Member-only story
Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty!
America and the rest of the world are drifting apart as our planet continues to burn in the Climate Emergency. Can the chasm ever be bridged?
As you leave the enchanting town of Saumur to enter the lush and abundant forests adorning the rivers Indre and Loire in France, you are transported to another age, a sense of the centuries melting away.
The forest suddenly yields to a brilliant glade with the land rising towards a distant horizon, bringing into view a fairytale castle in the truest sense. Charles Perrault was a frequent visitor at the castle of Ussé during the 17th century, and he chose it as the setting of his fable about a kingdom frozen in time, La Belle aux Bois Dormant, which we know in English as Sleeping Beauty.
Today, the Atlantic coastal forest separating Ussé from the sea is aflame, ignited by an arsonist, spurred into an unstoppable inferno by the catastrophically high temperatures that have much of western Europe scrambling to cope with an unprecedented existential threat. And the same threat affects the entire planet.
The climate crisis has no ideology, no political agenda. It simply is. One can waste endless hours and precious time debating how much of it is “natural” and how much of it is anthropogenic —…
