On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  I ask local friends. They look worried and talk about who has which kind of fishing boat.

  A DEATH IN A BLUEBERRY FIELD

  Nine days into the whiteout, some terrible news arrives. A farmworker in smoke-choked Sumas, Washington (less than a mile from the Canadian border) has died in a Seattle hospital. Honesto Silva Ibarra came to the United States from Mexico on a temporary H-2A visa to work through the harvest season. He was twenty-eight years old and had been picking blueberries at Sarbanand Farms, owned by California-based Munger Farms, when he started feeling sick.

  Silva’s coworkers blame his death on unsafe working conditions: long hours, few breaks, insufficient food and drinking water—all compounded by the heavy smoke drifting in from British Columbia. “The workers have been overworked, underfed, have not been hydrated enough, and this has been going on for weeks,” said Rosalinda Guillen, director of the advocacy group Community to Community Development. Some workers had fainted on the job, they told reporters.

  A representative for Munger Farms says that Silva died after running out of his diabetes medication and that heat and wildfire smoke had “nothing to do” with it. The company also claims it did all it could to save him.

  Whatever the cause (or causes) of death, the way the company treated Silva’s coworkers when they raised their complaints is a chilling window into just how precarious life can be for America’s thousands of guest workers. After Silva was hospitalized, workers staged a one-day strike to demand answers and better conditions. Sixty-six of them were immediately fired for insubordination. They found themselves without means to get home to Mexico and without payment for their final days of work. After setting up a protest camp, marching to the company’s offices, and attracting local media, the workers won their back pay, and Munger has “voluntarily offered to provide safe transportation home for all of the terminated workers,” according to the company spokesperson.

  But they did not get their much-needed jobs back. Munger supplies Walmart, Whole Foods, Safeway, and Costco.

  North of the border, there are similar reports of temporary farmworkers fainting and becoming sick on the job, with smoke apparently playing a role. And advocates point out that rather than being looked after, their sponsoring employers often send sick workers home like defective goods. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, at least ten workers in hot and smoky British Columbia were sent back to Mexico and Guatemala, “deemed too ill to work.”

  A HIGHLY DIVIDED DISASTER, AS USUAL

  We learn the same lesson over and over again: In highly unequal societies, with deep injustices reliably tracing racial fault lines, disasters don’t bring us all together in one fuzzy human family. They take preexisting divides and deepen them further, so the people who were already getting most screwed over before the disaster get extra doses of pain during and after.

  We know a fair bit about how that looks during storms like Katrina, Sandy, Harvey, and Irma. We understand less about fire. But that’s changing. We know, for instance, that as California struggles with a now-endless fire season, the state has become intensely reliant on prison labor, with inmates paid a staggeringly low hourly rate of one dollar to do some of the most dangerous work fighting flames. We know that hundreds of South African workers were contracted to help battle Alberta’s 2016 Fort McMurray fire—only for them to stop working en masse after discovering that they were being paid significantly less than their Canadian counterparts, and less than press reports claimed they were being paid. They were promptly sent home.

  We also know, as with floods, that our media give far more coverage to house pets rescued from wildfires in the United States and Canada than to the human lives lost because of infernos in, say, Indonesia and Chile. A global 2012 study estimated that more than three hundred thousand people die annually as a result of the smoke and air pollution from wildfires, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia.

  And in British Columbia this summer, we learned still more about the way inequalities play out against a burning backdrop. Several Indigenous leaders raised concerns that during fire emergencies, their communities do not receive the same level of urgent response as nonindigenous ones, whether for fighting the flames or for rebuilding afterward. With this in mind, several Indigenous reserves directly threatened by fire refused to evacuate, and a portion stayed behind to fight the flames—some with their own teams of trained firefighters and equipment, others with little more than garden hoses and sprinklers. In at least one case, the police responded by threatening to come in and remove children from their families, words with traumatic reverberations in a country that not so long ago systematically took Indigenous children from their homes as a matter of policy.

  In the end, no First Nations homes were raided, and many were saved because of self-organized fire brigades. Ryan Day, chief of the fire-threatened Bonaparte Indian Band, said, “If we all evacuated, we would have no houses on this reserve.”

  A WORLD WITH TWO SUNS

  It’s almost a week into the smoke-out, and the moon is nearing full. Around here, people take full moons seriously; there are drug-fueled dance parties in the forest and late-night kayak excursions taking advantage of the extra light.

  But when the almost-full moon rises in early August, I mistake it, at first, for the sun: It’s the same shape and almost the same fiery color.

  For about four days, it’s as if we are on a different planet, one with two red suns and no moon at all.

  SOUR FRUIT

  It’s week two of the smoke-out, and the blackberries are finally ripe. We set out to collect them. It feels strange to be going through with this carefree summer ritual with the air so thick and the news so grim, but we do it anyway. Combining hiking with nonstop eating is one of Toma’s all-time favorite activities.

  It’s pretty much a bust. With so little rain and such a weak sun to warm them, even the ripest berries are sour. Toma quickly loses interest and refuses to try any more. We come home with shin scratches and an empty bucket.

