Fire Weather

Fire Weather

F or years I’ve known that the climate crisis will soon be upon us… well, it’s now happening to my friends and family and it’s just as nasty as predicted. I have a friend in Spokane had to leave his home as the fires headed in his direction; lucky for him he is now able to return to a home that did not burn down like the 1000 others that did burn to ashes. My daughter from Kelowna decided months ago that the just the risk of smoke from fires made it a smart move to live for a month in our cottage just south of Ottawa; boy is she ever glad she did as she sees the news of smoke and fires in the Okanagan region. Today I am just going to share some posts and poem I read which I hope will allow to share in the anguish that folks out west are feeling as their regular lives and sense of safety are shattered by what feels like never ending summer fires. Their lives are changing. We need to be in solidarity with them and help them as best we can. I hope that you will feel what they feel and use that emotion to change how you think and act.

I was born in Spokane and as I see it burn I cry out in pain. Meanwhile, here in Portland where I now live the sky is smoky with grief.

The symptoms of robbing nature for profit all around us.

All around the globe, the earth is on fire. And the air is burnt.

It’s hard to post. It’s hard to pray. It’s hard to be inspiring and speak of resilience. But I can’t stay silent. So I witness. I feel my cramped heart, and wonder why it hurts so much. So I pray… for clean air and flowing water, for balance and protection and miracles. To be alive here and watch the world burn takes a certain bravery I never wanted to muster. Let this be a thread to hold grief. Let us cry together. Maybe another day the inspiration returns… but some days, like todat, are just for acknowledging the horrors of destruction.-tia mia

 

Spokane just watched wildfires tear through entire neighborhoods, destroying roughly 700 structures and forcing around 65,000 people to evacuate in what the mayor called the worst natural disaster the region has ever faced. According to NBC News, the fires broke out over the weekend with almost no warning, fueled by dry conditions and wind gusts up to 35 mph, and as of Monday they were still zero percent contained. Homes exploded into flames one after another, families fled with pets and whatever they could grab, and firefighters are still checking for people who are missing. This isn’t a freak event anymore. It’s just August in America now.

And Spokane is only the latest entry on a list that keeps getting longer every single year. Whether it’s California, Colorado, Hawaii, or now Washington state, we’ve settled into a grim rhythm of watching entire towns turn to ash and then moving on to the next one. Fire seasons that used to be a few months long now stretch nearly year round, and the fires themselves are burning hotter, faster, and closer to where people actually live.

It’s not just us either. Europe has been absolutely getting cooked this summer. France just broke its own annual wildfire record by tens of thousands of hectares, with over 220,000 people evacuated near Bordeaux in what may be the country’s largest peacetime evacuation ever. Spain, Portugal, Greece and Turkey have all been dealing with their own infernos, and researchers say Europe’s burned area this year is second only to 2022. Temperatures across the continent are now running about 2.5 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels, and meteorologists warn the danger window is stretching well past its usual summer peak.

This is the new normal, plain and simple. Not an anomaly, not a rough patch, but the baseline we’re going to live with unless something actually changes.

For decades, politicians on both sides have hemmed and hawed about climate action because they say it costs too much, that transitioning away from fossil fuels would hurt the economy. Meanwhile trump and his allies have spent years mocking climate science outright and gutting the very agencies meant to prepare us for this. But look around. Rebuilding hundreds of homes, deploying thousands of firefighters, evacuating whole cities, recovering from droughts, floods, and increasingly violent storms costs a fortune too, and that bill keeps coming due, every single year, whether we’re ready to pay it or not. – David Stebbing’s  Aug.3 Facebook

And if you still feel safe, and if you still feel unaffected, and if you still think you will escape this or some other horror – I beg you to share in the pain of those suffering now so that we can all work together to escape the trap we set for ourselves, the trap being the very socio-political-economic trap called modernity and “progress”. Remember, human beings have inflicted great horrors upon each other I the past and hopefully learned to not repeat them so I hope and pray that we can apply these lessons learned to the current horror we are inflicting upon creation. Otherwise, we will not have learned the lessons of the Holocaust captured in this short poem by the German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller .

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

————————————

First the coral reefs died, and I did not speak out—
Because I did not live near the reefs.

Then the forests burned just north of where I live, and I did not speak out—
Because the winds did not blow the smoke my way.

Then the herbicides and pesticides and endocrine mimicker chemicals killed the farmers nearby, and I did not speak out—
Because I remained healthy.

Then Mother Nature came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Note:

the title is I used is that of the book Fire Weather by John Vaillant.

If you still don’t “get it” this book is a must read.