(As Hurricane Irma Rolls its way up the western shore of Florida, Naomi Klein’s disheartening yet elegantly crafted piece on the pacific northwest’s wildfires reminds us of the root cause of Neptune’s fury, our insatiable appetite for FOSSIL fuels. It is a long but important and timely read and I have quoted from it Rather more liberally than I might otherwise.)
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Naomi Klein has a love affair with British Columbia’s “Sunshine Coast”, it is where her parents live and where her grandparents spent their last days. All through the bitter winter of our collective discontent and into this spring and early summer of burgeoning and discomforting new growth of outrage and catastrophe, she and her husband Avi had promised their five year old son that they would all take a break from the increased workload and stress that a proper response to the multitudinous drumpf maladministration’s solecisms had demanded.
“B.C. in August” they had promised the youngster, painting a glorious mental diorama in his mind of kayacking and camping, of nights enthralled under a crystal clear Canadian sky full of chatoyant blue and yellow stars, of days spent splashing and frolicking, picking blackberries and ignoring, if only for a few precious days, the troubled world they had left behind.
But something is terribly wrong. The hundreds of wild fires that blanketed the North American Western Coast from Los Angeles to Prince Rupert cast a pall that threatens to ruin their holiday.
“This break (“self-care” in the parlance of my younger co-workers) took on mythic qualities in our house. Which may be why I am a bit slow to clue-in to the seriousness of the fires — and the smoke.
On the first day, I’m sure the sun will burn it away by noon. By evening, I announce that it will blow over by morning, revealing at least a glimpse of actual sky. For the first week, I greet each day hopefully, convinced that the drab light peeking through the curtains is just morning mist. Every day I am wrong.
The placid weather forecast that seemed so promising before we traveled turns out to be a curse. Sunny, windless days mean that the smoke, once it is upon us, parks over our heads like an unmoveable outdoor ceiling. Day after day after day.”
It was disconcerting. The “Fake Weather” forecast she had consulted back East had promised fair skies and sunny days.
Not this.
Naomi’s allergies act up.
Toma breaks out in hives.
Compounding the drear, their bodies rebel against the effects of living in Beijing like levels of atomized carbon.
The cloud closes in...
“A week into the whiteout, the world begins to feel small. Life beyond the smoke starts to seem like a rumor. At the ocean’s edge, we can usually look across the Salish Sea to Vancouver Island; now we strain to see an outcropping of rock a few hundred feet from shore.
I’ve been on this coast for whole winters when we barely saw the sun. I learned to love the steely beauty, the infinite shades of grey chiseled in the mountains. The low sky and the movement of the mist. But this is different. There’s a lifeless quality to the smoke, it just sits there, motionless and monotone.”
Even the animals seem affected, the seals slowed in surfacing and joyless, the eagles perfunctory in flight rather than soaring in splendor.
Naomi, as is her wont, autopsies the causes of this disaster, and its consequence to persons and peoples - from the young migrant who dies picking other folks’ blueberries, to the indigenous Tsilhqot’in, whose lands are threatened by the tar sand oil pipeline Justin Trudeau is hellbent on building - scrupulously, but never so studious as to neglect the elegance of her writing.
“We paddleboard in the smoke and act like it’s mist. We bring beers and ciders to the beach and remark that, on the upside, you barely need sunscreen at all.
Sitting on the beach under that fake, milky sky, I suddenly flash to those images of families sunning themselves on oil-soaked beaches in the midst of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. And it hits me: They are us. Refusing to let a wildfire interfere with our family vacation.
During disasters, you hear a lot of praise for human resilience. And we are a remarkably resilient species. But that’s not always good. It seems we can get used to almost anything, even the steady annihilation of our own habitat.”
It is a majestic, if disturbing read.