  We don’t stop hiking, though. We spend hours every day walking through the stands of moss-covered cedars and Douglas firs, breathing in the super-oxygenated air. I love these forests and have never taken their primordial beauty for granted. Now I find myself in near worship—thanking them not just for scrubbing the air, or for the shade and the carbon sequestration they provide (“ecosystem services” in the lingo of business environmentalism), but for their sheer stamina. For not joining their burning brethren. For sticking with us, despite our failings. At least so far.

  HELLO AGAIN

  I have breathed this smoke before. Not these precise airborne particles, of course, but smoke from many of the same wildfires. And the odd thing is, I breathed it in some 570 miles east of here, in another province entirely.

  I spent mid-July in Alberta, helping teach a course on environmental reporting at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

  This time, too, the forecast had looked perfect: sunny, clear, warm. This time, too, the forecast was usurped from the first day by a smoke cast, a haze that obscured the spectacular mountains in Banff National Park and provoked air quality warnings, headaches, and a catch in the throat. More #FakeWeather.

  Back in July, the winds were blowing east, which is why the Rockies were getting a face full of smoke. In Calgary, Canada’s oil capital, the smoke was so thick that it obscured the city’s skyline of gleaming glass towers bearing the logos of Shell, BP, Suncor, and TransCanada. And the smoke didn’t stop there. It kept traveling eastward, reaching well into the center of the continent, to Saskatchewan and Manitoba and down to North Dakota and Montana. (NASA released a striking picture of the five-hundred-mile-long plume.)

  Then, just as my family was heading to coastal British Columbia, the winds abruptly shifted and started blowing the plume westward, with the Rocky Mountains now acting like a giant tennis racket, lobbing the smoke to the Pacific.

  Inhaling smoke originating from the same incinerated forests f
or the second time in one summer—never mind that I had traveled six hundred miles and crossed a provincial boundary—was an eerie experience. I felt like the smudge was somehow stalking me like the smoke monster on Lost.

  WORLD ON FIRE

  Part of the head trip in all this is the sheer scale of the disaster, both temporally and spatially. Even devastating hurricanes like Harvey tend to concentrate their impacts in a contained geography. And the event (though not the aftermath) is relatively brief.

  These fires, which rage for months, are of a different order entirely. There are the direct impacts of the fires. The huge swath of land charred. The tens of thousands of lives overturned by evacuation orders. The lost homes and farms and cattle. The industries (from tourism operators to sawmills) forced to close down.

  And then there are the less direct impacts of all that wandering smoke. Over July and August, the smoke from this conflagration covered an area spanning roughly seven hundred thousand square miles. That’s bigger than all of France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Portugal combined. All touched by this one fast-moving disaster.

  And this is just one snapshot of a much larger season of fire. At summer’s end, large parts of the American West were on fire. A fire in Los Angeles was the largest ever recorded within city limits; a fire-related state of emergency was declared for every single county in Washington State. In Montana, a wildfire named the Lodgepole Complex burned some 425 square miles of territory, making it the third-largest blaze in the recorded history of the region. This is part of a broader increase in both the numbers of fires and the months during which they burn: Since the 1970s, fire season in the United States has lengthened by 105 days, according to an analysis by Climate Central.

  The area of Europe that has burned this fire season has been triple the average, and it’s not over yet. Central Portugal experienced the deadliest impacts: In June, more than sixty people died in a blaze near Pedrógão Grande.I Hundreds of homes have burned in Siberia. During Chile’s summer months, the country battled the largest wildfire in its recorded history, and thousands of people were displaced. In June in South Africa, the same storm caused flooding in Cape Town and fanned the flames of unprecedented deadly wildfires in nearby towns. Even Greenland, that icy place, saw large and unusual wildfires this summer. Jason Box, a world-renowned climate scientist specializing in the Greenland ice sheet, pointed out that “temperatures in Greenland are probably higher [than they have been over] the last 800 years.”

  YES, IT’S CLIMATE CHANGE

  Warmer and drier weather is not the only factor at play. Another is the perennially hubristic attempt to reengineer natural forces far more powerful than we are. Fire is a crucial part of the forest cycle: Left to their own devices, forests burn periodically, clearing the way for new growth and reducing the amount of highly flammable underbrush and old wood (“fuel” in firefighter parlance). Many Indigenous cultures have long used fire as a key part of land care. But in North America, modern forest management has systematically supressed cyclical fires in order to protect profitable trees that were headed for sawmills, and out of fear that small fires could spread to inhabited areas (and there are more and more inhabited areas).

  Without regular natural burns, forests are chock-full of fuel, provoking fires to burn out of control. And there’s a hell of a lot more fuel as a result of bark beetle infestations, which have left behind huge stands of dry and brittle dead trees. There is compelling evidence that the bark beetle epidemic has been exacerbated by climate change–related heat and drought.

