Environmentalist

  By Brian Onali Nduw Walk through a coastal neighbourhood at high tide, and you’ll find it: nuisance flooding that creeps up driveways. Lingers in streets. And has become less an anomaly than a calendar event. It is no longer a question of  if  the water will rise, but  when . And how often. This is not speculation. It is the leading edge of sea-level rise, lapping at the foundations of communities that were never designed to be tidal. Inland, the signs are just as unmistakable. The air carries a chemical weight. What falls from the sky is not always water anymore. It is acid. Fed by emissions that have accumulated in the atmosphere for decades. Beneath that sky, once-hardy plants brown and wilt. Some species are vanishing entirely. Not dramatically, but silently, slipping into extinction before most of us ever learn their names. The future, by these measures, ain’t exciting. A crisis measured in degrees and breaths The language of climate science is often abstract:...