Apocalypse has landed on the western landscape. The bay area is so thick with smoke, it breaks everything Camera sensor For weather models.
The situation is compared to the real and imaginary future. Blade Runner And Blade Runner 2049 Both have been Touchpoints There was torment because of the scenes of the future city. Other reference Martian, A future science fiction movie set entirely on another planet (although astronomers point it out) Venus and Titan Is also a perfectly acceptable analog). And the situation in the West, in part., We all soon have been drawn as a glimpse of the future of climate Face.
The 2020 fire season has seen time and space resonate, the present and the future, the earth and space colliding like a rubber band instant. But I can’t help resolving the resilience of the present and the past, and the fate of those who suffocate under the blood-red sky, with the decisions made in the board room around the Slick Mahogany table. Our environment and forests are full of those decisions, and we forget them at our own risk.
Let’s start with the forest side of the equation. Long before there was a National Forest Service, indigenous groups managed land using fire as an integral part of the landscape. But the U.S. After the government evicted them from their lands, things began to unravel. After that, a catastrophic fire in the Northern Rockies in 1910 changed everything from a big burn.
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Eventually, the federal government enforced the 10 a.m. rule, declaring all fires to be contained, you guessed it, the morning after the second day of sightings. The head of the Forest Service at the time was William Greeley Exactly That fire was evidence that “Satan was working.” “My burning conviction is that firefighting is the first job of American foresters,” he said.
This, in its face, was a matter of public safety as communities expanded into forests and 87 people, including a number of firefighters, were killed by large burns. But basically it was cool, hard economics. The mission of the Forest Service is (emphasis added) “health, diversity and Productivity“Land. One of the main pillars of the agency is leasing land for timber.
The firefighters, then, were trying to save the forest as much as cutting it down by throwing in some racism (Greeley took an indigenous approach “Pite Forestry”). The Forest Service was hardly alone in this; Former Wisconsin defense director who served around Greeley’s time Noticed That “every foot of land we have as a nation is worth it, it’s a potential utility for all.” And the mentality of making money from land still continues today. In 2017, companies made cuts 9 179 million The cost of timber on forest service land. While the agency and other land managers have improved it Identify the value of fire On the landscape, forests ready for burning have had built-up fuel for decades.
Then there is the climate side of the equation. This you probably know a little better. But let’s really let the blood flow and because honestly, anger experiences are more fun than the hearing experience I just had.
Fossil fuel companies spent decades risking burning their products. This Anti-campaign Extensive from Exxon, Chevron and others and Continues to this day.
Fossil fuel companies have received assistance Powerful politiciansStopping any meaningful atmosphere action, especially Republicans. These companies have turned from softcore rejection into a softer and lighter form of refusal. Party line Climate change is real now, but we’ll stay Nice. Perhaps no better distillation of this mentality is expressed below than Exxon’s former CEO and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. 2012 interview:
“If you use this, I would call it a fair scientific approach, we believe the result is managed. They need to get us started to make policy or more policy efforts to adapt. …
And as humans, as a species, that’s why we’re all here. We’ve spent our entire lives adapting, right? So we will adapt to this. ”
I’m sure people who have had their homes burned down or who breathe the most polluted air on earth agree, Rex.
Policymakers had plenty of advice on how to avoid the boredom we now have. The most famous is James Hanson, a former NASA climate scientist Warned Congress in 1988Is, but it is the only warning or too far away as soon as possible. Here’s a snippet of testimony about the dangers of going hard on a fossil fuel burning object more than 30 years ago:
We haven’t reached that stage yet, but we’ve seen California turn into a deeper, more dangerous drought this decade that has helped fuel fires. And the risk of further ominous Multi-decade “megadr” ra “ Rise there and in Texas, as Revelle predicts. Despite this, Congress has done nothing to take action.
Oh, and then there are developers who have attracted people for decades to the Wildland-Urban interface and local governments that have enabled the spread. From 1990 to 2010, 13.4 million homes were built The fiery landscape. And half of all houses burned down by fire Rebuild in five years, Putting people back in harm’s way.
While it is tempting to look ahead and warn of a more burning future, looking to the past has never been more important. We need to understand exactly how we ended up here and who continues to advocate for what has been captured by special interests what the futurist Alex Stefan says. “Hunter delayOnly then can we find a way out of the spider’s web that has trapped us in this moment of crisis and the fight for the future will not compare us to a constant distopia.
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