This year’s Conference of the Parties, the annual United Nations meeting meant to avert catastrophic climate change, was subject to a ham-fisted metaphor. On Thursday, the Brazilian venue hosting the conference burst into flames from what was likely an electrical fire.
In 1998, outside of Fort Wayne, Indiana, a hydraulic excavator at Buesching’s Peat Moss & Mulch stripped back a layer of peat and struck bone in the underlying marl. Bone is the right word: This bone belonged to a mastodon, and mastodons are still fresh bodies in the dirt, not petrified fossils entombed in the rock. Although they might be popularly imagined living way back with the dinosaurs, the Ice Age megafauna went extinct only moments ago, in staggered waves over human history.