My grandparents’ home was a magical realm. It was a solid old place with an open basement and a wild backyard that my grandpa tried to keep under control. Despite their ample library and my grandma’s special butter spaghetti, it was a cold house – partly thanks to the altitude. At 1,300 m above sea level, it sat on the eastern slopes of Costa Rica’s central valley. From their sitting room, while wrapped in a heavy blanket and sipping hot cocoa, you could see city lights in the distance.

My grandparents’ home was a long way from travel magazines’ depictions of tropical Costa Rica. Although it was free from snowflakes - temperatures rarely dipped below 12°C, their garden was not sprinkled with palm trees. There were no burrowing crabs or waves to surf. Instead, we had misty evenings, peppered with the bright dots of fireflies.

As I child, it was here that I first ventured into entomology, collecting dozens of bugs, moths and spiders in glass jars. There were so many that I created an insect museum in the basement. Among that generosity of wings and legs, my heart belonged to the fireflies. I ran through the night following their blinking calls, carefully capturing them. In the misty atmosphere of that hillside, they gave the dark hours of the night an eerie, romantic tone.

My grandparents eventually moved away, but this year, the memories felt close. One evening last August I was leaving my family home, which sits close to where my grandparents had lived, when my dad looked out the window and said: ‘Wow, there's loads of mist today.’ He was right. I could barely see more than a hundred meters ahead of me. It felt like a new and foreign world, unexpected and mysterious. The walk to the bus station was a complete joy, immersed in the low-hanging clouds. Glee quickly gave way to nostalgia. Waiting for the bus, my childhood memories flooded back. It has now been decades since I’ve seen mist, and fireflies are even rarer. I realised the Anthropocene had reached my hometown.

Change in a lifetime

Costa Rica is full of stories like this. Biologists recently warned that amphibian communities are shifting in the country, naturalists in the dry forest of the north-western plains recounted the decline in insect numbers earlier this year,[1] and scientists in the cloud forest of Monteverde, a popular research and tourism destination hidden between cordilleras, have warned for years that their woods risk losing their ‘cloud’ status if mist continues to recede.[2] Some scientists say it’s already happening, and models expect mist to contract further, here and elsewhere in the tropics.

Witnessing these changes requires years of attention, something buzzing 21st century urban lives lack. I have been going to that hillside for three decades, first as a boy to visit my grandparents and later, at eight years old, when my family moved there. Still, it took me years to notice. There are many changes I’ve certainly missed, there and elsewhere. These observations are more natural for rural people living in close contact with nature. Academic literature likes to call them ‘front-line communities’. The media sometimes refers to them as victims. They are just people living in harm’s way.

In August, I spoke with bug collectors in north-western Costa Rica. They have collected caterpillars and other insects for research purposes for almost as long as I’ve been alive. They spoke of dwindling rivers, disappearing larvae and hotter days. It’s only people who live in cities that don’t believe in climate change, one of them told me. 50 km to the west work the naturalists who sounded the alarm about insect decline within protected areas. ‘It’s all happening too fast,’ cried one of them, Dr Winnie Hallwachs. Her only hope, she said, was that, at this pace people wouldn’t be able to ignore the changes for much longer.

Half-way across the country, park rangers at the coastal Cahuita National Park in the Caribbean say the beach is dozens of meters shorter than a couple of decades ago. My family has visited that park for almost thirty years and I remember the amazing hike around its peninsula. This year I was confronted by the coastline’s erosion when the ranger told us it was too treacherous to walk. The beach had been washed away by the waves.

Elsewhere in the world, the Icelandic Okjokull glacier had its funeral last August,[3] Indigenous communities in the Amazon region are first-hand witnesses to its destruction, and coastal communities that rely on coral reefs, or in Arctic areas that rely on ocean ice, are under threat. The danger is surpassing old frontlines, and reaching further.

Witnessing the Anthropocene

In a 2013 essay, anthropologist Dr Peter Rudiak-Gould explored the contours of the ‘climate visibility’ argument. His central question was whether global climate change could be witnessed first-hand with the ‘naked senses’. He drew insights from 19 months in the Marshall Islands studying how people there understood and responded to the threat posed by global warming and rising waters to their lifestyle. Rudiak-Gould suggests that climate change is visible to front-line communities, while, by definition, invisible to ivory tower academics.

He believes we need to find a middle ground and make climate change visible. Faced with many of the political and epistemological tensions around climate change — Can citizens’ experiences inform science? Should experts have louder voices? Who should we listen to? — Rudiak-Gould suggests we bring climate change closer. ‘If Londoners do not care about climate change, bring them photographs of a melting Arctic,’ he writes, ‘show them documentaries of a sinking Tuvalu, or broadcast to them local voices from an eroding Alaskan island.’ This, however, may feed into the narrative of front-line communities as ‘climate change canaries’, and therefore imply that climate change isn’t felt in cities. Rudiak-Gould admits that this ‘making climate change visible’ approach ‘end[s] up as the worst of both worlds.’

Years later, his questions fall increasingly flat. His prescriptions are now a reality, although an unplanned one. The human impact on our planet has forcefully been made visible to city dwellers in Europe, Asia and North America where record temperatures and floods explain climate change better than most news stories.
In the suburbs of my hometown, San Jose, the absence of mist and bugs suddenly transformed that mundane bus stop into an observation post. It is painfully obvious that the fireflies are gone. It is clear climate change is happening right here, in my privileged urban landscape, where the grayness of the city has deluded us for so long. But things are changing. We are all entering the frontline.