
myself full of anger, right at the brink of my
skin, and at the same time a large powerless-
ness, so much helplessness—exactly akin to
my reaction to the climate crisis, anytime my
fatalism gets peeled away by a photograph of
collapsing ice. Rage and grief. Grief and rage. I
want to do something; there’s nothing I can do.
A 2017 report by the American Psychological
Association said that chronic fear and fatalism
may be activated just by learning about cli-
mate change. In fact, a new concept, “solastal-
gia,” as documented by Ash Sanders in The
Believer, has emerged to describe the link
between environmental su≠ering and psy-
chological su≠ering. “The fact that the word
is gaining traction means we’re in deep shit,”
Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philoso-
pher and the word’s inventor, told Sanders. “I
want it removed from the English language as
quickly as possible.” Reading that reminded
me how, in April 2018, David Buckel, a lawyer
in New York City, had set himself on fire in
Prospect Park. “Most humans on the planet
now breathe air made unhealthy by fossil
fuels, and many die early deaths as a result—
my early death by fossil fuel reflects what we
are doing to ourselves,” his suicide note read.
An additional note for the police said, “I apol-
ogize to you for the mess.”
Not all responses to such pain, of course,
are destructive. One environmental reporter
I know took up surfing to handle the distress
of his job, to reconnect with nature. Another
went vegan, if only to feel better about him-
self. “Before I started school striking I had no
energy, no friends and I didn’t speak to anyone,”
Greta Thunberg wrote on Twitter last August.
“I just sat alone at home, with an eating disor-
der. All of that is gone now, since I have found
a meaning, in a world that sometimes seems
shallow and meaningless to so many peo-
ple.” Seeing that tweet, I sensed a deep truth
resounding: that doing nothing may be, for all
intents and purposes, about as meaningful to
this massive disaster as doing something—but
doing something sure feels a lot less bad.
Since 2009, Thomas Coyne has trained
people in survival techniques. Sort of a SoCal
Bear Grylls, Coyne crisscrossed the Sierra
Nevada in 2010 for a week, living o≠ thim-
bleberries, trout, and wild onions. In 2011 he
trekked 135 miles from Death Valley to Mount
Whitney with only a water filter, a sun hat,
a tarp, a knife, and a piece of string. His cli-
ents include members of Special Operations,
police o∞cers, ordinary civilians. “Survival
and preparedness is a cultural shift. It’s not
the extremes anymore,” he told me. “It’s main-
stream now.”
To prepare for Armageddon, or to at least
feel a little more ready, I signed up for Coyne’s
seminar in urban disaster readiness. The class
was held on a Saturday morning in Irvine.
Lessons were planned around a “grid down”
scenario: how to respond when standards like
electricity and cellular networks are disabled.
The lessons were largely metropolitan—how to
charge your phone o≠ the battery of an aban-
doned car, how to walk up to a skyscraper and
siphon drinking water—but a lot was surpris-
ingly wilderness-oriented. Because during a
crisis, Coyne explained, when routine systemsfrom a new generation of young people who
don’t mind living nearby, their downtown
existence excited by a little edge (a homeless
woman muttering to herself ), as long as it’s not
too edgy, or too threatening to property values
(a homeless man shitting on their doorstep).
The transition to Skid Row from surround-
ing blocks can be disorienting. Dan Johnson, a
nearby resident and a former literacy instruc-
tor at the Midnight Mission, one of Skid Row’s
oldest social-service organizations, walked
me into the encampment one morning at a
medium pace, nodding to people he knew. Tall
with a droopy mustache and sad eyes, Johnson
had the look of an outlaw from a spaghetti
Western. Asked if he ever got used to Skid Row,
he nodded and shook his head, both yes and
no. “I might be numb at this point,” he said.
“I’ve spent so much time aggressively loving
and advocating for Los Angeles, and also bit-
terly hating it. Really, really hating it.”
Some blocks looked more doomsday than
others. A woman in a bra and underwear was
slumped over a chair. Two men were passed
out, one in the street, one on the sidewalk.
A young man was smoking crack or meth or
something similar o≠ flakes of aluminum foil.
And there were also many examples of people
assisting others: residents helping one another
move belongings; people sharing food, shar-
ing a joint in the sunlight. There were shelters,
soup kitchens, employment agencies, and a
long line for two guys giving haircuts under a
white pop-up tent. On another visit, I walked
around with Suzette Shaw, who’d previously
been homeless herself. She high-fived and
hugged residents who recognized her. Shaw,
an advocate and activist, also an ambassador
for the nonprofit initiative the United State of
Women, emphasized that Skid Row is a liv-
ing, breathing community, not a containment
zone. “Rich white people come down here, look
around, and ask, How the hell can people live
like this?” she said. “I tell them, Just as people
become conditioned to Beverly Hills, people
become conditioned to this.” A few days before
I turned up, while Beto O’Rourke’s presidential
campaign was still active, Shaw showed Beto
around the neighborhood. He later suggested
in a press conference that Shaw, with her
empathy and compassion, be appointed the
secretary of Housing and Urban Development.
“We have to talk about who the people are
rather than pathologizing them,” Shaw said.
To paraphrase the historian William
Deverell, life on Skid Row deals less with geo-
logic or climatic time than with human time.
But it’s the climate crisis in a nutshell—and
not just because living on a sidewalk means
your life can literally be swept away. Every
day, the homeless population shows human-
ity’s capability for resilience, also its frailties.
And the state’s shoddy treatment of its home-
less citizens demonstrates our shortsighted-
ness, our easy tolerance for others’ su≠ering,
the complacency that follows saying things
like, It can’t get any worse.
It’s getting worse.Death
A FEW MONTHS AGO, during the reporting
of this story, a friend of mine died from can-
cer. He was 46 years old, four years older than