Last month, I wrote a piece, “My Extreme World and (Un)Welcome to It,” about the shock of finding myself in what might be thought of as World War III, or perhaps World War(m) III; that is, already living in a country experiencing unbelievably extreme weather. July had just been declared the warmest month ever recorded in human history. And that was before Tennessee experienced historically record-breaking rainfall and flooding; the Caldor fire — an unstoppable inferno of flames and smoke — descended on Lake Tahoe; and Hurricane Ida swept across the ever hotter waters of the Gulf of Mexico, another result of climate change, suddenly powering up from a category 1 to a category 4 hurricane to blast New Orleans with 150 mile per hour winds. (Amid sweltering end-of-summer heat there, forget air conditioning, tap water, or refrigerators for possibly weeks to come.) And then it even came north to clobber New York City and the Northeast.
I started that mid-August piece with the California mega-blaze, the Dixie Fire, one of 100 across the West at the time. It was sweeping through northern parts of that state and making headlines nationally. (Weeks later, as I write this, it’s still blazing, having burned more than 800,000 acres of land.) It had essentially obliterated a small town, Greenville, where I had spent time in the 1970s. As I wrote, “Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived.”
That put me back in touch with my old pal, journalist Jane Braxton Little, who’s written today’s vivid TomDispatch piece on what it feels like to be a climate refugee. (Her house, in fact, survived in devastated Greenville, though her office elsewhere in town was left in ashes.) You may know climate refugees, too, if, for instance, you happen to be friends with someone who fled New Orleans as Hurricane Ida approached (and whom the governor of that state has begged not to return home yet). Or maybe you have a friend among the tens of thousands of people who had to flee the Lake Tahoe area as the devastating Caldor Fire bore down on them. It’s long been clear that, on a planet where someday whole regions may become uninhabitable, such refugees, in the tens or hundreds of millions, will become the everyday reality of our world. Consider, then, Little’s account and take a deep breath. It could be you or me next. Tom
The Dixie Fire Disaster and Me
Can My Town Rebuild After Losing It All?
GREENVILLE, CA — At 10 a.m. on July 22nd, I interviewed a New York University professor about using autonomous robots, drones, and other unmanned devices to suppress structural and wildland fires. I sent the interview to an online transcription service, walked down the steps of my second-floor office and a block to the Greenville post office, where I mailed a check to California Fair Plan for homeowners’ fire insurance. I then drove 25 miles to a dental appointment. I was lucky to make it home before burning debris closed the roads.
That night I became a climate refugee, evacuated from my house thanks to the Dixie Fire. Since then, it's scorched a landscape nearly the size of Delaware, destroyed 678 houses and decimated several communities in Indian Valley, where I've been for 46 years. One of them was Greenville, California, a town founded in the Gold Rush era of the nineteenth century, where I happen to live. I never imagined myself among the 55 million people worldwide whose lives have already been upended by climate change. Maybe no one does until it happens, even though we're obviously the future for significant parts of humanity. Those of us who acknowledge the climate disaster -- especially those who write about it -- may be the last to picture ourselves fleeing the catastrophes scientists have been predicting.
Read More