What We Can See

I began this essay in a Pacific Northwest on fire. The sky was a heavy yellow-gray, and it was easy to look directly at the orange sun, which seemed drained of heat and even light. I was far from any fire danger, but for days the smoke made the outside air nearly unbreathable, for those of us who could choose to breathe elsewhere. I was very lucky; after years of dithering, I had finally broken down and bought an air purifier in July, knowing that I’d need it eventually.

The smoke was especially disturbing because it permeated the whole west coast and not a little of the interior, and because the fires had then devastated nearly 4 million acres and several small towns, as well as causing the evacuation of a medium-sized city. An automated warning on social media indicated that people with heart and respiratory issues should consider leaving. To where? One would have had to go hundreds of miles to find good air. People already worn down by the pandemic and threats to democracy joked darkly about 2020 apocalypse bingo: surely zombies and aliens were next.

I shifted uneasily between deep worry about loved ones and strangers; obsessive refreshing of the air quality and fire apps as I tried to metabolize what the data meant for the affected people, animals, and ecosystems; and an acceptance of this new (and accelerating) reality that, in a strange way, was almost more discomfiting. It’s not entirely new, the smoke. Last summer was smoke-free in Seattle, but the two previous summers were awful; several years ago I had friends in the Methow Valley who had to evacuate two years running, and all of whose neighbors lost their houses; and my brother lost a weekend house in Sonoma last year — a place that held many good memories for me, but which I couldn’t find it in me to mourn, with so many people having lost their only homes, and some having lost their lives. I’ve metabolized the new normal, it seems — and even amidst the smoke I knew that it would likely be beautiful again in a week or two, just as the fires will return next summer, or the summer after that. It’s part of the cycle now, and even while horrified by its impacts on people and animals, I’ve begun to take it in stride.

I don’t mean that humans didn’t write this terrifying new chapter: though the ecology and history of wildfire in the West is complex, we clearly didwrite this new chapter: with earlier fire suppression, with development, and most of all with the unchecked use of fossil fuels long past the moment when those responsible knew the risks and should have been stopped.

I mean that it’s part of our cycle — that those of us who choose to live here had better understand that, and build and live and above all politicappropriately. It’s uncomfortable to acknowledge that our lives have to change, but if we get stuck in denial or despair, we’ll lose far more. It’s time for cities and counties to have fire-safe, clean-air, pandemic-friendly shelters for those forced to evacuate their homes, and those who didn’t have homes to begin with. It’s years past time for builders in rural communities to be incentivized and/or mandated to choose materials like hempcrete, adobe, and straw bale. It’s time for strict regulations around the safety of farmworkers, those most essential of essential workers; construction and landscaping can pause for a week or two during fire season, but harvest often cannot. We have to work with the new reality even as we transform our politics and our economy so that we stop making it much worse, and so that we can begin to gentle the wild swings of the climate system pendulum, eventually returning them to the narrower band of changeability that humans evolved with.

The only other option is abandoning the West altogether — for Florida or Louisiana, maybe, with their sinking landscapes and hurricanes? The Southwest with its megadrought and 120° days? The Midwest with its flooding, tornadoes, and temperature swings? The Southeast or Northeast with their hurricanes, humidity, and heatwaves?

Pick your poison. We live where we live, and most of us don’t want to or can’t abandon those places. We have to learn to adapt to the new vulnerabilities of the places that are still livable, because some places won’t be, and no place will be untouched.

Though not a native, I’m in love with Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. I’ve never seen anywhere more beautiful — or more livable day to day, if one is lucky enough to have affordable housing and stable work, as I do. I feel blessed every day I get to see the lake, the mountains, and the Sound, and I feel a deep personal attachment to our magnificent trees and orcas. The week before the smoke closed in on us, I was backpacking among alpine lakes and wildflowers, ripe huckleberries and marmots and astonishing views. The whole summer had been perfect: high 70’s, sunny, clear. On a planet replete with special places, this seems to me to be one of the most special. I want to fiercely defend it, and its human and animal and plant inhabitants — I’ll start over elsewhere if I need to, but I won’t stop feeling responsible for this place, and changed by it.

But despite my love for its present-era specificity (forests, orcas, herons, cafés), what keeps nagging at me is that the single most important skill of adaptation may be that we start seeing the world we can choose to move towards, and not just the one that we’re losing. Being farsighted is what will give us heart, because in the near term we will see terrible things.

Life always tends towards regeneration eventually — and we can choose to help rather than hinder that. Will we wake after a wildfire and tend immediately to the people and beasts and ecosystems that need help? Or will mourning overwhelm us? It depends on what we can see.

Stuck in my house in the smoke, unable to walk more than a few minutes outside without my lungs tightening, seeing and touching only my partner, I saw immediately that what had seemed to be normal life could dissolve even faster than I’d imagined. The certainty of future regeneration is much harder to see in detail, but I know that can’t stop us from working for it; fruit flies won’t see next year’s apples, but that doesn’t make the apples any less real. Smoke, fire, and other catastrophes must wake our interior vision, and our capacity for love must help us act, because whatever we’re losing now, and whatever tragedies await us, do not absolve us of responsibility for what will remain, and do not diminish our power to collectively tip the balance back towards life.

