This past weekend, while tinkering with the first two pieces in The New Republic’s new series on extreme weather, I took a break to check The New York Times. Right there, on the homepage, was a striking image of doomsday aesthetic: a “fire tornado,” which occurs when air rises rapidly from a wildfire. Multiple such tornadoes were reported on Saturday in Northern California. And this is only the beginning of fire season.
 
Our new series is thanks to Arizona State University’s Voices From the Future project, which interviews survivors of extreme weather events—from floods in Chennai and West Virginia to wildfires in Australia and California to hurricanes in the Bahamas and Puerto Rico. As journalism professor Steven Beschloss, the project’s founder, wrote in his introduction to the series on Monday, he and his team of reporters and researchers were curious how people handled the trauma of such climate-accelerated events: the loss of a house; the loss of security; the realization that these things are getting worse, and we aren’t doing anywhere near enough to stop it.
 
“We were interested in what these survivors could tell us about the new era we are all about to face,” Beschloss wrote. “As the climate crisis expands and intensifies, many people will soon be confronting similar choices and realities.” One man lost his wife after their flooded house exploded due to a torn gas line; he turned to religion. A woman who nearly lost her father in the Australia fires last year quit her job to spend more time with family and volunteer to help survivors. Several have said the disasters made them reevaluate their approach to life, whether that meant considering relocating to safer areas, questioning consumerism in the wake of property loss, or rededicating themselves to raising awareness of climate change.

We didn’t plan to start publishing this series at quite such a resonant moment. But the insights from these survivors—particularly the way they thought about their own experiences—feel especially welcome this week. The fire tornadoes came a week after a deadly derecho in Iowa that caused astonishing damage to crops and homes. It also followed depressing news about the Greenland ice sheet: Researchers say the melt has passed “the point of no return.” Even if we were able to halt climate change today, the sheet (and most likely other glaciers) would continue to melt, increasing sea level rise. Meanwhile, the hurricane season—already unusually active—is just getting started.
 
Bad news can take its toll, causing pessimism and defeatism that make progress harder. Emily Atkin, a TNR alum sorely missed in our D.C. office (back when offices were a thing), wrote about the crushing weight of this kind of news in her vital Heated newsletter on Tuesday. She talked about the value in embracing fear—not as a paralyzing emotion but as a preservational instinct:
 
I don’t need to tell you what we’re doing now. You already know how the actions of our country and our president are affecting the global climate.… What I do need to tell you is that there is still time to fix it. Greenland’s ice sheet is headed toward eventual collapse, but “curbing greenhouse gas emissions today could delay the process by 5,000 years … giving people much more time to adapt as the sea encroaches across thousands of miles of densely populated coastlines.” There is still time to give humans who have not yet been born a fighting chance at a good life. But that outcome is far from guaranteed. It simply will not happen if we don’t act now.
 
I used to think that being scared about this made me weak. But fear is our most basic survival mechanism, and our planet is in survival mode. Fear gives us the strength to make tough decisions in order to survive.
 
As we continue the Voices from the Future series over the coming weeks, you’ll read a lot about fear as people faced life-threatening situations. You’ll read about grief and loss as well. But you’ll also read about how those emotions are leading people to confront their world in different ways. “Something has definitely shifted in me, the way I look at things,” KerryAnn Laufer, who lost her house in California’s Kincade Fire, said. “I cannot look at it just as my problem. I am one of the people affected by it, but it is not just my problem. We need more immediate action and to stop kidding ourselves that everything is good.”