From Now On...

Pacific Palisades, California, USA - January, 2025 - Photo taken by a friend of the writer.

In the movie Oppenheimer, the scientist is shown watching humanity’s first nuclear explosion and then quoting, roughly, from the Bhagavad Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Watching that scene, I thought that while Oppenheimer was probably feeling horrible and in shock at what he had helped to create, he was also giving himself a little too much credit, in that he was standing amongst a crowd of really smart people that had all helped him to create that monstrous thing. The path to the bomb had also been marked out for that group, over the past few decades, by some other really smart people, like Einstein.

I thought of that scene as I looked at another photo of the fires in Los Angeles. I considered everyone, like me, staring at the fire, or of its images on our phones, laptops and TVs — gazing in awe, and in horror.

While there will certainly be some criticism made of the way that this crisis was managed, it’s obvious that most everyone, especially the fire fighters, did everything they could to save lives and property. Most of us now understand that this past week’s fires were probably inevitable. Further, these fires may be the tipping point at which most of us now get it, and we can say that we get it — these fires were due to Climate Change: 1) An exceptionally long drought (Since last May); plus, 2) The hottest summer on record; and, 3) Hurricane force, 100 mph Santa Ana winds. These three factors, independently would have constituted a threat and all are predicted as Climate Change intensifies. The odds that these three conditions will coincide as Climate Change grows worse also increase.

What this has to do with coffee is this, we’ve now entered an era where, until we figure out this Climate thing, or not; that we will be looking at all of it in terms of our changing climate and how to cope with it. Whether it’s the fires in Los Angeles, or the coffee crop in Vietnam, or in Brazil, or the rains in Central America, or the bizarre weather events in Africa - it is now all of one context — that everything’s changing and most of the changes are because of what we’ve all done, and continue to do, to the Climate. We know things are not going back to normal and that they’ll get even worse unless we can turn them around by reducing the carbon in our atmosphere.

So, we can stare at the fires, or pictures of them, or video of them, and we can say to ourselves, to again misquote the Bhagavad Gita, “Now we are become death, the destroyer of our world,” unless we choose not to.