There’s a scene in Damien Chazelle’s First Man that depicts a moment that I had never considered. A tune by Leon Bridges blares for the short duration of the scene. On screen, a group of young African-Americans stand viewing the Apollo 11 launch from a nearby field. Kennedy Space Center is in view but the military installation may as well have been 10,000 miles away. They were purely spectators, nowhere near the real action. And they knew they never would be.
The Amazonian fires of August 2019 served as another sign that Earth’s climate is under duress. The dry heat and unforgiving conditions in the region contributed to an accelerated damage to Brazil’s annual fire season. The forest’s destruction had wide ranging economic implications for American companies; the most consequential of which didn’t share a geography or much of an economic interest.