  Overlying it all is the uncomplicated fact that hotter, drier weather (which is directly linked to climate change) creates the optimal conditions for wildfires. Indeed, these forces have conspired to turn forests into perfectly laid campfires, with the dry earth acting like balled-up newspaper, the dead trees serving as kindling, and the added heat providing the match. Mike Flannigan, a University of Alberta wildfire expert, is blunt. “The increase in area burned in Canada is a direct result of human-caused climate change. Individual events get a little more tricky to connect, but the area burned has doubled in Canada since the 1970s as a result of warming temperatures.” And according to a 2010 study, fire occurrence in Canada is projected to increase by 75 percent by the end of the century.

  Here’s the really alarming thing: 2017 was not even an El Niño year, the cyclical natural warming phenomenon that was commonly cited as a key factor in the huge fires that raged in Southern California and Northern Alberta last year.

  With no El Niño to blame, some media outlets have been willing to drop the hedging. To quote Germany’s Deutsche Welle: “Climate change sets the world on fire.”

  FAIRY TALES AND FEEDBACK LOOPS

  “Looks like snow is coming,” Toma declares solemnly, his face pressed up to the window and the white, thick air on the other side.

  Ever since we left Alberta, his five-year-old mind has been struggling to understand the smoke that has defined his summer. Trying to make sense of my chronic cough and his raging skin rash. Struggling, most of all, with the soundtrack of worried chatter among the grown-ups in his life.

  His response goes through phases: Nightmares wake him up at night. He writes songs with lyrics like “Why is everything going wrong?” There’s a lot of inappropriate laughter.

  At first, he was excited by the idea of wildfires, confusing them with campfires and angling for s’mores. Then his grandfather explained that the sun had turned into that weird, glowing dot because the forest itself was on fire. He was stricken. “What about the animals?”

  We have developed techniques for controlling worry. They begin with taking deep breaths, and we do it several times a day. But it occurs to me that breathing extra amounts of this particular air is probably not great, especially for small lungs already prone to infection.

  Avi and I don’t talk to Toma about climate change, which may seem strange given that I write books about it and Avi directs films about it, and we both spend most of our waking hours focused on the need for a transformative response to the crisis. What we do talk about is pollution, though on a scale Toma can understand. Like plastic, and why we have to pick it up and use less of it because it makes the animals sick. Or we look at the exhaust coming out of cars and trucks and talk about how you can get power from the sun and the wind and store it in batteries. A little kid can grasp concepts like these and know exactly what should happen (better than plenty of adults). But the idea that the entire planet has a fever that could get so high that much of life on Earth could be lost in the convulsions—that seems to me too great a burden to ask small children to carry.

  This summer marks the end of his protection. It isn’t a decision I’m proud of, or one I even remember making. He just heard too many adults obsessing over the strange sky and the real reasons behind the fires, and he finally put it all together.

  At a playground in the haze, I meet a young mother who offers advice on how to reassure worried kids. She tells hers that forest fires are a positive part of the cycle of ecosystem renewal—the burning makes way for new growth, which feeds the bears and deer.

  I nod, feeling like a failed mom. But I also know that she’s lying. It’s true that fire is a natural part of the life cycle, but the fires currently blotting out the sun in the Pacific Northwest are the opposite—they’re part of a planetary death spiral. Many are so hot and intransigent that they are leaving scorched earth behind.II The rivers of bright red fire retardant being sprayed from planes are seeping into waterways, posing a threat to fish. And just as my son fears, animals are losing their forested homes.

  The biggest danger, however, is the carbon being released as the forests burn. Three weeks after the smoke descended on the coast, we learn that the total annual greenhouse gas emissions for the province of British Columbia had tripled as a result of the fires, and it’s still going up.

  This dramatic increase in emissions is part of what climate scientists mean when they warn about feedback loops: burning carbon
leads to warmer temperatures and long periods without rain, which leads to more fires, which release more carbon into the atmosphere, which leads to even warmer and drier conditions, and even more fires.

  Another such lethal feedback loop is playing out with Greenland’s wildfires. Fires produce black soot (also known as “black carbon”), which settles on ice sheets, turning the ice gray or black. Darkened ice absorbs more heat than reflective white ice, which makes the ice melt faster, which leads to sea level rise and the release of huge amounts of methane, which causes more warming and more fires, which in turn create more blackened ice and more melting.

  So, no, I’m not going to tell Toma that the fires are a happy part of the cycle of life. We settle for half truths and fudging to make the nightmare subside. “The animals know how to escape from the fires. They run to rivers and streams and other forests.”

  We talk about how we need to plant more trees for the animals to come home to. It helps, a little.

  A WAKE-UP CALL—FOR SOME

  One of the regions hit hardest by the fires is a place I have visited often, the territory of the Secwepemc people, which encompasses a huge swath of land in British Columbia’s interior—much of it now on fire. The late Arthur Manuel, a former Secwepemc chief, was a dear friend and hosted me several times. So far in 2017, I have visited his territory twice: once to attend Manuel’s funeral and once for a meeting he had been organizing when heart failure took his life.