Anecdotal Evidence of Climate Change and Ecosystem Decline in South America

Post by John Michael

As a traveler, I often find myself engaged in small talk, and no topic is more frequently the subject of conversation between myself and those that I meet while traveling on the road than the weather. Yesterday I was riding in a truck up the side of one of the three volcanoes that surround the Ecuadorian city of Otavalo, which is located within the country’s northern highlands. I began to speak with my driver about the rash of tornadoes that had just ravaged the American South. He told me what a shame it was that so many people had died, and then he went on to say something that I found very interesting. “It never used to rain this much in Ecuador,” he admitted. “Sure, it would rain every now and then, but never every day like it does now.” He gestured toward the overhanging gray clouds and at the rain that was spattering the windshield. “Before, we would hear about things like what happened in your country, and they were things that only happened in other countries. But now, with these rains, people are dying here, too.” “People have died because of the rains?” I asked him. “Yes,” he nodded, momentarily turning from the road to look me in the eyes. “Thirteen people have died recently from floods and landslides.” He looked back at the road. “And it’s worse, because now, with all of this rain, the crops are beginning to rot before they can be harvested.” I stared out the window at the hilly fields of corn that we passed. “We used to be so happy,” he continued, “because Ecuador was a paradise, but now things are changing.” Five minutes after he had said these words, the rain turned to hail, and we had to pull off to the side of the road and wait until the storm had calmed before continuing on our journey.

The day before I had crossed the border from Colombia to Ecuador at the Colombian city of Ipiales, which is located within the Andes Mountains, about fifteen minutes away by car from the border crossing station, which itself is set within a narrow valley beside a rushing river within a steep ravine that separates the two countries. I arrived in Ipiales in the early morning, around 4 AM, and stepped off of the bus to find that the air was bitterly cold. I quickly hired a taxi, and my driver was kind enough to offer me a cup of aromatico, which is the local term for herbal tea, that I drank as he drove me toward the border. “How about this cold,” he said as a way of starting a conversation. “It’s very intense,” I replied, “but I like it because it wakes me up.” He nodded, and then he warned me, “But you have to be careful with cold like this, because the second that you start to feel warm again, then you’ll fall right back to sleep.” We both laughed, and then he went on to say, “It never used to be so cold here. It’s only recently, in the past few years, that we’ve experience a cold like this.” He looked directly into the rearview mirror so that he could see into my eyes. “Do you think it has to do with climate change?” he asked. I made a face and shrugged. “I don’t know,” I replied, and then added, “maybe.” 

The close incidence of these two conversations has caused me to recall the other times that I had heard locals in South America discussing climate change and ecosystem decline. About three months ago, in Taganga, a seaside town just outside of Santa Marta, Colombia, that’s famous for its scuba diving, a friend of mine asked a local hostel owner about a coral reef that she had visited a few years before, where, according to her, the coral formations “were as big as trees.” The hostel owner, herself an avid scuba diver, sadly replied, “They’re not there anymore. That whole coral reef has been bleached.” And two years ago, in Bariloche, a resort city in the lake district of Northern Patagonia, I was warned not to stay out too long without sun protection, because, aside from the high altitude, the region was near the hole in the ozone layer, which meant that the rays of the sun were particularly strong there. 

In the US, we have a culture of climate change skepticism, and any evidence of such change, even rigorously developed scientific data, is often the subject of intense scrutiny and merciless doubt, so I don’t expect the anecdotes that I’ve collected here to be viewed as reliable evidence that our world’s climate and ecosystems are changing. What I do want these few anecdotes to testify to is that human beings around the world are now talking about climate change and ecosystem decline frequently, and that stories such as these have become a part of our daily lives. Climate change stories are now quotidian, an almost mundane part of our global culture; they have become one of the many types of stories that we tell that reveal who we are at this time in our history. All over the world, and throughout human history, when people were affected by great events, they ended up telling stories about those events. Our grandparents talked about the Second World War, while our parents retold the events of the civil rights movement and America’s cultural revolution. For us, climate change may very well be the great story that we tell to our children. What will your story be? And how do you think it will end?