A New Force We Haven't Reckoned With Before - Emma Bacon Knows The Heat That's Coming For Us All

Emma Bacon is the Executive Director of Sweltering Cities and she’s on the show this week to talk about and share more on the terrifying reality of what she describes as the personal tragedies of a hotter everywhere world.

My name is Nathan Robertson-Ball and welcome to the Finding Nature podcast. I started this show nearly a year ago and the broader endeavour that is Finding Nature as a response to my own disaffection and distress over the trajectory of so much. In that time we’ve had another record year of greenhouse gas emissions, heat records just about everywhere have been smashed again and the election of - and my favourite description so far - a useful idiot in the US has emboldened authoritarianism, emboldening dumb binary politicking and a massive retreat from organisations who a couple of years ago were all rushing to commit to play their part in the avoidance of planetary calamity. What halcyon days they seem like now.

So Finding Nature is a response to that disaffection and distress. I have this show where each week I get to go longer form with the people on the frontlines of change making and impact creation, over on Substack I write about the Encroaching Apocalypse or a Glorious New View and also collect the views and contributions of many others in our community. Lastly - Finding Nature holds events that bring life and atmosphere to this whole thing. Like a refuge for the people who often feel like mutants in the environments they spend their time in. Finding Nature is easy to find on Substack, Humanitix, Instagram and LinkedIn, and then we’re on all the podcast platforms including the one you’re listening to this episode on now.

OK so Emma Bacon, Sweltering Cities and heat. This topic legitimately terrifies me. As a civilisation dependent on a goldilocks climate zone for our stable existence, what happens as we enter a new climate era - defined primarily by not only more frequent and intense disasters - but by the ratcheting up of heat everywhere. From average temperatures and the ways by which that affects the delicate cycles of life in specific locations, to blasting furnace heat waves that obliterate heat records and cause widespread suffering, loss, death and damage. So much of the climate crisis is esoteric or abstract for the regular person - but everyone knows heat. It’s inescapable, and it’s arrived and arriving. Emma outlines plenty in this chat - the despair over how decisions makers at all levels can’t hide behind plausible deniability as a valid reason for inaction, how vested interests lock in structural inequality and worsen conditions through inappropriate building standards and the ways by which everyone everywhere is at risk of heat.

We cover a lot of ground in this chat, and I hope you come away not only more informed but ready to action.

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