The Arithmetic of Emergency

A personal accounting

American amnesia—the ability to forget the future even as it arrives.

The insurance adjuster who came to assess my property last spring wore a baseball cap and carried a clipboard thick with denial. He measured the distance from my house to the volunteer fire station five miles down the valley—twelve minutes if we're lucky, he noted, assuming the truck starts and assuming we have enough volunteers to crew it. He photographed the sagebrush that has been steadily choking out the ponderosa pine, twenty years of drought giving the desert the upper hand in a war I watch from my kitchen window. His camera clicked at the dried creek bed, at the skeletal remains of trees that once shaded trout streams.

"We can't write policies here anymore," he said, not unkindly. Just arithmetic. He didn't mention that I carry a radio for the volunteer fire department, that I might be the one responding to my own emergency. There's a particular irony in being uninsurable while simultaneously being responsible for putting out the fires that make you uninsurable. Our crew has gotten smaller and grayer over the years, fighting fires that have gotten bigger and hotter. We average sixty-four years old now. Last year, Mark had a heart attack on a brush fire. We keep going because someone has to, even as we protect properties that no insurance company will touch. During the evacuation two years ago, I stayed behind with the animals. Who else was going to save my place?

While the cable networks cycled through their daily inventory of outrage—scandals breaking and tweets flying and investigations launched—the insurance companies were quietly conducting their own investigation. They were mapping the future with actuarial tables instead of opinion polls. Block by block, county by county, they were withdrawing from the American map. Not because of politics or ideology, but because of mathematics. Because of satellite data showing fire danger and flood plains and the inexorable march of what meteorologists have taken to calling, with characteristic understatement, "extreme weather events."

The insurers, it turns out, are our most honest prophets. They have already voted on climate change with their balance sheets.

I learned this the way most people learn hard truths: through my bank account. The water well I drilled last fall cost $100,000 all in. But eight months without water was incentive enough to spend the money. The generator I bought when the power grid started failing during heat waves: $15,000. The firebreaks I cut around my house, hoping to save it from the inevitable: $12,000. These are not the costs of living in the country. These are the costs of living at the end of the world, itemized and invoiced. I am lucky I had a retirement fund.

My sheep cluster in whatever shade they can find, panting through days that stretch past 110 degrees, and summer hasn't even fully arrived. I check them every hour now, looking for signs of heat stress, calculating how much water I can afford to give them before the well runs dry again. The deer have stopped coming to the creek bed; the ospreys circle but don't hunt in this heat. Even the ravens, those opportunists of the desert, seek shade now. While politicians debate whether we should call it climate change or extreme weather or acts of God, everything with lungs is learning what thirst means. The sheep do not care what we call it. Neither do the birds.

There is something almost quaint about the idea that this is still a debate. Like arguing about gravity while falling off a cliff.

FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, gutted by budget cuts and hobbled by bureaucracy, sends form letters to disaster zones that read like afterthoughts. We have moved beyond emergency into something else—a permanent state of crisis so normalized that we have developed its own vocabulary. "The new normal," we say, as if calling it normal makes it bearable. As if normal is something we can simply decide to be.

But the fires don't read our press releases. The drought doesn't check the news cycle. The floods don't wait for political convenience.

I think about this while I drive to town for feed I can barely afford, past houses with "For Sale" signs that have been up for months, past ranches abandoned to the scrub and the deer. Entire families packing up and leaving, not because they wanted to but because the land itself evicted them. Climate refugees in our own country, though we don't call them that. National Public Radio, NPR, the lifeline of rural America, drones with urgent bulletins about scandals and investigations, about who said what to whom and when. The democracy is under threat, the voices insist, and they are right, but not in the way they think.

The biggest threat is not in the statehouses or the courts or the voting booths, though it stalks through all of these places. The biggest threat is in the dried aquifers and the overheated oceans and the insurance maps redrawn in red. It is in the emergency that became so routine we stopped calling it an emergency. It is in our talent for being urgently distracted by everything except the thing that will kill us.

We have perfected a peculiar form of American amnesia—the ability to forget the future even as it arrives. We debate and we argue and we investigate while the planet burns, literally burns, around us. We have turned catastrophe into content, emergency into entertainment, the end of the world into just another thing to have an opinion about.

The distraction is not accidental. The outrage cycles serve a purpose: they keep us looking up at the sky for political meteors while the ground shifts beneath our feet. They keep us arguing about symptoms while the disease progresses, unchecked and unnoticed, through the body politic.

My grandmother used to say that the land tells you everything you need to know if you know how to listen. The land is speaking now, but we have chosen not to hear. We have chosen to listen instead to the sound of our own voices, raised in anger and fear over things that will not matter when the wells run dry and the fires reach the city limits and the last insurance company closes its last office and drives away.

What we are passing down is not just damaged land and depleted aquifers and uninsurable houses. What we are passing down is a way of seeing—or not seeing—that allows us to argue about everything except the arithmetic of emergency. We are bequeathing to our children a world where the most important truths are the ones we have agreed not to discuss, where the most urgent crises are the ones we have learned to ignore.

The sheep know better. They seek shade and water and shelter from the storm. They do not debate the storm's existence or argue about what to call it or investigate who might be responsible for it. They simply endure, and adapt, and die when they cannot do either.

I envy them their clarity.

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Image ©2025 Gael MacLean