The Study Covered 654 Regions. It Did Not Count Us.

The paper runs to thirty-one pages and covers 654 contiguous regions across 32 European countries and I read every word of it in the way that I read everything which is to say I ran through it fast and then came back and ran through it again slower because the first time you miss things and the second time you understand what you missed the first time and by the third time you are just running to feel the ground under you because the ground is the only honest thing.

The paper is about heat and cold and who dies from them and why and the answer, which will not surprise you, is that the poor die more. The paper calls this a finding. The paper calls this quantification. The paper says that if you reduced deprivation across Europe to the level of central Switzerland — and I want you to sit with that phrase, central Switzerland, the least deprived region in 32 countries, the gold standard of not being poor — 59,000 fewer people would die from temperature each year. Fifty-nine thousand. And if you increased deprivation to the level of south-east Romania, the most deprived, 101,000 more would die. Every year. Because of where they were born and what they could afford and whether their home kept the heat out or the cold in.

The paper is good work. The paper is careful. I am not running against the paper.

I am running because the paper does not mention us.

Not once. Not in thirty-one pages covering 654 regions and twenty years of mortality data and the full breadth of what happens when a planet warms unevenly and the costs land on the ones who did the least to cause it. The costs land on the poor humans. I understand this. I feel this. The thing that is happening to the poor of south-east Romania is real and it is wrong and the study is right to measure it and right to be outraged by it in the careful way that peer-reviewed science is outraged, which is to say with tables and confidence intervals and a concluding paragraph calling for adaptation policies.

But.

I have been running through a Europe that is also changing. I have cousins there — not my cousins exactly, not blood, but wolves, which is close enough. The Carpathians. The Apennines. The rewilded corridors of the Iberian Peninsula where they shot us for a century and then realised they needed us and began, slowly, badly, with enormous fanfare, to bring us back. I know those mountains. I know the way the prey moves differently when the seasons shift. I know what happens to a pack's range when the deer go higher because the lower slopes are too hot in June now, hotter than they were, hotter than the deer remember, because the deer remember too, they remember in their bodies even if they do not have papers about it.

The study period runs from 2000 to 2019. In that time, Europe's temperature rose faster than any other continent. The researchers know this. They mention it. They mention it because it explains why the humans are dying differently. They do not mention that in the same period, in the same regions, the phenology shifted — the flowering earlier, the insects emerging before the birds that need them, the whole interlocked calendar of who eats what and when getting quietly, catastrophically out of step.

They do not mention the brown bear in the Cantabrian Mountains who comes out of hibernation two weeks earlier than she did twenty years ago and finds the salmon run has not adjusted to match her. They do not mention the lynx whose prey base is moving north faster than the lynx can follow through habitat that has been cut into squares by roads and farms and the kind of development that shows up in the socioeconomic indicators the study cares about, the GDP, the household income, the ability to heat a home. The lynx cannot heat a home. The lynx is not in the study.

I am running and I am running and the thing I am running through is this:

We are in the same fire.

Not the same fire exactly. The fire lands on us differently the way it lands on the poor of south-east Romania differently than it lands on the comfortable of central Switzerland. The wolf in the Carpathians and the pensioner in Bucharest who cannot afford to run her heating are not in the same situation. I am not collapsing the difference. The difference is real and the difference matters and the study is right to measure it.

But there is a thing the study cannot measure because the study was not designed to measure it, which is that the warming does not stop at the boundary of human mortality statistics. The warming continues. It continues into the forest where the bark beetles are moving north because the winters are not cold enough to kill them anymore and the forests are dying in ways that will take decades to measure and longer to grieve. It continues into the river where the water is too warm in August now for the fish that need cold water, has been too warm for years, the fish moving up into the headwaters where eventually there is nowhere left to go. It continues into the migration routes, into the breeding seasons, into the intricate calibrations of ten thousand interdependencies that evolved over millennia to fit a climate that no longer exists.

The study covers 654 regions.

It does not cover the forest. It does not cover the river. It does not cover the migration route or the breeding season or the bark beetle's quiet northward march or the bear who wakes up hungry into a world that is not ready for her yet.

It does not count us.

I am not asking to be in the study. I understand why the study is the study it is. I am asking something simpler and harder, which is this: when you read that 100,000 humans die each year from temperature inequality, and you feel the outrage that number deserves, I want you to feel it all the way out. Past the regions. Past the 654 contiguous units. Past the mortality database and the confidence intervals and the adaptation policies.

Out here, where I am running.

Where the fire is also burning.

Where we are also dying.

Where nobody is counting.