Inferno
As wildfires are transformed into year-round challenges, the carbon they release only further contributes to emissions from other sources, making it that much more difficult to halt rising temperatures.
As wildfires are transformed into year-round challenges, the carbon they release only further contributes to emissions from other sources, making it that much more difficult to halt rising temperatures.
By carrying both grief and gratitude, we seem to be transforming at a rate matching the surrounding land.
With the worsening of forest fires and the spike in deforestation as a result of attacks by Bolsonaro’s government, volunteer forest firefighter brigades started to form around the country.
It’s as if we exist in a thick haze, trying to understand how to piece together the effects of climate change, a mutating coronavirus and connected threats.
Across continents and climates, uncontrollable and destructive wildfires are becoming an expected part of annual calendars. This year has been a case in point.
Even as communities begin picking themselves up after the devastation, West Coast climate activists are experimenting with what an effective response to such crises looks like.
As wildfires rage across California, it saddens me that Indigenous peoples’ millennia-long practice of cultural burning has been ignored in favor of fire suppression.
It all happened so fast. The temptation was to shut down and succumb to the shock. Instead, a group formed in neighboring Ashland and started to figure out how to help.
There remains a hope that once we get past the economic and social effects of the pandemic, all of us will be able to return to something resembling normal life before the pandemic—even if it is a “new normal” marked by heightened vigilance and protection against infectious disease … But the date for this recovery to a new normal seems to keep getting postponed.
We are in the midst of an unmitigated natural disaster here in Oregon and on the West Coast. I struggle to find the words to express what’s happening and the toll it’s taking – on our natural treasures, on homes and businesses, and on our collective psyches.
In 2019, intense fires sprung up on every inhabited continent on the planet. In just one year, 250,000 fires across the world resulted in almost 40 million hectares of land being burnt.
As the smoke continues to blanket our state, we call on insurers and other institutional investors to be a powerful force for good, and to end the madness of continued extraction. Our ability to thrive on this, our only planet, demands it of them.