"Not those people. The people who do understand that its happening. Why aren't they panicking? Why aren't they doing something?" I tell her honestly: I don't know.
"Maybe if they lived here," she says, "they would get it."
**********
To live in California is to be fire-touched. If you haven't lost your home, your town, your pets, your family, you probably know someone who has. To live in California is to hike in forests where the trees have blackened trunks, where drought meant water rationing for years, where hot wind rising is enough to make your pulse pound.
To live in California is to know fire is personal. For me it is increasingly personal: over 8400 buildings and structures burned down in Santa Rosa and the surrounding region in 2017, and my parents evacuated; many of my friends lost their homes. The following year, in Agoura Hills, my grandmother's house - the house my dad grew up in - burned to the ground.
 |
| Grandma June's House, post Woolsey Fire |
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I am not in California right now. I moved to New York / Cambridge (long story) three and a half years ago. People ask me about the culture shock. Yes, there is no good Mexican food in Cambridge ("Felipé's" exists, which is probably the best you can say for it). Yes, I miss wearing flip-flops everywhere. Yes, people are very stressed out here.
But. There's something else that long-term residents don't really pick up on.
In a way, New York and Cambridge are the center of the world. What matters here matters nationally. When Camille and I moved here, we were struck by how the world becomes a cocoon. So many TV shows are set in New York, and if possible, even more novels. For people outside of New York, the media is about New York, and for New Yorkers, the media is even more about New York.
The inverse is also true, to a degree; what doesn't matter here doesn't matter nationally. Policy is set here - agendas are set here. Empathy deficits - information deficits - in New York and Cambridge matter. If something doesn't effect New York, is it even real?
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It's a bit ridiculous to talk about California as some forgotten flyover country. It's the most populated state in the US; it's where Hollywood and Silicon Valley are; it has its own monstrously outsized influence. But if I had to identify a place where culture is made - as if such a thing were possible - it would be the Northeast: Washington DC, New York, and Cambridge.
This influence isn't hegemonic. It's not all-encompassing. But it matters.
***********
In the Northeast, to be fire-touched has nothing to do with climate change. I have technically been closer to a fire living here than I ever was in California - an apartment on the floor directly below us has burned down twice in the past year. Nobody knows why, the building management company says nothing, long-term residents tell stories about the fires of '87, of '01, how the whole of the 35th floor burned down and people had to jump into the street. I don't know the exact dates. Records that might exist, buried deep in the cities' archives. The real records are in the bodies of the long-term residents: the way they don't trust the elevators, the suspicion of new notices from the building management company, the rates of asthma and cancer and who knows what else, all throughout Harlem and the Bronx. Fire in New York is a class issue (and because this is America, also a race issue), not a climate issue, and its the type of class issue that the unaffected feel bad about but comfortable ignoring, because what are they to do about it?
The people in my building are fire-touched, but they don't write about it in the national papers.
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Today I received a call for papers from a conference here in the Northeast to discuss cultural responses to climate change. It highlighted examples of how the climate crisis emerges in moments of disruption and disaster - among them, "the fires raging in the Pacific North West, throughout California..."
According to Amitav Ghosh, "the canon," so-called "serious fiction," has failed to deal with climate change. I think to a certain extent this framing confounds cause and effect; by dealing with climate change, fiction is removed from the "canon" and relegated to other, apparently less prestigious, genres. Climate change, apparently, is not about "the human and the human condition."
The first solution is obvious: abolish the canon. I am already on the record that the concept of the canon is not merely pretentious but insidious, a last-stand of a bourgeois academy to exercise the power of exclusion. The most damning traits of so much "canonical" late 20th century fiction - its rank misogyny, its racism, its middle-class self-centeredness, its anthropocentrism - are all symptoms of an almost-comic narrowness of vision. Who can say with a straight face that novels of white academic men in bad marriages, the bread and butter of the Phillip Roths and John Updikes and Harold Blooms and -yes despite his editorializing- Jonathan Franzens, are in any way representative of the human condition? I want to slap the canon in the face: The world is on fire. People are on fire. That is the human condition in 2019.
