On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  The gathering was in response to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to approve a $7.4 billion project that would nearly triple the capacity of the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline, which carries high-carbon tar sands oil from Alberta through British Columbia. The expanded network of pipes would pass through dozens of waterways on Secwepemc land, and is forcefully opposed by many traditional landholders. Arthur believed the struggle has the potential to turn into “Standing Rock North.”

  When the fires began this summer, Manuel’s friends and family wasted no time making the argument that building more fossil fuel infrastructure as the world burns is both absurd and reckless. A statement was issued by the Secwepemc Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty opposing the pipeline expansion project and demanding that the existing, smaller pipeline be shut down immediately to reduce the risk of a catastrophic accident should fire and oil meet.

  “We are in a critical state of emergency dealing with the impacts of climate change,” said Secwepemc teacher Dawn Morrison. “The health of our families and communities relies heavily on our ability to harvest wild salmon and access clean drinking water, both of which are at risk if the Kinder Morgan pipeline was ruptured or impacted by the fires.”

  This is common sense: When oil and gas infrastructure finds itself in the bull’s-eye of the cumulative effects of burning so much fossil fuel—think of oil rigs battered by superstorms, or Houston underwater—we should all do what the Secwepemc did: treat the disaster as a wake-up call about the need to build a safer society, fast.

  WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T TALK ABOUT OIL

  Our political and economic systems, however, are not built that way; indeed, they are built to actively override that kind of survival response. So Kinder Morgan doesn’t even bother answering the community’s concerns. What’s more, the company is gearing up to begin construction on the expansion this month, with the fires still raging.

  Worse, some extractive industries are actively using the fiery state of emergency to get stuff done that was impossible during normal times. For instance, Taseko Mines has been fighting for years to build a highly contentious, open-pit gold and copper mine in one of the parts of British Columbia hit hardest by the fires. Fierce opposition among the Tsilhqot’in First Nation has so far successfully fended off the toxic project, resulting in several key regulatory victories.

  But this July, with several of the impacted Tsilhqot’in communities under evacuation order or holding their ground to fight the fires themselves, the outgoing British Columbia government, notorious as a “Wild West” of political payola, did something extraordinary. In its last week in office after suffering a humiliating election defeat, the government handed Taseko a raft of permits to move ahead with exploration. “It defies compassion that while our people are fighting for our homes and lives, B.C. issues permits that will destroy more of our land beyond repair,” said Russell Myers Ross, a Tsilhqot’in chief. A representative of the outgoing government responded: “I appreciate this may come at a difficult time for you given the wildfire situation affecting some of your communities.” Despite the stresses the fires have placed on their people, the Tsilhqot’in are fighting the move in court, and the company has already been forced to suspend its drilling plans in the face of legal troubles.

  Yet anyone holding out hope that the fires might jolt Prime Minister Justin Trudeau into serious climate action has been gravely disappointed. Canada’s prime minister loves being photographed frolicking in British Columbia’s spectacular wilderness (preferably shirtless), and his wife, Sophie Grégoire, recently unleashed a hurricane of emojis by posting a picture of herself surfing off Vancouver Island. (It was during the fires and the sky looked hazy.)

  But for all his gushing about British Columbia’s forests and coastal waters, Trudeau is slamming his foot on the accelerator when it comes to pipelines and tar sands expansion. “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and just leave them there,” he told a cheering crowd of oil and gas executives in Houston in March 2017. He hasn’t budged since. Never mind that Houston has since been flooded by an unprecedented storm, or that a third of Trudeau’s own country is on fire. This month, one of his top ministers said of the Kinder Morgan pipeline approval, “Nothing that’s happened since then has changed our mind that this is a good decision.” Trudeau is on fossil fuel autopilot, and nothing, it seems, will make him swerve.

  Then there is President Donald Trump, whose climate crimes are too comprehensive and too layered to delineate here. It does seem worth mentioning, however, that he chose this summer of floods and fires to disband the federal advisory panel assessing the impacts of climate change on the United States and to greenlight Arctic drilling in the Beaufort Sea.III

  THE GUY WHO LOST TWO HOUSES

  It’s not just politicians who are bound and determined not to learn from nature’s blaring messages.

  In the midst of British Columbia’s fire emergency, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation struck human interest gold: They found a man, Jason Schurman, whose log home burned down in British Columbia—and who also lost a home in the Fort McMurray fires one year earlier. Two homes, two fires, same guy. The CBC ran photos of his charred properties (separated by eight hundred miles) side by side. In both cases, only the fireplace and chimney remained.

  There’s a lot of moving detail in the story about the human wreckage these disasters leave behind: the endless paperwork, traumatic memories, and family stress. But there is no mention of climate change. This is notable because Schurman works as a site supervisor in the Alberta tar sands. Still, the reporter did not ask Schurman if losing two homes and nearly losing his son raised any questions for him about the industry in which he works (one of the only sectors in Canada or the United States still paying blue-collar salaries that afford middle-class lives). Instead, the tale of a man “twice burned” played as a quirky human interest story, alongside one about a firefighter who got married amid the flames.

