Living Through The Storm

With his salt-and-pepper hair and thoughtful demeanor, Chris West looks like just another mid-career professor as he crosses the streets of Oxford University. But West, trained as a zoologist, is more an activist than an academic these days. From his cramped office around the corner from Balliol College, he directs the government’s UK Climate Impacts Program, which educates individuals and businesses in Britain about the risks they face from climate change and the ways to cope with it.

Not long ago, West says, a DuPont executive boasted to him about how well his company was now treating the environment. Jolly good, West replied, but was DuPont also prepared for how the environment might treat DuPont? “I asked how many of his company’s 300-odd facilities around the world were located in floodplains,” West says. Global warming will bring increased risks to anyone located in a floodplain. “He didn’t know,” West recalls. “I said, ‘Don’t you think you should?’”

For years, global warming was discussed in the hypothetical—a threat in the distant future. Now it is increasingly regarded as a clear, observable fact today. This sudden shift puts all of us in the same boat as that Dupont executive. We must start thinking about the many ways global warming will affect us, our loved ones, our property and our economic prospects in the years ahead. We must think—and then we must adapt to this new reality as best we can.

more from Mark Hertsgaard's article in Time