EXPLORE | THE BIG IDEA
storm. By the time it hit Cameron Parish, early in the
morning of August 27, it was the fifth fiercest hurricane
to make landfall in U.S. history. The storm caused at
least 16 U.S. deaths and up to $12 billion in damages.
Twenty years ago, crises like the Doe fire and Hur-
ricane Laura could have been described as “natural
disasters.” Thanks to climate change, this is no longer
the case. Right around the time of Newsom’s press
conference, the mercury in Death Valley hit 130°F,
the highest temperature ever reliably recorded on
Earth. A hotter, drier California is much more likely
to burst into flames. The Gulf too is heating up, with
dangerous consequences. Hurricanes draw their
energy from the warmth of the surface waters and
so are becoming stronger and more apt to intensify.
I’ve been reporting on climate change for almost two
decades, and I’ve come to think that we need a new
term to describe these events. Perhaps we should call
them “man-made natural disasters.”
People now play such a dominant role on the
planet, it’s said we live in a new geological epoch:
the Anthropocene. By cutting down forests and
digging mines and building cities, we’ve transformed
half of the ice-free land on Earth. (Indirectly, we’ve
altered half of what remains.) With our fertilizer
plants, we fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial eco-
systems combined; with our plows and bulldozers,
we move around more earth than all the world’s rivers
and streams. In terms of biomass, the numbers are
staggering. People now outweigh wild mammals
by a ratio of more than 8 to 1. Add in our domes-
ticated animals (mostly cows and pigs), and the
ratio’s almost 23 to 1. In the Anthropocene, all sorts
of catastrophes straddle the line between man and
nature. Many earthquakes, for example, are now
triggered by human activity, in particular fracking.
An unusually strong human-induced quake that
shook Pawnee, Oklahoma, a few years ago was felt
all the way to Des Moines, Iowa.
And then there’s COVID-19.
The virus that causes COVID seems to have origi-
nated in horseshoe bats. It appears to have made the
leap to people near the city of Wuhan, China, either
directly or through an intermediate species that has
yet to be identified. Pathogens have, presumably, been
jumping between animals and humans for as long as
both have been around. But for most of human history,
such “spillover events” were limited in their impact.
Infected populations didn’t move very far or very
fast. With jet travel, a virus can now make it halfway
around the world between evening newscasts. Within
a month of the first confirmed cases in central China,
COVID had reached at least 26 other countries. Soon it
was just about everywhere, even such remote places
as the Falkland Islands and the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Just as with their predecessors, it’s hard to pre-
dict when or where man-made natural disasters
will strike. Still, the trend lines are clear. As people
increasingly destroy other animals’ habitats and
move species around the world, outbreaks of novel16 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC