Under the Sky We Make by Kimberly Nicholas PhD

Author:Kimberly Nicholas PhD [Nicholas, Kimberly]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

Values and Costs

We Can’t Afford Not to Fix Climate Change

In October 2017, fire roared toward my beloved hometown of Sonoma, California. My parents left their house in the hills with the clothes they were wearing and an extra pair of underwear they’d grabbed. They first went to my sister’s house on the outskirts of town. When the fire crept closer from the wildland edges to suburban cul-de-sacs, my whole family reevacuated to a friend’s house twenty miles south in Marin County. I was on the phone with my sister as she used her garden hose, usually reserved for watering her roses, to spray the roof of her house to make it a bit less flammable. Before she hung up, as she packed up her car with her family and their lumbering, ever-cheerful three-legged yellow Lab Ollie, she told me, “We’re walking out the door with everything that matters.”

My best friend from junior high was caring for her aging parents as their house in downtown Sonoma was enveloped in smoke that hurt to breathe and shortened visibility to less than a city block. Molly’s mother had suffered from a degenerative disease for a decade and had recently been put in hospice care. A mandatory evacuation order closed in on their street, but moving her would be medically difficult and emotionally impossible. For a week, Molly and her parents watched as the glow of the fire burned on the surrounding hills and smoke roiled closer.

Even far away from the evacuation zone, instead of “Sunny” or “Cloudy,” weather apps reported the status “Smoke.” The cloud of ash dispersed, and the charred remains of someone’s grandmother’s quilt, someone’s wedding album, someone’s baby shoes, gently settled one particle at a time on SUVs in driveways a hundred miles away.

The American West is wildfire country, but I’d never imagined something the scale of this fire was in the realm of the possible. I could not comprehend the size of the area burned, no matter how many tens of thousands of football fields or what percentage of Rhode Island it was compared to. It felt surreal. There were multiple fires burning simultaneously in places separated by mountain ranges and major highways, at distances that would take hours to drive. As the days went on and the widely scattered fires steadily devoured their fuel, some merged across county lines to become one massive fire.

With a disaster of this scale, the news media was limited in what it could cover, and rumors were flying. Thousands of miles away in Sweden, I was constantly checking in on friends and family and obsessively following social media for news from Sonoma. I saw photos of a high school gym transformed to a refugee camp for the community I grew up in, the floor covered with plastic sheeting, fold-out cots each bearing a neatly shrink-wrapped kit from the Red Cross. I watched videos of people fleeing for their lives along roads engulfed in flames. Evacuees numbly refreshed websites and pored over pixels and wind directions, trying to divine if they would have a home to return to.

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