Prepping for Fire Season: A Short Series
How do we ground ourselves as we experience the consequences of climate change?
A few weeks ago I wrote about trying to look more directly at the challenging future ahead of us, reframing the “no future in an era of disastrous climate change” used in some climate movement rhetoric to “a different and difficult future,” then looking at the story of one person whose life didn’t turn out as they expected due to chronic illness. (See “Living Through the Unlivable,” from April 30.)
I have no doubt that the future will be difficult. I also know that I do not wish to live through the upcoming years either in a state of denial, or in a state consisting only of fury and grief, jealousy and fear. Not that those emotions will be absent, but I am seeking ways to look them in the face, that I might also look beyond them. I am looking, as well, to learn from the many, many others whose lives are models of grace in the face of affliction and altered hopes. Such models are everywhere. They might be those who have suffered battle or famine. They might also just be poets who can no longer walk through the woods, though once they loved to do so.
So how do we do this? How do we reckon with the altered future that is already happening all around us?
One reason why it can be hard to face up to climate change as it happens around us is just how big in scope it feels, and how many different ways change will happen. Those trying to bring attention to the need to take action often play up this broad scope, and while that has been needed for a better analysis and understanding of the situation at hand, it can be difficult, on an individual level, to process all that in a way that doesn’t trigger basic fight, flight, or freeze responses. Even that fight response, which we might see as useful in such a moment, can’t be a place we stay forever, and just as many of us admit to looking away or freezing instead. How do we move through these and stay emotionally grounded?
I think one possible way is to toggle back and forth from that grand ‘it’s all going to change’ analysis to the more specific changes, breaking them off piece by piece and taking the time to look at them from a few different angles. Getting comfortable enough with them, if you will, that they lose their initial shock. Having enough familiarity that panic doesn’t dominate, and we allow ourselves to sit with some of the other emotions many of us have also been suppressing (grief and loss, for instance).
So what I would like to do, in some upcoming pieces, is to play with our perspective on some of the big and scary changes we’re seeing. To pick them up, not as heavy burdens, but as interesting stones paving the path on which we must travel. You can lift a stone up—even one with some sharp edges that necessitate careful handling—and rotate it and hold it away to squint at it and then bring it closer to marvel at its texture and in doing so know something about the land you’re about to cross, something you couldn’t see when all the jagged rocks were assembled in an uninterpretable mess on the ground in front of you. I think here of learning that one doesn’t simply wear sneakers when walking on some kinds of volcanic rock; the sharp black edges can slice away such flimsy soles. But one can pick up the shiny black glass, and in that moment pause to enjoy its dangerous beauty, and choose to change into boots.
The road may have seemed long and difficult on the feet, but such a pause and examination can give you new understanding, and if nothing else, tell you what tools you may want for your travel.
Given the places towards which I tend to gravitate—often forested or arid places in the Western half of Turtle Island—the effect of climate change that is arguably already having the most impact on people that I know personally is fire. So I’m going to start there. Tomorrow I’ll share an essay I wrote earlier this spring as something of a personal meditation on fire to ready myself for fire season, which I expect might be a doozy this year.
Fire is a useful starting place for this experiment as it’s also a phenomenon where we see the spread of emotional responses at play: some move cross-country, exhausted after another smokey summer, while others resolutely keep their fingers crossed that they can keep the flames at bay and build another cabin up in the mountains.
Our fear of fire is already literally triggering flight. But surely we cannot all squeeze into the state of Vermont, a place I hear, on an anecdotal basis, as the destination for more and more relocating Westerners. As a story in WIRED from last month notes, while we don’t really have good data yet on the scale of climate migration nationally, it’s surely taking place, and there are some clear places where people are headed. Vermont is among them, along with the rest of the Northeast and Appalachia—the places least likely to be touched by wildfire, as is well-illustrated by this map, from risk-assessment organization First Street Foundation, featured over at the New York Times.
As the accompanying article makes clear, it’s not just the western states but the Southwest in particular, that has the highest number of homes at risk of burning. Yet, despite this, the Southwest has been experiencing some of the biggest population gains in recent years.
This is our emotional split made plain, with the slow drift of climate migrants already making their way to new places, while others ignore what’s staring them straight in the face, and head toward some daydream of year-round sunshine. The NYT wraps up its coverage of growing fires and the building boom in southern Utah with this:
That construction is unlikely to slow down. Last week, Mr. Sorenson drove past the spot where the 2020 fire was stopped. Just below the fire line, a developer has plans to build more homes. Mr. Sorenson said he expected those plans to go ahead. He pointed to the land that almost burned.
“This,” Mr. Sorenson said, “is all going to be new houses.”
This is the strange dichotomy I hope we can leave behind: the one in which our only potential responses are to leave the places we love or deny the likely harm they will surely experience. (Denial, we must be clear, is not only done outrightly—building at the fire line—but also through the compartmentalization of our fears, which we set aside in order to make day-to-day decisions in the routines to which we have become accustomed, and hence never make time to address.)
I haven’t yet lived through a fire myself, though I’ve been in the situation of keeping tabs on fire perimeters as others I know receive evacuation warnings, and I’ve been on trail as the Forest Service has shown up and taped off the path directly behind me, fires ready to climb the ridges I’d only just come over. I want to be respectful, though, of those who have lived through what can be a traumatic event, so I’ll be posting content warnings for some of these upcoming pieces.
Hopefully I can create some space for us to explore questions like: What happens if we pause to look at fire without fleeing or freezing? What can the experience of fire offer us? What happens when we sit with the loss? Do we mentally write off places that have burned, think of them as ‘gone,’ when there might be a moment of connecting with that land instead? Can we imagine living through, or living with, fire, rather than simply suppressing it or running away from it?
Check out tomorrow’s essay for a first attempt at trying to emotionally reorient to the experience of fire. And in the meantime, I’d love to hear from you in the comments: how are you grounding yourself in the face of another fire season? How do you prepare, both practically and emotionally? What most concerns you about upcoming years of heavy fire?