That means first and foremost a swift end of the fossil fuel era and a Green New Deal mobilization to clean energy, regenerative farming, ecosystem restoration, and a winding down of all industries that threaten ecological balance. Without those, nothing else we do will matter, so we must focus on them in whatever ways we can. It means a shift in culture so that we’re valuing ecosystems, community health, and care-work over profit and accumulation. But it may be just as necessary that we orient towards a deep future, metabolizing the reality that Earth will eventually birth a new menagerie to replace what (some) humans have caused to be lost. If we have a purpose, it’s to be those who minimize devastation, shelter who and what we can, and help this to happen sooner, rather than those who cause more devastation, or who look back permanently in sorrow, seeing only what’s gone, and thus neglecting the dire and tender needs all around us.

We don’t abandon our children because our parents or partners die; loss is hideous but survivable. For that matter, if we lost our own loved ones, but then came upon a stranger child who needed us, most people would rise to that, and take care of that child however they could.

That child — those children — exist by the hundreds of thousands. That we cannot see them in front of us, cannot stop us from collecting ourselves enough to do right by them.

Our communities and ecosystems won’t survive in their current forms — it’s a fact as simple as that of our own deaths. But life will in fact go on, and it will be precious and extraordinary. Joy — or at least the possibility of joy, and the appreciation of what remains — must be the twin of grief.

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In truth, those who lived hundreds of years ago would likely be shocked at the diminishment of animal life that is our current world, the smog and toxic water and plastics, the sheer massing of ugliness and refuse and noise — yet we are keenly aware how much beauty is still here, just as those who come after us will have attachments to a natural world that might seem to us profoundly diminished and even devastated, were we there to see it.

It’s one of our finest and most dangerous traits, this ability of new generations to not just adapt to our changing world, but to attach to its beauties. It means we glory in what remains even as we fail to see what our forebears would know was lost — and it also means that we can find sustenance even in the bleaker times that we know are coming.

Life is good — it may be that it is the only and ultimate good. If there is any moral imperative, then, it is that we must give room to and shepherd all we can, no matter what darkness and smoke descend, until the very end. The more of life that’s gone, the more important are the seeds that remain.

Grief tends to make us myopic. If we know that a beloved is dying or leaving we often sit only with that loss; it blots out everything else. Friends cannot console us for the gaping absence, and we can’t see that in five years or ten, our lives may be full and fine in a different (and sometimes entirely unforeseen) way. People and satisfactions we don’t yet know can’t balance those we love and are losing, even if they will do so eventually. The mysterious and often lengthy process of possibility blossoming into something — it’s hard to believe in when we’re grieving.

We’ve seen, and increasingly will see, devastation. But if we value life, if we value the beauty and variety and possibility in this world, then there is always something to live for, and something worth fighting for.

I begin to adjust to this strange new world because that’s the only way I can fight for what remains of the world I love, so that some of it can be part of the world yet to come.

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I finished this essay in a Pacific Northwest reborn. A night of rain cleared the air so completely that it went from deep red on the air quality index to a green so light the PM 2.5 particulates (the really nasty ones) almost didn’t register. The air smelled like wet leaves and wood, and there was a palpable relief and even joy that seemed to be shared by all of those who were suddenly out walking again. For those first days at least, we took nothing for granted.

That first day of clear air, I could almost forget what it was like just the day before — or no, not forget, but feel it shrink in size and importance. Normalcy has a weight to it, different from the weight of upheaval and fear.

The air purifier again became a large, inconvenient object in my very small house, and I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Realities whirl and then settle, and we adapt. A harsh or comfortable set of circumstances is replaced by its opposite, and then replaced again. Psychologically, we don’t know where to land these days; for those of us in northern climes with some level of privilege, life might go on in a mostly normal-looking way for a decade or two, or it might literally go up in flames tomorrow. It’s hard to hold both of these possibilities in our hearts; if we forget the latter we won’t be prepared to do whatever it is that we need to do, and if we remember it to the exclusion of more joyful truths, we won’t have the heart to.

Here is a fact we can anchor in: that the people and creatures who will survive are every bit as precious as those who will be lost. Choosing to care for them is the most important thing we can possibly do.

The universe is wild and complex and astonishing in ways we have barely begun to plumb. Every breath we take in contains more molecules of the world around us than there are grains of sand on all of Earth’s beaches: what was lost by the tree — for that matter, by the dog and the frying pan — becomes us. The swirl of things into one another that Van Gogh saw — that’s what the world is. What we leave behind turns into other things, all the time, and they turn into us.

This happens with ideas, too; we begin to embody the ideas we surround ourselves with.

Let’s ask this of ourselves, then: that we gather the right ideas around us, and turn into the humans that life needs us to be: taking care of each other and other beasts and Earth, so that there’s as much of life’s goodness as there can be.

In the last extinction, some dinosaurs survived; they became birds.

If we truly understand the possibilities of this world, we will never give up on it.