1Life Is Different Now
THE WILDFIRES HAD ALWAYS been there, lurking in the background, and Ellen Herdell thought she knew what it meant to live in their midst. A mild-mannered woman in her midforties, she brushed aside her long, straight brown hair and started at the beginning of her story, before she’d sent me a panicked email about wildfires changing her life, before she’d begun to think about leaving California. She’d grown up in Southern California and then in the hills north of the San Francisco Bay, and spent her childhood exploring the state’s expansive wildness and the granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada. You always kept your campfire close, she knew. But with the proper precautions, wildfires were avoidable, controllable. We’d first traded letters online, then talked on the phone, and now, after more than a year, we were finally meeting in person. Ellen measured her words, perhaps with the more conservative-leaning members of her family in mind, and tried to be fair. Besides, she continued, the fires served their purpose: culling the swelling forests of one of the continent’s last mountain ranges so that those forests could rise, majestically, all over again.
She was in college when, in 2003, the hillsides above San Diego burst into flame and the sky turned black. It was the first time in her memory that an intimate brush with catastrophe forced her to reckon with a more fearsome reality: arid lands and unfettered growth could sometimes lead to disastrous megafires—and sometimes those fires could not be controlled. Even then, though, wildfires remained rare; they were background noise in a pattern of endless summers and glorious sunshine. “There were fires,” she said, “but they didn’t come into your homes.” She could live with that.
After college, Ellen moved to Sonoma County, about forty-five minutes north of San Francisco, with her high school sweetheart, Jeff Herdell. Jeff’s family had been in that part of the state for three generations. Ellen and Jeff got married and settled into a house near the crest of a steep hill in a quiet neighborhood of new homes on the north side of Santa Rosa. A working-class city at the crossroads of the state’s lumber and wine industries and the more metropolitan Bay Area, Santa Rosa boasted seven breweries, its own community college, and a population of about 180,000.
The Herdells’ home was nestled in one of those border regions that let Californians enjoy the wild of nature and a sliver of city life at the same time. Just uphill from the house, a cul-de-sac faced the grassy, oak-covered slopes of the southern Mayacamas Mountains. From the kitchen window, an expansive vista stretched toward Fountaingrove ridge. In the other direction were the magnificent craggy oak forests of Trione-Annadel State Park, vintners’ country estates, and, just out of view, the street grid of downtown Santa Rosa. Ellen and Jeff’s kids—who soon came along—could attend elementary school at the foot of the hill, and the family led an idyllic sort of middle-class existence: Jeff worked in marketing for a dental business, and Ellen, who’d formerly worked in the wine business, shepherded one child through preschool while nursing a newborn. The couple vacationed in the mountains near Lake Tahoe—showing the children the same trails Ellen had explored in her own youth—or visited Jeff’s parents and kayaked on Clearlake, fifty miles north of Santa Rosa.
Then, in September 2015, Jeff’s parents’ home burned down in a fast-moving wildfire that came roaring out of the hills south of Clearlake. The Valley Fire, as it was called, erupted quickly as extraordinary gusts of tropical-storm-force winds lashed the coastal mountains of California, toppling power lines. Ellen’s father-in-law, Mike Herdell, stood his ground with a garden hose, extinguishing spot fires. He believed that a ten-gallon-per-minute flow of water from a three-quarter-inch rubber line could protect his property from flames, some of them seventy-five feet tall, rushing in at forty-five miles per hour. By the time he came to terms with reality, it was too late to pack. He fled, leaving behind family mementos, Jeff’s baby albums, and the paintings and drawings of generations of children. A few days later his wife, Eve, was photographed standing in the family’s driveway with only the concrete-and-stone arch of the home’s front windows, black with soot, still standing.
To Mike Herdell, this was a once-in-a-generation disaster, like an earthquake or the same sort of bad luck that could befall families living in Tornado Alley. More than 1,280 homes were lost in the Valley Fire, which took more than four months to fully extinguish and ultimately ravaged some 76,000 acres. That whole year, 880,000 acres of California burned—an eye-catching number, but an almost unremarkable fraction of a state that spans an area greater than all the land between Virginia and Maine.
It turned out, though, that the Valley Fire was merely a harbinger of the fires to come.