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Just not for certain people in New York and Cambridge. These people are, unfortunately, the ones who make policy, who run think tanks or congress or the universities and magazines and news channels that influence them. While obviously Western universities matter, I think few would argue that they do not exert the cultural gravitation of New York, a city that pulls
The canon is a symptom of a deeper problem. Urgent action on climate change won't happen if the people in the corridors of power don't feel it is urgent to them. For them (the ones who believe anthropogenic climate change is real; the ones who don't are a different issue entirely), climate change is still something that will happen; it exists in the future tense. Climate change fiction is science fiction in New York and Cambridge because it seems not to be reality there yet. Climate fiction isn't the human condition because it hasn't affected them as human beings, beyond some vague anxiety caused by vague headlines about some other part of the world that was never quite real in the first place.
It hasn't burned down their house yet.
*****
This isn't true for the East Coast broadly, where climate change is very much a reality. Monarch butterfly migrations have shifted north; once the cod capital of the world, the Gulf of Main is now too warm for the species to flourish; sugar maples are experiencing stunted growth, threatening the future of maple sugar. But these are problems for the working class and ecologists and non-human lifeforms. They do not touch the centers of urban metropolises.
*****
The theme of the American Society for Literature and the Environment conference in Davis this past year was "Paradise on Fire," and the panel that stuck with me the most was a special session not on literature but on the Camp Fire itself. The panel consisted of a fire ecologist, a forest recovery strategist, and a former resident of Paradise.
There's a Netflix documentary out about the Camp Fire now with that same title: "Paradise on Fire." It's forty minutes of a town of twenty thousand people burning to the ground.
This panel and this documentary will never be part of "the canon." But they do compose something else, something I am calling the archive of climate disruption. This is an archive the 21st century is compiling, accretion by accretion, disaster by disaster: Hurricane Katrina. The BP oil spill. The ongoing Sahel Droughts. The bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. The loss of arctic sea ice, the destabilizing of permafrost, the collapse and restructuring of fisheries across the North Atlantic. The archive is vast. It is contestable (it is very difficult to trace any given weather event to climate change since climate is by definition the accumulation of many weather events). The archive is also difficult to grasp psychologically, for several reasons.
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During my PhD General Exams, one of my advisors asked me: "What is Environmental History?"
My first answer - "everything" - didn't satisfy him, so I elaborated: "It's a matter of focus. Every aspect of history involves material relations between the human and the nonhuman, but environmental history puts those relations front and center." (Full disclosure: I didn't say it even close to that coherently).
What environmental history is about is connectivity. This is a word I first learned in during my Earth Systems MS: in this context, it refers to the complexity of links and connections within and between environmental systems. The carbon cycle, for instance, involves many smaller cycles, both human-driven and natural, operating on vastly different timescales. Its complexity and connectivity mean that small changes in one part of the cycle can greatly influence other parts, even if they are very distant in space and time.
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Which brings us back to our archive of climate disruption. Items in the archive vary in size, in impact, and in the length of their chains of causation. It's much easier to grasp that 1) BP was at fault for not implementing safety measures that led to Deepwater Horizon exploding and leaking 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico,
for instance, than it is to grasp that
2) BP was *also* at fault for extracting and profiting off far greater quantities of oil, which was then refined into gasoline and burned in the automobiles and other combustion engines that the vast majority of Americans use in one form or another, which raised atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which trapped more heat, which raised global temperatures, which has a wide variety of disparate impacts around the world, including drying and warming the Pacific Coast, leading to a longer and hotter fire season for California.
