Ink Tea Stone Leaf

It is a relief that the conditions that inspired me to write this post will have been much improved by the time it actually goes up. On Wednesday, the day I took the above photograph just outside my front door, wildfire smoke from the foothills of the Cascade mountains had settled over the Willamette valley. Simultaneously, we in Salem were experiencing a remarkably windless few days, allowing a layer of smog to develop out of our own local sources of air pollution. It does strike me as bitter that our usual air quality depends on noxious particles being blown away to somewhere else, but the atmosphere is a very complex system after all.

Like I said, the wind is returning and conditions here are improving. But I remain disturbed nonetheless, as much by what my circumstances imply about other parts of Oregon that are experiencing the fires firsthand as by the manifest unhealthiness of the fouled air around my home. Wildfires are a part of life in the west, and smog is a longstanding consequence of our worst industrial practices, but times being what they are in the age of visible climate change, shrugging these things off seems like something I wouldn’t want to do.

In 2003, when I was beginning my junior year in high school, I witnessed the Cedar Fire that burned thousand of homes in San Diego County. From my house in Poway I could see not only the thickest, darkest, evilest-looking clouds of smoke imaginable, but the glow of approaching flames from behind the hills that ring the town. For days the ash fell like snow, the sky was a poisonous orange, and the stench of burning trees and brush was everywhere and in everything. Fortunately my family was not required to evacuate, but this was probably the closest I ever came in my life to losing my home in a natural disaster, a fate that indeed befell some of my classmates.

I never saw anything quite like that until 2020, when the Santiam fire here in Oregon brought a similar atmospheric hellstorm to my doorstep. That time I wasn’t as close to the flames themselves, and as frightening as it all was I tried to keep a cool head. I say I tried, but of course we were also dealing with a deadly pandemic and historic political unrest that year, so we were all going nuts already. One morning when the air was at its ugliest I went outside and found that high winds had uprooted a massive tree in the parking lot of my apartment complex; I must confess, the mood in those days was a little of armageddon.

It is a fact that Oregon’s summers are becoming hotter and dryer, ultimately due to anthropogenic climate change. As a Southern California transplant, I have long been astonished by Oregonians’ embrace (in the heat of July, no less) of the kind of recreational fireworks that are simply not permitted where I grew up. The first time I was informed that it was “normal” here for people to pile waste in their back yards and light it on fire, I thought it was a sick joke. All these winter rains and rivers might make us feel safe, but in a genuine summer drought it does not take much to spark a disaster.

Wildfires, of course, are a natural source of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Since carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the cause of our warming planet, not a single supermassive fire in the news goes by (and they do go by) that I don’t see as a part of a vicious feedback loop. It’s hard to see it as anything else when you can smell the smoke carbonizing your lungs. It is neither possible nor even desirable to eliminate wildfires (many ecosystems rely on periodic burns for their long term health, and suppressing them too zealously can make the fires that do get through that much worse), but the massive burns and resulting infusions of carbon into the air of this wildfire age are part of the global problem, not just a symptom of it.

Incidentally, on Wednesday evening I actually saw a man light up a cigarette and smoke it in a parking lot. That a person could respond to a major toxic smoke event by deliberately introducing more toxic smoke into his breath is the kind of satire I am not nearly cynical enough to invent.

There’s still quite a bit of haze in the air—on a clear day I can see Mount Jefferson or even Mount Hood from the bridge, and that is simply out of the question for now. But the air doesn’t smell so foul anymore. I am not as worried as I was about the consequences of a deep breath outdoors. That’s worth being glad about, even if  Oregon continues to burn.

For all of our history, even in eras of great uncertainty and turmoil, humans have allowed themselves to feel hopeful when the weather changes for the better. The climate itself may be at the root of our anxiety, and weather is only the local and temporary expression of underlying climactic conditions, but if we are going to stay sane enough to address these problems then we have to allow ourselves to feel the same relief. And we must address them—our clean air is precious, and we cannot take it for granted while we await the next burning.

I think about weeks like this when I contemplate efforts to build data centers in our communities, despite the well-documented harm to local environments that they cause. People are waking up to the problem, and that is also worth being glad about. Caring about the health of our communities means caring about one another, which is the mark of a world I want to live in.

Incidentally, the venue we have for doing something about the changes wrought by a warming climate, as well as for reducing the unhealthy impact of pollution in our immediate environment is politics. That means seeing to it that the people who are elected to positions of authority are prioritizing our health and well-being above the short term profitability of corporations. I continue to hope (though hoping, alas, is not the same as expecting) we will make the right choices on that basis.