Two years later, almost to the day, on October 17, 2017, the wind—achingly familiar to the Herdells—kicked up into a violent swirl at Ellen Herdell’s own home. She knew what was coming next. That evening, from her backyard, she watched as an orange sky overtook Fountaingrove, an upscale neighborhood full of elegant homes and golf links. By midnight, flames were licking the crest of that far ridge. Ellen lay awake listening to the popping of propane tanks exploding in the darkness while Jeff monitored the police scanner. News broke that the fire had raged west, crossing U.S. Highway 101 and scorching some 3,500 homes and businesses in a neighborhood called Coffey Park. At almost the same time another raging inferno was closing in from the east. The Herdells lost power a little before dawn. Later that day, they decided to evacuate. They drove north, through hillside gauntlets alight in flames so close that they could feel the heat inside their car. The Tubbs Fire, as that one was called, eventually killed twenty-two people and burned more than 5,500 structures, coming to a stop right at the foot of the Herdells’ hill.
The Herdells could hardly recall more than a handful of major fires in northern California over the past thirty-five years. But all of a sudden fire had become a constant. There was the Nuns Fire, which burned 44,000 acres at the same time the Tubbs was raging. There was the Carr Fire, which burned 229,000 acres and 1,600 structures and quickly became one of the state’s most destructive fires only ten months later, in July 2018. Four days after that, the Mendocino Complex Fire began, burning 410,000 acres, consuming mostly rural and rugged mountain forests. That one became the state’s largest—at least at the time. Then on November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire ripped through Paradise, 160 miles northeast of the Herdells’ house, trapping residents as they fled a secluded mountain valley in their cars, killing eighty-five people.
To Ellen, it had begun to feel as if the very undergirding of their lives had become structurally unsound. Even when the fires seemed to stop—which they mostly did for the twelve months that followed—Californians remained in a collective state of shock. Ellen’s determination was withering, replaced by a mixture of exhaustion and resignation that she found unfamiliar. It was the kind of fatigue that can come from fighting for too long, and it seemed like it was California—the place she so loved—that was breaking her down. Then the summer of 2020 was one spent on edge all over again. That August she celebrated her daughter’s fifth birthday. She gave her a new bike, and they went for a ride, pushing their way through the thick, smoky air. Ellen forced herself to enjoy the moment, the fact that so much was the same. Her own fifth birthday thirty-five years earlier, only fifty miles away, played like a film reel in her memory: a new bike, an ice cream cake. Now, though, there was a go bag, and albums containing photos of that birthday were packed in the back of the car. The sun was orange, its outline easily discernible in the sky. It felt like the fires could come at any moment. Her in-laws were staying with them during the celebration—they’d been evacuated again. All around her, in Windsor to her immediate northwest and Deer Park to her east, her cousins and aunts were fleeing their houses. “I used to love fall,” she thought to herself.
That summer millions of acres burned across the state, and a haze of smoke drifted over anywhere unscathed. The Herdells grew accustomed to wearing respirators. And aside from the birthday party, their girls spent weeks sequestered indoors. They were growing up amid the flames, watching them steal homes and break up families, bringing an annual season of fear. And they didn’t know anything different.
Then, in late September, just when California appeared on the cusp of its first winter rain, the Glass Fire erupted. Ellen first saw an alert that the fire had begun to the north, in Napa County near the town of St. Helena. Around nine in the evening she got a text from family to the north: they were evacuating. Soon, Jeff warned, the fire could be on their own ridge. But Ellen, worn down and numbed by the omnipresent threat of fire, felt complacent. “I was in denial. I didn’t want to pack the car. It’s so much work evacuating,” she said. “We have two cats, we have to find photo albums and baby albums, and it’s just chaos, and I didn’t want to do it. It feels like we’re in a fire drill every year and all these [emergency cell phone alerts] coming though. It was just nonstop.”
Around eleven that night, though, the Glass Fire came hurtling over the last humpback ridge marking the southernmost Mayacamas Mountains toward the Herdells’ home, bringing with it a sense of urgency that was disorienting even after the past four years of terror. “Once we saw the flames we knew it was time to go,” Ellen said. She ran into the garage, grabbing bins of belongings she’d prepared in advance. Then the lights went out. Outside, neighbors were shouting in the street and sirens blared as trucks raced up the hill and firefighters pounded on doors, shouting for people to leave. Ellen’s seven-year-old daughter—having already seen several of her friends’ families lose their homes over the past few seasons—sobbed hysterically while Ellen scrambled with a flashlight to load the cat crates and kids’ baby albums into her Honda Accord. Meanwhile, Jeff packed the trunk of their Honda Civic with whatever else they could fit. It was nearly one-thirty in the morning when they reached Ellen’s mom’s house, twenty miles away, where Ellen monitored Facebook and a constant stream of text messages and phone alerts until well past four. “I really thought we didn’t have a chance,” she says. “Skyhawk Park was burning. Friends’ houses were burning. We just thought, okay, it’s gone, this neighborhood is gone.”
