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A Palliative Approach to the End of the World
What if we accept that we’ll never solve climate change?
Slag
I grew up on the lip of a crater. Sudbury is a mining city, but it is at the same time a place of rugged beauty. It is a place where the Canadian shield reveals itself, protruding to the surface like a leviathan’s rocky spine, cold and prehistoric.
Ten million years ago, one of the largest meteors ever to strike Earth made contact here. It thrust veins of underground ore to the surface, and only very recently — in the last 150 years — have humans tapped these veins. Their rich deposits of nickel and copper have helped feed global demand in times of peace and of war.
The towns that established themselves on the crater’s periphery were not so much places to live as shelters for miners who needed to access the ore. Settlers gave these towns jagged, alien names: Falconbridge, Coniston. The names sound as if they were cut from diamond drills. Levack. Skead.
I grew up in one of these towns. It’s where I learned to name the world and to begin to find my place within it. My high school sat on one end of the crater and my house sat on the opposite end. The commute involved an hour-long trip across the valley, skirting along a stretch of black hills where, for decades, rail…
