The Uniform Catastrophists
The knock at the door came late at night but it was not unexpected. An evacuation order had been made for everyone living on a hillside just south of town.
Earlier that night after I had read a bedtime story and the kids had fallen asleep, I turned off the lamp on their nightstand. Their room was cool and dark. The night sky out their window blazed a deep orange. The wildfire had crested the ridge, The one fire crews had hoped to secure.
On this planet changes have occurred over thousands of years. The doctrine of uniformity held by uniformitarians is the understanding that time, with the help of erosion, moves mountains. Shaping the Grand Canyon is a gradual process of erosion and movement that continues at this moment.
The catastrophists argue that catastrophic events like the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, which was caused by a meteor impact with global ramifications are more influential overall in shaping the planet than events occurring slowly over time.
When considering global warming, an otherwise gradual change in the climate that has happened over time which humans have now spurred to a catastrophic pace, do we view the rapid changes as catastrophists? The changes that we have observed in fossil records are now occurring in the atmosphere at the speed of a single generation.
The feedback loop of desertification, sea-level rise and shrinking seasonal snowfall totals makes incremental changes that can be observed over time. Do we seek to understand our changing world as uniformitarians?
The future is a dichotomy between the uniform and catastrophic. We approach the world as uniform-catastrophists. We perform as both the heroes and the villains of a surreal disaster movie playing out in real-time.
Police lights flashed against the orange sky as those ordered to evacuate carried armfuls of their most important items. They were made to choose what to take from a burning home. The immensely personal decisions that are forced at a moment’s notice as a result of a worldwide problem.
As the world warms things are displaced. People are displaced and so are objects. The warming planet is a vast and fluid entity quietly shifting everything as we know it. We only wait to see how far and how fast it moves.
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