The last five years came rushing back to Ellen in a wave of memories. Swirling in the thick fog of stress and fear was the unshakable sense that she was living through a shift in her environment that was, in some sense, permanent. Ellen’s father-in-law thought the recent fires could be blamed on poor land management, and he was partly right. But Ellen was now certain that bigger changes were underway. California felt different now. The world felt different. “It just didn’t used to be like this,” she said.
* * *
BY 2020, THE VISIBLE SIGNS of climate change in the United States seemed to be reaching a crescendo. In the eyes of casual observers and half believers, it was the year that the climate crisis finally arrived, shattering records for climate-change-driven weather and disasters, and for heat extremes across the United States and the world. It was the hottest year on record, closing out the hottest decade on record, but if you lived in, say, Phoenix, Arizona, it was also a year that saw the most days above 110°F in a summer—fifty-three—and the longest string of consecutive days over 100°F in three decades. That crippling heat killed 522 people—more than three times the number of deaths in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. In the Gulf of Mexico and the South Atlantic, there were more named hurricanes in 2020 than at any time since the U.S. government began tracking them. Two major hurricanes made landfall on the Louisiana coast less than eight weeks apart, flattening homes, flooding streets, and snapping trees like matchsticks. If you were a resident of coastal Louisiana, you may well have just arrived home to pry the plywood from your living room window when the evacuation warning for the next storm blared over the airwaves. At roughly the same time in the Midwest, floodwaters inundated cities and towns, collapsing dams in Michigan and raising the shorelines of the Great Lakes. The cost of the floods eventually exceeded $11 billion. It wasn’t just that climate destruction was bearing down; the financial costs of not attending to it were beginning to outweigh the savings. The violence and frequency of storms and disasters across the nation captivated even the most easily distracted public. Suddenly, climate change was noticeable—its effects were being felt, heard, and seen—and for a growing number of people like Ellen Herdell, it seemed as if the world was hurtling uncontrollably toward a cliff.
Any date could be chosen as the best example of the coming climate apocalypse, and the more recent the date, the better. The heat waves in the United States in 2023 were hotter and longer than those of 2022 and 2021, which were in turn worse than those of 2020, and so on. Federal data shows that those heat waves, on average, have gotten successively more intense over the last decade. In some places the droughts have gotten worse, too, the reservoir levels lower and the wildfires more destructive, while in other places the rainstorms are more torrential.
But you have to start somewhere, and at the time, 2020 seemed like a turning point. It represented a unique intersection between changes in the physical environment and the lived reality of the public experiencing them, a point when many of the worst climate risks—like the fires—not only got worse but also finally seemed to get worse. It was not just the year Ellen Herdell started paying attention to her predicament but also the year the world started paying attention in larger numbers, when concern showed evidence of crossing ideological, and even some political, lines. Democratic caucus voters in Iowa, which saw more than 100,000 acres of farmland flood in 2019, told pollsters that climate was second only to health care as their top issue. When Yale University and George Mason University conducted a series of national political surveys during the 2020 presidential campaign, they found that roughly half of Americans ranked climate change as a top political priority, up from roughly one-third in 2016, and three out of four described climate change as either “a crisis” or “a major problem.” Even Republicans were feeling the heat; climate policy wasn’t going to drive their votes—at least not yet—but one in three self-identified conservatives said climate change should be declared a national emergency. Whether that is a sign of hope remains to be seen, but it felt like something was shifting. When Joe Biden was elected president that November with a record eighty-one million votes, his supporters demanded that climate action rank among his top priorities. Biden answered by placing science and climate advisers both in cabinet-level positions, and signing a raft of climate-focused executive orders in the days and months after his arrival at the White House.
As far as scientists were concerned, 2020 was a point that made it increasingly clear the most optimistic scenarios were already sliding out of reach, becoming impossible to achieve. According to just about every metric, the world was hitting critical warming benchmarks sooner, and with more dramatic consequences, than expected. The most dramatic changes—ice cap melting, drought, and the thawing of the frozen Arctic—appeared to be occurring faster than even the most alarmist of climate scientists thought possible. It was suddenly realistic to think that the warming of Arctic permafrost could push the planet over a tipping point, leading to the sudden release of so much methane gas now trapped in the soil that global atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will continue to rise steeply even if governments effectively curtail industrial emissions. Maybe—hopefully—it will never get that bad. But the science tells us that the changes are just beginning.
