Other writing

‘Gray rhinos,’ in author Michele Wucker’s thinking, are dangers that are very likely to hit, and very damaging when they do. The world is being trampled by a gray rhino right now, Wucker says, and another one is barreling toward us. We should have seen the pandemic and climate change coming.

When car manufacturers’ rampant emissions cheating exploded into the headlines in 2015, Dieselgate became one of the biggest corporate scandals in history. Four-and-a-half years later, Volkswagen and its peers have yet to clean up their mess.

As the SARS virus tore through China in 2003, Zuo-Feng Zhang wondered whether the country’s notoriously polluted air might be amplifying its dangers. The answer he and his scientific colleagues found feels frighteningly relevant now, not just for China, but all across a world where SARS’ coronavirus cousin is bearing down on billions of people who already live with unhealthy air.

As an environmental journalist, I’ve been covering the frightening acceleration of climate change for more than a decade. As a person who believes in the tenets of liberal democracy, I’ve watched the rise of white-supremacist, anti-immigrant and nationalistic ideologies with similar dread over the past few years. But I always thought of those two trends — looming ecological dangers and the gathering strength of the far right — as unrelated.

A frightening new threat cascades around the world, upending familiar routines, disrupting the global economy, and endangering lives. Scientists long warned this might happen, but political leaders mostly ignored them, so now must scramble to respond to a crisis they could have prevented, or at least eased, had they acted sooner.

As public concern about plastic pollution rises, consumers are reaching for canvas bags, metal straws, and reusable water bottles. But while individuals fret over images of oceanic garbage gyres, the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries are pouring billions of dollars into new plants intended to make millions more tons of plastic than they now pump out.