WORLDFIRE - Chapter 16, Part I
A Green Fire Rising
“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes, something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac
When it comes down to it, I think we are all just trying to find our way home. We didn’t know it when we first set out, but the path modern society chose to advance, while marvelous in many respects, has led us away from Gaia. It has led the human family to a place where we are now facing the fire. I mean this both metaphorically and literally. Every human being on Earth is literally impacted by a world on fire. And this worldfire has lit a metaphorical green fire in countless climate-awake citizens of conscience, illuminating the darkness so we can navigate the pathway home.
When the history books are written, I believe 2017 and 2018 will go down as the years when America finally embraced climate reality, as evidenced by an explosion of climate activism. What finally woke us up? Part of it was public disgust with the Trump administration’s Neanderthal climate denial. Ideological idiocy has its own way of pointing people to the truth. Idiocy that continues to this day, like the bizarre claim by the former president and self-described “extremely stable genius” that we can prevent wildfires by dampening our forests. But mostly it was a perfect storm of cascading events, one building on top of the other, into a wave so frighteningly ferocious it could no longer be ignored. Most of America is finally feeling a healthy fear of the climate beast we have unleashed. This embrace of climate reality, while belated, is galvanizing record numbers of people to action. It is fanning the flames of hope and fueling the rise of a fierce green fire that may yet save humanity.
We’ll start with the climate wake-up calls. We’ll end with the green fire rising.
Climate Breakdown
Among the major events that contributed to America’s climate awakening in 2017 were three Category 4 hurricanes striking the U.S. First came Hurricane Harvey, hammering Houston and costing the lives of nearly 100 Texans. Then came Hurricane Irma, flattening the Florida Keys and killing nearly 100 Floridians. This was followed by Hurricane Maria, which pummeled Puerto Rico and left a path of destruction that claimed more than 3,000 American lives. Then there were the wildfire wake-up calls. With soaring temperatures in California leading to deeper drought, drier vegetation, less snowpack, and more arid soils–a potent recipe for combustion–more than 9,000 fires burned more than one and a half a million acres that year. Nearly ten million acres burned nationwide. Together, these hurricanes and fires made 2017 the costliest disaster year in U.S. history, leaving 1.6 million Americans displaced.
But it wasn’t just hurricanes and wildfires that shook people awake. As you already know, former President Trump’s infamous decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord set off alarm bells domestically and internationally. Alarms were also sounded in print, like the earth-shattering 2017 New York magazine piece called “The Uninhabitable Earth.” One of the most widely read climate essays ever, author David Wallace-Wells set the table by declaring that “absent a significant adjustment to how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth will likely become close to uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as soon as the end of this century.” Writing that “no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough,” he painted a dystopian picture of the future gleaned from the findings of hundreds of scientific papers and dozens of conversations with scientists (even if other scientists felt that some of his descriptions leaned too heavily on worst case scenarios). Among the terrifying scenarios Wallace-Wells described are human beings being “cooked to death from both inside and out;” mass starvation caused by “unprecedented droughts nearly everywhere food is today produced;” “prehistoric plagues” emerging from the melting ice; “a rolling death smog” suffocating millions; “poisoned oceans;” “perpetual war;” and “permanent economic collapse,” reminding us that “those scenarios… are our schedule.” He further wrote that “more than half of the carbon humanity has exhaled into the atmosphere in its entire history has been emitted in just the past three decades; since the end of World War II, the figure is 85 percent. Which means that, in the length of a single generation, global warming has brought us to the brink of planetary catastrophe, and that the story of the industrial world’s kamikaze mission is also the story of a single lifetime.” Ending his piece on a slightly more upbeat note, he wrote that “climate scientists have a strange kind of faith: We will find a way to forestall radical warming, they say, because we must… For them, the alternative is simply unimaginable.”
Those are some of our 2017 climate wake-up calls. Let’s look at 2018.
In 2018, Hurricane Florence flooded the Carolinas with record-breaking rainfall, followed by Category 4 Hurricane Michael leaving yet another lethal path of destruction, this time in the Florida Panhandle. Abroad, Category 5 Super Typhoon Mangkhut wreaked deadly havoc in the Philippines. Again, were the wildfires. The deadliest was the Camp Fire inferno that consumed the town of Paradise, California, killing 85 people and destroying roughly 14,000 homes. Drought conditions, strong winds, and previous U.S. Forest Service logging of forests adjacent to Paradise helped the Camp Fire spread unusually fast, denying residents precious time to flee. The logging- and climate-fueled firestorm burned so fast it incinerated people trapped in their homes, fleeing in their cars, and running for their lives. The National Weather Service pegged May, June, and July as the “hottest on record” in the lower 48.
