This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
In case you hadn't been paying attention, it's hot on this planet. I mean, really hot. And I'm not just thinking about Europe's worst heat wave in at least 200 years. There, fires in Spain, Portugal, and France rage, barely checked. Nor do I have in mind the devastating repeated spring heat waves in South Asia or the disastrous drought in the Horn of Africa. It's burning right here!
Scarcely noticed in the rest of the country (or in national news coverage), the American Southwest and parts of the West are in a megadrought of historic proportions. And parts of New Mexico, as naturalist and TomDispatch regular William deBuys describes so vividly today, have been burning in jaw-dropping fashion. (As a poor state, its fires don't get the attention that those in wealthier southern California might.)
And yet, right now in what Noam Chomsky recently suggested could be "the last stage in human history," the question is: When it comes to climate change, who's really paying attention? As the Yale Program on Climate Communication discovered recently, "Of 29 issues we asked about, registered voters overall indicated that global warming is the 24th most highly ranked voting issue." (Admittedly, it was number three among liberal Democrats, but either 28th or 29th among Republicans.) Meanwhile, coal baron Joe Manchin has just taken climate-change legislation of any sort off the Democratic congressional agenda for the imaginable future with the likelihood that, in the November elections, climate-denying Republicans could take full control of Congress.
And don't think it's just voters not fully focused on climate change either. Given my age (and force of habit), I still read a paper copy of the New York Times daily and, just last week, I noticed a front-page piece of news analysis written by Max Fisher with the headline, "In Many Ways, the World Is Getting Better. It Also Feels Broken." Climate change is mentioned only in a passing phrase in its second paragraph as Fisher describes how our world is "generally becoming better off" than any of us imagine. And mind you, that was on a day when the first major article inside that paper was headlined "Growing Drought Imperils Northern Italy's Rice Harvest" and focused on the drying up of the Po River at a moment of global warming-induced "extreme drought" there. At the bottom of the very next page was another piece, "Heat Wave Grips China's South and East" ("Roofs melted, roads cracked, and some residents sought relief in underground air-raid shelters.") " offering yet more evidence of "frequent episodes of extreme weather driven by climate change" globally.
In short, our world is all too weird in what it focuses on " and doesn't. With that in mind, why don't you head directly into the flames with William deBuys (whose most recent must-read book is The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss). Tom
New Mexico's Megafires Mark a Turning Point
For People, Land, and the Forest Service
Firefighters don't normally allude to early English epics, but in a briefing on the massive Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire in northern New Mexico, a top field chief said, "It's like Beowulf: it's not the thing you fear, it is the mother of the thing you fear." He meant that the flames you face may be terrifying, but scarier yet are the conditions that spawned them, perhaps enabling new flames to erupt behind you with no escape possible. The lesson is a good one and can be taken further. If tinder-dry forests and high winds are the mother of the thing we fear, then climate change is the grandmother.
The Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire blazed across 534 square miles of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the southernmost extension of the Rockies. Although the fire was the largest in New Mexico's history, it had competition even as it burned. This spring, the Black Fire, a megafire of nearly equal size, devoured forests in the southern part of the state. The combined area of the two fires is roughly equal to that of Rhode Island, the American standard for landscape disasters on a colossal scale.
Records amassed by the Forest Service indicate that, at the fire's peak, 27,562 people were evacuated from their homes. Four hundred and thirty-three of those homes were destroyed and more damaged, while an even greater number of barns, garages, sheds, and other outbuildings were also lost. The unquantified property damage, including destroyed power lines, water systems, and other infrastructure, will surely exceed the nearly billion dollars in damages arising from the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, which torched more than 200 residential structures in the city of Los Alamos. Meanwhile, the heartbreak resulting not just from destroyed homes but lost landscapes " arenas of work, play, and spiritual renewal, home in the broadest sense " is immeasurable.
The Hermits Peak fire began April 6th with the escape of a prescribed fire ignited by the U.S. Forest Service in the mountains immediately west of Las Vegas, New Mexico. A few days later and not far away, a second, "sleeper" fire, which the Forest Service had originally ignited in January to burn waste wood from a forest-thinning operation, sprang back to life. It had smoldered undetected through successive snowfalls and the coldest weather of the year. This was the Calf Canyon fire. Driven by unprecedented winds, the two fires soon merged into a single cauldron of flame, which stormed through settled valleys and wild forests alike, sometimes consuming 30,000 acres a day.
The blaze marks a turning point in the lives of all who experienced the fire. It also marks a transformative change in the ecological character of the region and in the turbulent history of the alternately inept and valiant federal agency that both started and fought it.
The Turning of a Climate Tide
Two and a half decades ago, a long-running wet spell came to an end in the Southwest. Reservoirs were full, rivers were meeting water needs, and skiers and irrigators alike gazed with satisfaction on deep mountain snowpacks. The region's forests were stable, if overgrown.
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