  When Vice picked up the irresistible story, the reporter did raise climate change with Schurman, which he acknowledged could be one of the factors contributing to these infernos. But, in very Vice-like fashion, the bulk of the article focused on how the oil worker is coping with his losses through baroque body art: “The constant pain of a tattoo also takes your mind completely off . . . losing everything I own.”

  YOU GET USED TO IT

  Aren’t we all guilty, in one way or another, of sleepwalking toward apocalypse? The soft-focus quality the smoke casts over life here seems to make this collective denial more acute. Here on the coast in August, we all look like sleepwalkers, stumbling around doing our work and errands, having vacations in a thick cloud of smoke, pretending we don’t hear the alarm clanging in the background.

  Smoke, after all, is not fire. It’s not a flood. It doesn’t command your immediate attention or force you to flee. You can live with it, if less well. You get used to it.

  And that’s what we do.

  We paddleboard in the smoke and act like it’s mist. We bring beers and ciders to the beach and remark that, on the upside, you barely need sunscreen at all.

  Sitting on the beach under that fake, milky sky, I suddenly flash to those images of families sunning themselves on oil-soaked beaches in the midst of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster. And it hits me: They are us, refusing to let a raging, record-breaking wildfire interfere with our family vacation.

  During disasters, you hear a lot of praise for human resilience. And we are a remarkably resilient species. But that’s not always good. It seems a great many of us can get used to almost anything, even the steady annihilation of our own habitat.

  A WINDOW TO A HACKED PLANET

  A week into what a local Sunshine Coast paper has dubbed our “Days of Haze,” The Atlantic runs a cheery story headlined, TO STOP GLOBAL WARMING, SHOULD HUMANITY DIM THE SKY?

  The piece focuses on a method often referred to as solar radiation management, which would see sul
fur dioxide sprayed into the stratosphere to create a barrier between Earth and the sun, forcibly lowering temperatures. Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the piece notes, means more governments, including China, are taking sun-dimming seriously.

  The first mention of possible risks comes in paragraph 20, where the journalist quotes a climate scientist saying that hacking the planet “could induce droughts or floods or things like that.” Yeah, that would be a bummer. In fact, there is a large cache of peer-reviewed research showing that this form of geoengineering could interfere with the monsoons in Asia and Africa, thus threatening the food and water supply for billions of people.

  Now imagine a scenario in which men like Trump, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, and North Korea’s “Supreme Leader” Kim Jong-un were empowered to deploy these climate-altering technologies like unconventional weapons, hurtling us into an era of undeclared weather wars in which one country sacrifices the precipitation of another in order to save its crops, and the other retaliates by unleashing mega-floods.

  Some would-be planet hackers insist that these worst-case risks can be managed (though they never explain how). All concede to lesser downsides, however. Spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere would almost certainly create a permanent milky-white haze, making clear blue skies a thing of the past for the entire planet. The haze might well prevent astronomers from seeing the stars and planets clearly, and weaker sunlight could reduce the capacity of solar power generators to produce energy.

  When you think about this in the abstract, it can seem like a small price to pay to buy “some more time to get our act together” on pollution control, as the Atlantic article puts it. But it is something else entirely to read about the prospect of deliberately dimming the sky under a sky that is already artificially dimmed with omnipresent smoke casting a literal pall over daily life.

  Losing the sky is no small thing. We take it for granted that even in the most crowded of cities, we can look up and see the world beyond our reach—yes, there are planes and satellites, but beyond that is the heavens, the unknown, the ultimate “out there.” In almost every corner of the Pacific Northwest this August, when we gazed up at the sky, we didn’t see any of that expanse. We just saw ourselves, more detritus of our own broken system. In the blanket of smoke, we had a ceiling, not a sky—and it felt like a suffocating lid placed over possibility itself.

  I hear myself manically suggesting to Avi that we should just drive north until we hit clean air. And then I remember that if we did, we’d be face-to-face with rapidly melting permafrost. We stay put.

  THE WIND CHANGES

  Almost two full weeks into the smoke-out, something shifts. I hear it first, and then I see branches moving: wind. A sudden temperature drop. And by noon, actual patches of blue, separated by clouds. I had forgotten how distinct they are from haze—higher, for starters, and with all kinds of delicate shapes and movement.

  The smoke hasn’t cleared entirely, but enough of it has blown away to suddenly make the world look sharp. Crisp. You know that elation when a long fever finally breaks? I feel like that.

  The next day brings rain; not a lot, but enough to hope for some relief for the 2,400 exhausted and overworked firefighters. My allergies clear up, and Toma starts sleeping through the night again.

  But the news from the interior is disastrous. The same wind that finally pried loose the blanket of smoke on the coast has been fanning the flames at the epicenter of the fires. The stillness that trapped the smoke here for so long turns out to have been the only bright spot for the fire brigades. Now that’s over, and there’s not nearly enough rain.

