Our power is back on, but it may go back off shortly. Everything smells like smoke. People are wearing masks on BART. This is what it will be like every year, from now on.
I keep thinking of something @dwallacewells wrote in the Uninhabitable Earth:
I keep thinking of something @dwallacewells wrote in the Uninhabitable Earth:
"Especially those who have imbibed several centuries of Western triumphalism tend to see the story of human civilization as an inevitable conquest of the earth, rather than the saga of an insecure culture, like mold, growing haphazardly and unsurely upon it."
"That fragility, which pervades now everything humans might do on this planet, is the great existential insight of global warming."
I'm not saying the California wildfires are all about climate change. They're partly about climate change, partly about political and business decisions. But they are a reminder that our insulation from nature is self-deception, easily torn away.
And of course, climate change itself reflects the same short-sighted political and business decisions that have compounded California's wildfire crisis.
We are not just causing one environmental problem for ourselves. We are causing many, and the damage is cumulative.
We are not just causing one environmental problem for ourselves. We are causing many, and the damage is cumulative.