If anyone would have occasion to hold a grudge against fire, it would be me, having lost nearly all of my worldly possessions to one. But I don’t. Fire is a natural element. Fire serves a purpose. Minus a weirdly wet spring, climate-driven summer and fall drought, lack of winter snow, and persistent hurricane-force winds the day of the disaster, the Marshall Fire would almost certainly have been a containable grassfire. Climate breakdown is what super-charged those flames and turned me into a climate refugee. As explained by one of the world’s top wildfire authorities, Chad Hanson, in his eye-opening book, SMOKESCREEN (which should be on every forester’s bookshelf): “[F]ire-adapted forest ecosystems evolved with fire and depend on it. Excluding fire from these ecosystems is like trying to keep rain out of a rainforest.” Hanson reminds us that mixed-intensity forest fires are natural and have been occurring since time immemorial. He also reminds us that forests regenerate naturally after rejuvenating wildfires. Did you know that wildlife actually thrive in forests that have experienced fire? Many species depend on that fire. Fire is an element as natural as the wind and the rain. Mother Nature knows what she’s doing.
And lest you buy into the U.S. Forest Service’s propaganda that so-called forest “thinning” projects protect communities from wildfires, let me disabuse you of that false notion: logging dries out forests, compacts the soil, and removes natural windbreaks, all of which increase, not decrease, fire intensity. As explained by Hanson, “the more trees removed from the forest through logging operations, the faster and hotter fires tend to burn.” Logging isn’t the solution. Logging is the problem. In his myth-busting book, Hanson does a masterful job of piercing the smokescreen around so-called forest “thinning.” Did you know that “[a] typical thinning project kills and removes 50 to 70 percent of the trees in a given stand and 20 to 50 percent of the tree biomass and carbon?” That’s not thinning. That’s butchering. Maybe you’re wondering how much carbon is released into the atmosphere from all those wildfires you see on the news. Again, Hanson blows away the smokescreen by sharing that “typically only 1 to 4 percent of tree carbon is consumed in forest fires.” Here’s something else I learned in Hanson’s book: despite all the breathless reporting, the broad scientific consensus is that less wildfires are burning today than burned a century ago.
Weather and climate are the primary drivers of wildfires. And climate breakdown is making the weather more extreme, leading to drier forests and more intense fires. Aided by a century of unnatural fire suppression, severe heatwaves exacerbated by climate chaos are also making fires in the wildland-urban interface zone harder for firefighters to contain. We can’t stop weather- and climate-driven fires, but we can make our communities and homes much more fire-safe. Along with proven measures you can take to reduce the ignitability of your house, you can also create a defensible space zone by annually pruning and reducing combustible vegetation within 100 feet of your home. That, not logging, is how we save homes and lives.
By prioritizing destructive logging and dangerous backcountry firefighting over things that actually help like fire-safing homes and communities, the U.S. Forest Service–incentivized by timber sale profits–is doing the opposite of what it needs to be doing to protect homes and lives. It is doing the opposite of what it must do to keep healthy, carbon-absorbing forests standing. Here are two other inconvenient truths I learned from SMOKESCREEN that the logging industry does not want you to know: soil compaction from heavy machinery alone “can reduce forest carbon sequestration and storage capacity by 30 percent” and “15 percent or more” of carbon storage capacity can additionally be lost “from nutrient removal from the ecosystem” while logging. And that is without even considering the massive carbon emissions resulting from incinerating the mill residue and slash debris from logging operations. By promoting practices that ravage instead of revere our forests, federal and state forest agencies are exacerbating the climate crisis.
