California, Warming, Denial, Drought And October 2017; Things They Saved From The Fire
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On the evening of 8 October 2017, severe gusts of dry winds blew across desiccated grasses and diseased trees caused by years of excessive heat and drought. A great flood had fattened grasses into combustible fuel. The wind knocked down power lines, which lit the trees on fire. The firestorm destroyed a thousand homes in a single neighbourhood. Neighbours pounded on neighbours’ doors, honking horns, trying to rescue one another. It took hours to leave town. Most people reported that drivers were calm, though a few resorted to the sidewalk, the median, and the opposite side of the road. One woman managed to stuff her pony in the back seat of her Honda Accord. Another woman had to choose between saving her car or her horse. She jumped on her horse in her pyjamas and rode away from the flames. The fires burned for over a week, killed 44 people, and destroyed more than 10,000 structures and square miles of land. It was the most destructive outbreak of fires in California’s history.
During the fires I took walks, and I tried to read the paper falling from the sky. I wanted to collect the scattered notes, but they disintegrated when I picked them up, leaving the smell of poison on the tips of my fingers. The paper pieces lay curled like chocolate shavings. They were all the size of my palm. I was looking for stories, but I could only find information. Bible pages (sections from Genesis); phone bills; pieces of romance novels (so many of those); perfectly preserved letters so meticulously burned around the edges that they looked the way letters do when you burn them in fourth grade to make them look romantic; gold-embossed stationery with someone’s name written over and over in tiny letters at 45-degree angles; musical scores; Swedish package-tour vacation brochures; pieces of phone books (people still have phone books); a kid’s homework (he did poorly); journal pages (so many pages of people talking to themselves); as well as tar paper and bits of insulation burned until thin as paper.
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The night after the grief workshop I got into an argument with my boyfriend. “You should get out of the Silicon Valley rat race and dedicate yourself to transitioning to a green economy,” I heard myself saying. “You’re a scientist. You can help develop technologies. This article says we have to treat climate change like we are fighting the second world war. For example, we have to start movements where everyone paints their roofs white to try to dissipate the heat before it reaches a rise of 1C. We have to cut carbon emissions now,” I said. “Here’s an article about what we can do to stay below a one-degree rise. There are solutions. If you were to really internalise that we are the first generation to see the effects of climate change and the last generation to be able to do anything about it, would you change your life?”
Even while I spoke, I could hear myself sounding like a maniac. I kept reminding myself that people don’t respond well to threats, to cajoling, to end-of-the-world scenarios. But I couldn’t help it. I was in a bad mood because it was so hot outside. “Yes, it’s the right thing to do,” my boyfriend finally said, calmly. “But if it were really that bad, as bad as you say, don’t you think Google would be doing something about it?”
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https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/04/california-burning-life-among-the-wildfires-climate-change
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