BP is responsible for both of these items in the archive, but one has a much longer chain of causation than the other. One is legally criminal; the other entirely legal. Ordinary Americans are arguably complicit in both, since there would be no oil spill if there were no demand for oil, but it feels obvious that we are not the primary villains. For climate change more broadly, that is far less obvious. We avoid thinking about it because we are complicit, because we do not know how to end our complicity, because the chain of causation is long enough to let us off the hook. Because we are not on fire yet.
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Besides setting New York on fire, I don't know what the solution is. On the one hand, it seems cruel to make people in the ACELA corridor more anxious than they already are (these are not un-anxious people). On the other hand, the empathy deficit is itself becoming an existential problem. Mitigating climate change will mean really big, impactful decisions about energy resources, energy use and efficiency, and standard of living, and it will mean making them quickly - much faster than things usually happen in American politics. People's lives are going to be affected. The political will for this response - the only response that can make a difference - is dependent on people realizing that this is an emergency.
White upper middle-class people are historically not very good at emergency identification if they are not affected by them.
If they don't think my building in Harlem being on fire every couple months is an emergency, I don't know why I expect them to think the same for a state on the other side of the country. Or flooded farms in Iowa, or deliberate fires set in the Amazon, or disappearing sandbars in the Marshall Islands, or 150 million displaced people in Bangladesh.
That last one hasn't happened yet. That many refugees is going to be a lot harder to ignore, but white upper middle class people are historically, and currently, very good at ignoring refugees.
*****
We should be marching in the streets. Every day.
This is the solution that Extinction Rebellion has come up with, because nothing else is working. I agree with them. Nothing else is working.
I also heard someone say the other day that the one thing everyone in the Beltway agrees on is that climate protests are silly, not to be taken seriously. So what are we to do?
In Dipesh Chakrabarty's highly influential essay, The Climate of History: Four Theses, he argues there will be no life rafts for the rich and powerful. It's a compelling line rhetorically, but I don't think anyone told the rich and powerful that they don't get life rafts. They're certainly not acting like they need them. Then again, everyone is invincible right until they aren't.
*****
At least not the ones on the East Coast. Another thing Environmental History teaches is that geography matters. Jane Fonda and Sally Field have been protesting climate change and getting arrested for it for much of the past year. They live in Beverly Hills and Malibu, respectively - two places that are frequently on fire. While they are obviously also conscientious individuals with a long history of protesting progressive causes, I don't think it is an accident that they picked climate change.
Of my two alma maters, Stanford (despite its many flaws; taking fossil fuel money for its Earth Sciences programs not least among them) has divested from coal; Harvard hasn't. That is not an accident either.
*******
So for now, California is attempting to lead the country on climate change.
There are some changes that it can make on its own: socializing PG&E and putting their notoriously failure-prone power lines underground would be a great start. So would funding alternative energy and efficient transportation- there is no reason not to expand solar power across the desert and real train routes across the Bay Area and SoCal.
There are some changes California can make on its own if it is allowed to by the Supreme Court, like raising fuel emissions standards, as it's done before. This has the effect of forcing auto companies to make more efficient cars across the country, rather than two different vehicles of each model for different states.
But it can't stop coal and oil production in other states. It can't install charging stations for electric vehicles or solar panels or wind farms outside its borders; it can't build interstate public transit. It can't rescue climate refugees or honor treaties with indigenous Nations to preserve the natural processes essential to their worlds and sovereignties. It can't prevent and can barely slow down the increase in emissions that makes fire season longer and hotter.
One state cannot save the nation. Only the nation can do that.
We can vote. We can vote strategically, we can vote passionately, but if we don't vote for people who have plans to take climate change seriously, we might as well be voting for climate deniers.
*******
It's raining now, in theory - little drizzles that are enough to quench the driest of the brush. Fire season is (probably) over, though on the other side of the planet in Australia it's still blazing. California will get a few months of reprieve.
Until then?
We can get our shit together and pay attention, because just as assuredly as there will be an election in the fall of 2020, there will be another fire season.
