Living in the forest on the West coast of the United States, daily life presents an immediacy of exposure to hotter and drier conditions, which means a more intimate and urgent relationship with climate change. Being poor and in the wrong place at the wrong time and lacking the right resources can certainly do this too, or watching a fire destroy your community. There are numerous ways to become radicalized, to be sure, and of course the amount and intensity of these ways are growing as well.
There is a real and persistent fear especially in the
summer, living within a tinderbox which is perpetually drying out each year,
and drying out more completely in cycles as time passes. Trees are dying at
growing rates, and you walk among the vegetation that is burnt from the sun,
and the soil drying out and then lifting up as dust as it is tread upon or
blown. You can feel the strain of the forest under the sun as you walk through
it: the thirsty trees drink up earlier and earlier in the season; the streams
dry up. And the snowcap disappears in greater amounts off of the top of the
mountain every year.
We don’t have air conditioning here, and the temperature
gradients in the shaded regions and in the insulated buildings becomes ever
more noticeable, and if you stand in the sun in a cleared area, you can feel
the anger and intensity in its rays and in the irradiated and desiccated landscape surrounding
you.
And on a socio-economic level, you wonder about those rows
of power lines, swaying haphazardly on their leaning poles, and the clear-cuts
opening up like wounds on the valley walls, leaving behind their own heat
islands and oceans of monocropped conifers, standing like matchsticks. And the
desperate and or/careless weekenders fanning out in the canyon, setting up campfires
to be responsibly or carelessly tended.
Every heat wave, every period of elevated temperatures
grates on the nerves: will it all hold?
