out of sync

Climate change is often subtle.

Floods, devastating forest fires, catastrophic draughts, extreme weather phenomena, the disappearance of glaciers: all of these are macroscopic effects of the changes our climate is undergoing. They are striking, profoundly unsettling and impossible to miss (although I find that, lately, the human capacity for denying even the obvious seems to be more and more on display …).

Still, there are changes that are not so obvious and yet no less disturbing. One of these is the disruption of seasonal patterns on which much of life, especially plant life, depends.

This is often harder to pin-point clearly. Farmers have had their crops ruined by insufficient precipitation or unseasonal frosts since time immemorial and we tend not to notice that these effects are becoming, gradually but steadily, more and more common. The plant life (and the animal life that depends on it, ours included) that thrives in the areas were we live is adapted to the local seasonal patterns and depends on them. Nature is resilient and plants and animals can, for the most part, withstand an occasional disruption, but when the changes in pattern become more and more frequent resilience will not be enough.

The vegetation we are used to seeing around us will begin to suffer, pests that were kept at bay by cold winters will wreak more and more damage when winter temperatures fail to dip under a certain threshold for several winters in a row, lower levels of precipitation will wipe out plant life that depends on the presence of sufficient moisture. The animals that feed on those plants will go hungry and, if the disruption repeats itself year after year, will either move elsewhere or die out. The entire local ecological balance, that took centuries or millennia to become established, will be thrown out of kilt.

Even our supposedly insulated, selfish human world will eventually be changed beyond recognition. Foods that we consider staples will become luxuries (this article explains how a drop in production of durum wheat is affecting the pasta making industry in Italy, for example, www.reuters.com/business/worst-come-pasta-makers-fret-over-durum-wheat-supply-crunch-2021-11-10 potentially increasing the price of a food that every Italian household depends on and is frequently part of at least one meal a day if not two.) The life style we have known, the activities we are accustomed to will go through an enormous upheaval.

As photographers, we train ourselves to keep an eye out for things that most people miss. I know that, since I became interested in photography, I have developed a greater sensitivity to light conditions, for example, or an eye for details that others might not notice. Even without a camera, I often catch myself “composing” or “framing” images in my mind as I go through my daily life.

I think we have almost a duty to use these skills to communicate the plight of the environment around us, to highlight these subtle changes that so often go unnoticed in people’s busy lives. I know, it’s almost certainly too late to reverse the changes, but by educating people and putting pressure on governments blinded by the god of economy, it could still be slowed down, giving us and the environment a little more time to adapt to a world that is, inevitably, becoming hotter and drier, losing costal lands (and whole islands) and being deprived of biodiversity as countless vegetable and animal species get wiped out.