Getting back to the 2018 climate wake-up calls, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration tallied 14 weather and climate calamities in 2018 that cost the U.S. economy an estimated $91 billion. For a snapshot of the global price tag of climate breakdown, check out these eye-popping numbers from a report by the anti-poverty group, Christian Aid, tallying the global costs of the most destructive extreme weather events in 2018 [listed by event and estimated cost]:
Event/Estimated Cost
U.S. – Hurricanes Florence & Michael: $32 billion
California, U.S. – Camp & Woolsey Fires: $9-13 billion
Japan – floods: $9.3-12.5 billion
China – floods: $9.3 billion
Europe – drought: $7.5 billion
Argentina – drought: $6 billion
Australia – drought: $5.8-9 billion
Kerala, India – floods: $3.7 billion
Philippines & China – Typhoon Mangkhut: $1-2 billion
Cape Town, South Africa – drought: $1.2 billion
By 2018, the effects of climate breakdown had grown so grim a group of leading climate scientists published a scientific paper called “Hothouse Earth,” warning “that the Earth System may be approaching a planetary threshold that could lock in a continuing rapid pathway toward much hotter conditions—Hothouse Earth… a pathway that could not be reversed, steered, or substantially slowed.” In other words: a point of no return. “Where such a threshold might be is uncertain,” they wrote, “but it could be only decades ahead at a temperature rise of ∼2.0 °C above preindustrial, and thus, it could be within the range of the Paris Accord temperature targets.” Let me repeat that: within the range of the Paris climate accord temperature targets. The authors further asserted that “a deep transformation based on a fundamental reorientation of human values, equity, behavior, institutions, economies, and technologies is required.” Not desired, required.
Another climate wake-up tipping point was passed on December 30, 2018 when NBC’s Meet the Press became the first mainstream news show to devote a full Sunday morning program to the deepening climate crisis. In the “Climate Crisis,” the show’s host, Chuck Todd, hammered another nail in the climate denial coffin when he announced: “We’re not going to give time to climate deniers. The science is settled, even if political opinion is not.” Tragically, this 46-minute show represented almost one-third of all the time the networks devoted to the world’s biggest story on either the nightly news or Sunday morning political programs in 2018.
Then there was the aforementioned 2018 Fourth National Climate Assessment, the congressionally mandated report the Trump administration tried, and failed, to bury. The report began with this stern warning: “Earth’s climate is now changing faster than at any point in the history of modern civilization, primarily as a result of human activities.” It chillingly warned: “Without significant reductions, annual average global temperatures could increase by 9°F (5°C) or more by the end of this century compared to preindustrial temperatures.” That’s heating of 5°C or more.
But the biggest climate wake-up call in 2018 was an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report that flat out scared the crap out of a lot of people. There was a single number in the report that got people’s attention. That number was 12, as in we only have 12 short years in which to act to avert climate catastrophe. The scientist authors asserted with high confidence that this will “require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” What kind of unprecedented changes? 45 percent cuts in carbon emissions globally by 2030 and zero emissions by mid-century. They got the 12 and zero numbers right, but 45 percent cuts by 2030 and zero emissions by 2050 isn’t going to cut it. Here’s why: as alarming as the IPCC report was, the intergovernmental body has a long history of understating the real risks we face. Reacting to the report’s release, climate scientist Michael Mann declared: “To those who say that the #IPCC is alarmist: If anything it is the opposite. Once again, with their latest report, they have been overly conservative (i.e. erring on the side of understating/underestimating the problem).” Mario Molina, who shared a Nobel prize in chemistry for his work on ozone depletion, similarly cautioned that “the IPCC understates a key risk: that self-reinforcing feedback loops could push the climate system into chaos before we have time to tame our energy system, and the other sources of climate pollution.” You don’t have to be a climate scientist to be losing sleep over what all of this means: as ambitious as it is, the IPCC’s climate remedy is nowhere near ambitious enough.
Writing about the IPCC Special Report and its warning that 2°C of global heating would be catastrophic, David Wallace-Wells informed New York magazine readers that we are already on track for twice that level of heating: “As a planet, we are coursing along a trajectory that brings us north of four degrees by the end of the century. The IPCC is right that two degrees marks a world of climate catastrophe. Four degrees is twice as bad as that. And that is where we are headed, at present – a climate hell twice as hellish as the one the IPCC says, rightly, we must avoid at all costs… The only thing that changed, this week, is that the scientists, finally, have hit the panic button… the action needed is at a scale and a speed almost unimaginable to most of us. The IPCC report called it unprecedented. Other activists often see one precedent, in all of human history, citing the model of how the United States prepared for World War II, and calling for a global mobilization of that kind – all of the world’s rivalrous societies and nationalistic governments and self-interested industries organized around the common pursuit of a stable and comfortable climate as though warming was an existential threat. It is.”
This cascade of climate wake-up calls fortunately has a positive flip side, and it is this: climate breakdown is fueling a fierce green fire of civic activism that has the potential to deliver a climate breakthrough. The rise of this green fire is genuine cause for hope.
NOTE: The written form of WORLDFIRE is the authoritative version. Any inadvertent errors in transcribing the recordings are mine and mine alone.