Burning lives Away

Here in budget-impaired California – home to quakes, fires and resulting mudslides – an explosive forest fire is attacked from the ground and the air by every modern fire-fighting piece of equipment and trained volunteers and professionals, not only from California, but from neighboring states dedicated to mutual cooperation. News reports blister containment statistics from every medium known to man, and Californians track the devastation vs. containment battles on interactive maps that are constantly updated. As climate change has seeped and then flowed into our lives, fire season has grown longer every year. With the massive rains we have had this year, the hills are festooned with beautiful and inevitably dangerous kindling, simply awaiting the inevitable long, dry season.

So it is in a relatively wealthy Western society, but where fires burn across drought-stricken African plains, where grasslands and forests feed and shelter both people and wildlife, impoverished peoples watch with passive acceptance as their resources burn away. They are used to inhaling the toxic clouds of black smoke that smolder unchecked, sometimes for weeks on end… growing into unstoppable blazes. Feed grasses, livestock and farms become fuel. Species, a mass of individual feelings and fears, slowly are deprived of their habitats, face extinction in a modern and unforgiving world. There is no money for firefighters here.

For photographers, the orange sun blocked by thick clouds often form magnificent silhouettes in mid-day heat. But while fire has always been a cyclical natural phenomenon necessary for the very survival of the land, climate change has pushed “necessary and cyclical” to “never-ending drought followed by the seeming permanence of desertification.” Fire is simply an accelerant of this life-destroying climactic shift.

Daniel and Sindiso Mnisi Weeks expressed their vision in the February 15^th New York Times as they honeymooned in Zambia, a gorgeous if impoverished nation in southern Africa: “Tucked in the middle of southern Africa, Zambia is burning because life south of the equator is becoming dangerously hot and dry. That is in large part because since the Second Industrial Revolution of the middle 19th century, the West has been pumping billions of tons of climate-changing carbon into the atmosphere with impunity, leaving Africa hotter and drier than at any time since our earliest ancestors found their feet and began to walk away….

“There wasn’t a fire truck or helicopter in sight…small wonder in a country where the average individual earns $850 per year and it costs nearly $100 to fill up a tank of gas. Even if Zambians could afford the trucks and choppers to fight the fires, where would they find enough water to fill the other tank?

“… When Zambia burns by fire it burns by poverty too. And one cause, at least, is shared by both. The rise in concentration of atmospheric carbon from 284 parts per million by volume (ppmv) 150 years ago to nearly 400 ppmv today is hastening drought and desertification in sub-Saharan Africa to a shocking degree. It’s a cause which cannot be addressed by improving governments or building schools or staffing clinics on the ground, desirable as those things might be. Rather, it’s a cause for which we in the industrialized West must take a large share of the blame.” In the end, Americans are unlikely to do much about this anomaly for which we are partially responsible. People and animals will starve to death. Families that were poor will sink to new depths of poverty. Species will disappear from the face of the earth. But nature is agnostic; she accepts whatever happens to the scarred surface of her planet, and if a few animals or species disappear now and again, so be it; it just is. She sends us messages, but we often don’t listen or look.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I cannot turn my eyes away.