  Over the next week, British Columbia blazes through the record books. By mid-August, the fires break the provincial record for the most land burned in one year: 3,453 square miles.IV Within days, several different fires combine forces to create the largest single fire in British Columbia’s history.

  TOO SOON

  When the solar eclipse arrives, I feel nothing but dread. We have clear skies, a near-perfect viewing location, and I know, in theory, that what is about to happen is a natural wonder. But I’m just not ready to say good-bye to the sun again, even for a few minutes. We only just got it back.

  I spend the eclipse sitting outside alone, staring at the horizon, clinging to the dying light. A week after neo-Nazis marched with torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, and with so much of the world engulfed in actual infernos, this sudden dimming of our world just feels too damn literal.

  THE GLOBAL FIRE ALARM SYSTEM IS BROKEN

  Over Labor Day weekend, more than 160 fires are still burning in British Columbia. Extremely hot, dry, and windy weather has conspired to create the conditions for a slew of large, new wildfires to ignite and for old ones to expand exponentially. Authorities announce new evacuations daily; at last count, some 60,000 displaced people had registered as evacuees with the Red Cross over the course of the summer. The state of emergency has been extended for the fourth time.

  But even in Canada, it’s impossible for this news to compete with the devastating fallout from Hurricane Harvey; the scores dead and millions impacted by record flooding in South Asia and Nigeria; and now the fury of Hurricane Irma. Then there are the headline-grabbing blazes in Los Angeles, the state of emergency in Washington State, and new evacuations ordered, from Glacier National Park to Northern Manitoba. A satellite image from early September shows the entire length of the continent blanketed in smoke, #FakeWeather from the Pacific to the storm-churning Atlantic.

  I can barely keep track of the nonstop convulsions, and it’s my job to do so. I do know this: Our collective house is on fire, with every alarm going off simultaneously, clanging desperately for our attention. Will we keep stumbling and wheezing through the low light, acting as if the emergency were not already upon us? Or will the warnings be enough to force many more of us to listen? To respond like the Secwepemc, who, in a cloud of smoke, are nonetheless putting their bodies on the line to stop an oil pipeline from being built on their fire-scarred land?

  Those are the questions still hanging in the air at the end of this summer of smoke.

  * * *

  I. That death toll was surpassed just one year later in neighboring Greece. Some one hundred people died in a series of fires that ripped through coastal lands starting in Attica, the deadliest fire in modern European history. The remains of a large family were found by a cliff’s edge with their limbs entwined: they had clung to each other as the flames approached. “Instinctively, seeing the end nearing, they embraced,” the head of Greece’s Red Cross, Nikos Economopoulos, told a television crew.

  II. As was the case in November 2018 in Paradise, California, a town of 27,000 people that was razed to the ground in the deadliest fire in the state’s history.

  III. One year later, in 2018, Trump’s (now former) interior secretary used California’s record-breaking wildfires to quietly open up large new tracts of forest for logging. This was nothing new for Ryan Zinke, who in 2015, while serving as a member of Congress, cosponsored legislation that threatened environmental protection of public forests. Three years later, he was still repeating the mantra that deforestation was the best option to curb forest fires. “Every year we watch our forests burn, and every year there is a call for action. Yet, when action comes, and we try to thin forests of dead and dying timber, or we try to sustainably harvest timber from dense and fire-prone areas, we are attacked with frivolous litigation from radical environmentalists who would rather see forests and communities burn than see a logger in the woods.” There is no doubt that California needs both better forest management and wiser land use policy. But given the indispensable role that trees play in keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, the last thing we should be doing is expanding deforestation in the name of fire prevention.

  IV. That grim record was broken just one year later, during the historic fire season of 2018.

  THE STAKES OF OUR HISTORICAL MOMENT

  You went and showed us
all that you can win. Now you have to win.

  SEPTEMBER 2017

  LABOUR PARTY CONFERENCE, BRIGHTON

  IT’S BEEN SUCH A PRIVILEGE to be part of this historic convention. To feel its energy and optimism.

  Because, friends, it’s bleak out there. How do I begin to describe a world upside down? From heads of state tweeting threats of nuclear annihilation, to whole regions rocked by climate chaos, to thousands of migrants drowning off the coasts of Europe, to openly racist parties gaining ground, most recently and alarmingly in Germany—most days there is simply too much to take in. So, I want to start with an example that might seem small against such a vast backdrop.

  The Caribbean and southern United States are in the midst of an unprecedented hurricane season: pounded by storm after record-breaking storm. As we meet, Puerto Rico—hit by Irma, then Maria—is without power and could be for months. Its water and communication systems are also severely compromised. Three and a half million US citizens on that island are in desperate need of their government’s help.

  But just like during Hurricane Katrina, the cavalry is missing in action. Donald Trump is too busy trying to get black athletes fired, smearing them for daring to shine a spotlight on racist violence.

  As if all this weren’t enough, the vultures are now buzzing. The business press is filled with articles about how the only way for Puerto Rico to get the lights back on is to sell off its electricity utility. Maybe its roads and bridges, too.