As activist Bill McKibben put
it, "We've simply got to slow down the climate crisis."
Wednesday, October 30, 2019
With wildfires raging across
California on Wednesday—and with portions of the state living under an
unprecedented "Extreme Red Flag Warning" issued by the National
Weather Service due to the severe conditions—some climate experts are openly
wondering if this kind of harrowing "new normal" brought on by the
climate crisis could make vast regions of the country entirely uninhabitable.
Lack of rain coupled with
powerful Santa Ana winds in the state, some gusting with hurricane-level force,
have left officials warning residents in many communities that the worst
is yet to come even as firefighters already report being
stretched to the max.
Reflecting on the current and
recent devastating fires in California, climate activist Bill McKibben wrote in
an op-ed for The Guardian Tuesday that what the state has been
experiencing "starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal"
for both residents and victims as well as those witnessing the destruction from
afar.
Citing an article in the San
Francisco Chronicle published Tuesday—which described how the fires had
"intensified fears that parts of California had become almost too
dangerous to inhabit"—McKibben wrote: "Read that again: the local
paper is on record stating that part of the state is now so risky that its
citizens might have to leave."
Writing for The
Atlantic, journalist Annie Lowery detailed the dynamics leading increasing
numbers of people to believe the state has become "unlivable":
Wildfires and lack of
affordable housing—these are two of the most visible and urgent crises facing
California, raising the question of whether the country's dreamiest, most
optimistic state is fast becoming unlivable. Climate change is turning it into
a tinderbox; the soaring cost of living is forcing even wealthy families into
financial precarity. And, in some ways, the two crises are one: The housing
crunch in urban centers has pushed construction to cheaper, more peripheral
areas, where wildfire risk is greater.
The state's "housing
crisis has exacerbated its wildfire crisis, and its wildfire crisis has
exacerbated its housing crisis," explained Lowery, and that "vicious
cycle is nowhere near ending."
For many
critics, the state's largest utility PG&E remains a chief corporate
culprit in the mess. As Common Dreams has reported, the company's has
failed to adequately respond to the increased fire dangers—choosing to reward
investors and seek profits instead of making the kind of changes and safety
investments that communities and experts have demanded.
Meanwhile, as the
following Now This video details, the scenes created by the
California wildfires in recent weeks depict a hellscape fueled
by the climate crisis—the scale and destruction of which fulfill some of
the dire warnings scientists have been making for years:
In response to the video,
climate activist group Friends of the Earth declared:
"Thanks to the climate crisis, this is the new normal in California. To
save lives, communities and wildlife, we must #ActOnClimate."
After a new fire broke out in
Simi Valley on Wednesday, fire crews spent the day protecting—among other homes
and structures—the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library.
Speaking to Democracy
Now! on Tuesday, Leah Stokes, assistant professor of political science at
the University of California, Santa Barbara, criticized the corporate media for
ignoring the role of the climate crisis in the fires and explained that the
scientific research about what's happening in California is crystal clear.
"There is research that
says that fires have gotten 500% more risky as a result of climate change and
that two times more area has burned because of climate change,"
Stokes explained.
"We know that the drought that California has recently come out of was
also caused by climate change. And yet some of these deeper stories about what
is happening in California, what is happening across the United States with
climate change, are not told by the media."
In California, the threat to
residents and wildlife as well as the loss of property has been devastating.
As The New York Times reported Tuesday:
California's
catastrophic wildfires have
not discriminated between rich and poor. In recent years tens of thousands of
people lost their homes, from trailer parks to mansions. But the aftermath of
the fires has produced a spectrum of misery and recovery, ranging from the
wealthy, who with insurance money rebuilt houses sometimes worth more than the
ones that burned, to those who lost everything and years later still have
nothing.
Like access to quality
education and clean
water, natural disasters are another prism through which California's vast
income inequalities can be viewed.
A lawyerly knowledge of the
peculiarities of the insurance industry, a pool of savings to fall back on, and
the time and grit to deal with the state's labyrinthine regulations have helped
some in California bounce back from the infernos. Others have not been so
lucky.
For example, 44-year-old
Gina Wheeler "lost her uninsured trailer that she rented on family
land" in the Camp Fire that devastated Paradise,
California and the surrounding area late last year.
"Every place I've ever
set foot in has been touched by fire," Wheeler told the Times.
"I don't think anybody that's not gone through this will ever, ever
understand what it's like to lose your entire community."
"I can't even describe
the empty feeling that we have," she said. "I talk friends and family
members out of suicide, and they talk me out of it."
Jenn Wilcox, who worked at
residential care facility in Paradise and lost the uninsured cabin where she
lived, has also struggled in the year since the fire. "I'm a
refugee," she said. "I'm broke."
This week, PBS aired
its one-hour documentary, titled "Fire in
Paradise," which details what happened on November 8 of last year as
the flames ripped through the California town. While the community was not
unfamiliar with the threat of wildfires—and had done more than most, local
officials claimed, to prepare for such an emergency—the episode details just
how quickly the strength of the fire overwhelmed detailed evacuation plans and
made fighting the flames an impossible task.
Watch the trailer:
At the conclusion of the film,
Capt. Matt McKenzie, a member of California Fire Station 36, offers an ominous
warning in the context of what the people of Paradise suffered that day and
what scientists say are conditions across the country that will make wildfires
more frequent and more ferocious in the decades ahead.
"Everything was perfect
that day for a massive, destructive incident to do what it did and it's in
place everywhere—everywhere in California, Arizona, Nevada, Washington,
Oregon," McKenzie says. "And you don't even wanna think about what's
next. Can it be worse than that? And the answer is: Yes."
In his op-ed, McKibben said
the idea that California may one day be a place where fewer and fewer people
can live should come "as no real surprise" to anyone who has been
paying attention to global trends and the warnings of scientists.
"My most recent
book, Falter, centered on the notion that the climate crisis was making
large swaths of the world increasingly off-limits to humans," McKibben
wrote. "Cities in Asia and the Middle East where the temperature now
reaches the upper 120s—levels so high that the human body can't really cool
itself; island nations (and Florida beaches) where each high tide washes
through the living room or the streets; Arctic villages relocating because,
with sea ice vanished, the ocean erodes the shore."
Speaking with USA
Today, Beth Fulton, a resident of Sebastopol who was evacuated this week from
her town as the Kincade Fire approached, said more and more people are deciding
to leave the area and never come back.
"People are naturally
resilient, but to deal with this year after year can be traumatizing,"
Fulton said. She explained that several people who lost their homes in previous
fires moved off to New Mexico and Oregon.
"This seems like it'll be
a yearly thing," she said,
"and some people say, 'I've had enough.'"
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