* * *
IN PREINDUSTRIAL TIMES, the earth’s atmosphere acted like a kind of regulator. The sun’s energy was either reflected back into space or, to a lesser degree, absorbed by the earth itself. But then the era of fossil fuels arrived, and as coal, oil, and natural gas were burned to make energy for manufacturing and transportation, hydrocarbons that were locked in those fuels deep within the earth were reformulated and released into the atmosphere as gases. Rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases have had the effect of trapping more of the heat reflected off the surface of the earth in the atmosphere and holding it, turning the earth’s ventilation system into insulation instead.
Approximately 340,000 years ago, levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases peaked naturally, likely contributing to a cycle of warming on the planet. The peak is part of a natural pattern: Every hundred thousand years or so the shape of the earth’s orbit changes slightly, and every forty thousand years the earth tilts on its axis, each starting a period of warming or cooling that is determined by how much sunlight reaches the earth and that is influenced by a whole host of factors, including the rate of evaporation from the oceans, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, and the reflectivity of ice cover on the poles. But scientists believe that throughout all of these past cycles, CO2 levels never reached higher than about 300 parts per million (ppm) in the earth’s atmosphere, and that after it reached that apex two cycles ago, it settled back to around 280 ppm for the last several hundred thousand years.
With the advent of the industrial revolution and the widespread burning of fossil fuels, atmospheric CO2 quickly surpassed those levels, suggesting the warming that is beginning now will be far greater than anything in the planet’s history. In 1965, the year the President’s Science Advisory Committee first came to Lyndon Johnson’s White House to deliver a briefing on environmental pollution that warned industrialization was causing dramatic global warming that would also lead to rising seas, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 320 ppm. “We can conclude with fair assurance that at the present time fossil fuels are the only source of CO2 being added to the ocean-atmosphere-biosphere system,” the report stated. By 1987, when NASA scientist James Hansen warned Congress that extreme climate warming would ensue if people allowed industrial emissions of CO2 to continue to increase, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency most focused on weather and climate, estimated that the concentration of CO2 had already jumped to about 348 ppm.
Since then, global leaders—and American leaders in particular—haven’t done much to curtail either the use of fossil fuels or emissions. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, whose signatories pledged to reduce emissions of countries around the world, failed. The Paris Agreement, adopted in 2015, has yet to achieve anything close to its objectives. American attempts to establish markets for trading carbon emissions credits, or to enact strict regulations aimed at boosting renewable energy that would lower emissions, repeatedly failed to pass in Congress. After the former vice president Al Gore warned in 2006 of exponential warming and showed the now-famous “hockey stick” graph for rising emissions and temperatures, he was co-awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But in mainstream U.S. politics, his admonitions were largely dismissed. Since then, an extraordinary misinformation campaign driven by corporate and fossil fuel interests has propelled the false view that scientists are undecided about how climate change works—when they are not.
On May 9, 2013, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 surpassed 400 ppm, a milestone scientists had long warned could be a tipping point for the earth’s climate. Moreover, CO2 concentrations were rising more than a hundred times faster than during the period of CO2 increase before the thaw of the last ice age. In May 2022, the concentration of CO2 was still ascending, racing past 421 ppm, in what at least one prominent researcher described as “an explosion.”
As the average temperature of the atmosphere increases, all the global systems that circulate air and water, functioning like the plumbing of our planet, are increasingly disrupted. The higher the average temperature on earth, the more the ocean currents in the Atlantic find themselves stalled, or thrown out of whack. Separately, the westerly winds that compose the polar jet stream, carried by convection and their own momentum, begin to sag, dropping farther south in big, bendy loops—loops that carry arctic air far from its typical northern latitudes, helping to make rapidly intensifying bomb cyclones more likely. And the more those currents and loops and patterns change, the more the life we call normal goes out the window. It’s not just that global warming leads to more heat, more drought, and so on. Rather, the whole planet will see wilder swings and cycles, a lack of stability, like the wheels slowly wobbling off a bus. Some places will get cooler, with frigid temperatures becoming more extreme. In other places, precipitation will increase—torrential rains will cause epic floods, and winter storms will dump more snow. Entire regions will soon lose the ability to grow food, and extreme heat will make it difficult to work, to fly airplanes, and to produce goods. In some places and at certain times, simply going outdoors will become deadly. The places around the planet we think we know will be less knowable, less predictable. And the places around the world we think we can live in now will not be the same as the places where we will be able to live in the future.
Copyright © 2024 by Abrahm Lustgarten
Copyright © 2020 by Jane Hirshfield