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Climate Grief Is Burning Across the American West
Sep 14, 2020 3 mins, 33 secs

Grief has settled over the western US, along with the thick haze of smoke pouring from dozens of massive wildfires up and down California, Oregon, Colorado, and Washington.

Wildfires were around before human-made climate change, but by pulling a variety of strings, it’s made them bigger, fiercer, and ultimately deadlier, creating what fire historian Steve Pyne has dubbed the Pyrocene, an Age of Flames.

By burning fossil fuels, we’ve primed the landscape to burn explosively, and by pushing human communities deeper and deeper into what was once wilderness, we’re provided plenty of opportunities for ignition—and plenty of opportunities for grief as these forces catastrophically combine.

“So much is out of our control,” says Adrienne Heinz, a research psychologist at the Stanford University School of Medicine, who studies the effects of disasters like wildfires and the Covid-19 pandemic.

For the people of Northern California, an exhausting parade of massive wildfires have marched across the landscape over the past several autumns, with many people having to evacuate several years in a row.

California’s wildfires are also chewing through iconic destinations, like Big Basin State Park, bringing a sort of anthropomorphized grief as people mourn for a place they’ve bonded with.

“Places just have a lot of emotional significance for us,” says psychologist Susan Clayton of the College of Wooster, coauthor of an extensive report on climate change and mental health.

To be sure, wildfires are a perfectly natural and indeed beneficial component of the Western landscape, periodically clearing out an environment and resetting it for new plant growth, which feeds herbivores, which ultimately feed carnivores.

Plus, bigger populations make it harder for fire crews to do controlled burns—small, manageable blazes set in the spring when the landscape is hydrated, so there’s less fuel load to burn in the dryness of summer and fall.

But to burn safely, crews have to ensure there aren’t people downwind, especially with the continued spread of Covid-19, a disease that attacks the lungs.

“The populations within these wildfire regimes are increasing so rapidly that forest management becomes almost impossible,” says climate scientist Zachary Zobel, who studies wildfires at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

But the collision of climate change and the West’s wildfires is also a matter of timing, and oddly enough, it’s about the abundance of water during a certain time of year.

But climate change is pushing those rains later and later in the year, giving the parched landscape more time to combust.

And because of climate change, the landscape is drier for longer and wildfires burn more intensely.

But here’s a great irony of climate change: Parts of California are getting very heavy rains during the winter, because the warmer air on a warmer planet holds more moisture.

Instead of burning naturally and less intensely every so often, parts of the western US are now in a regular cycle of blooming, getting obliterated by massive wildfires, and blooming once more.

“If we were just dry all the time, at some point, we would run out of things to burn, essentially,” says Zobel.

What makes the resulting grief so painful for the people who live in the West are the dueling certainties and uncertainties of wildfires: Residents know how climate change has exacerbated these fires, and know that the Western landscape will grow more dangerous from now on, but they don’t know where the next Camp Fire or Tubbs Fire will break out, or when whole towns and dozens of lives may be lost in a matter of hours.

“We see pictures of farm workers who are working in really horrible air quality that's bad for their health,” says Elizabeth Sawin, codirector of Climate Interactive, a nonprofit that focuses on the intersection of climate change and inequity.

“We could go down the list of people who are likely to lose their power, and with it all the food in their freezer, when replacing the food in their freezer is an economic hardship,” says Sawin.

Thus inequities, wildfires, and climate change collide.

“I am doing a lot of work with people on really increasing psychological self-care, spiritual self-care, physical self-care, and to help that fatigue,” says Young, the therapist in Healdsburg.

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