That blaze erupted in forests primed for a runaway inferno by a climate that’s changing before our eyes. Whoever promised that “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” would impede postal deliveries never anticipated the ferocity of the Dixie fire.įew did. The box where I once received magazines, bills, and hand-decorated cards from my grandkids lies on its back, collecting ashes. Greenville still has a zip code, but the fire gutted the concrete-block building that was our post office. Now, it’s a 50-mile round trip drive that sometimes takes four hours due to the constant removal of hazardous trees. My mission is to retrieve the household mail, a task that would ordinarily have required a five-minute walk from my second-floor office to the Greenville Post Office. We motorists are all headed toward Quincy, the seat of Plumas County and its largest town. I’m the first in a long line of vehicles halted by a burly man clad in neon yellow and wielding a stop sign on a six-foot pole. Sadly, I have plenty of time to contemplate these devastating changes. Like natural disasters everywhere, this fire has upended entire communities. The historic sheriff’s office is just a series of naked half-round windows eerily showcasing devastation. The fire left our downtown with scorched, bent-over lampposts touching debris-strewn sidewalks. It reduced house after house to rubble, leaving only chimneys where children once had hung Christmas stockings, and dead century-old oaks where families, spanning four generations, had not so long ago built tree forts. It razed Greenville, my hometown since 1975. Today, I see only slopes studded with charred stumps and burnt trees jackstrawed across the land like so many giant pick-up-sticks.ĭixie did far more than take out entire forests. They were so green then, pines, cedars, and graceful Douglas firs mixed with oaks pushing through the thick conifer foliage in a quest for light and life. Today, stuck at the bottom thanks to endless road work, I try to remember what these hillsides looked like before the Dixie fire torched them in a furious 104-day climate-change-charged rampage across nearly one million acres, an area larger than the state of Delaware. From the top of that grade, I’ve sometimes seen bald eagles soaring over the valley that stretches to the base of Keddie Peak, the northernmost mountain in California’s Sierra Nevada range. Half a mile south of what’s left of the old Gold Rush-era town of Greenville, California, Highway 89 climbs steeply in a series of S-turns as familiar to me as my own backyard. With that in mind, take a moment to return to Greenville with Little and experience a world of destruction that just goes on and on and on. Quite the opposite, they become the essence of life for those who live through them in a world where, by some estimates, the climate crisis could displace up to 1.2 billion people (yes, you read that figure correctly!) by 2050. Today, Little reminds us that such disasters - and they are only going to grow worse as the planet continues to heat in such a record fashion - aren’t faintly passing events. Given the way the news functions in our world, we’re always moving on to the next disaster, which makes it easy enough to forget that the last one is seldom truly behind us. As it happens, an old friend of mine, journalist Jane Braxton Little, was home in Greenville, California, when the Dixie fire swept through that Gold Rush-era town and, as she wrote for TomDispatch in September, made her a climate refugee only briefly, but many of the rest of that town’s inhabitants permanently. To that sum, the Dixie fire, burning for more than three months, contributed almost a million acres, making it at least the second largest in the state’s history. In that state, more than four million acres burned in 2020 and another 2.5 million this year so far. It’s experiencing once unimaginable fires and conditions that should be frightening. Like British Columbia and Washington, California has been particularly hard-hit this year, amid a historic megadrought across parts of the West and Southwest. Yes, fires and floods have always been part of the human experience, but let’s face it, this - the fact that those fires have become so fierce they can actually make their own weather - represents something breathtaking (or perhaps breath-taking-away) on this planet of ours. But it’s also been the year of record-breaking floods - sometimes, as in British Columbia and parts of the state of Washington, in the very same places that had earlier burned so devastatingly (releasing, by the way, yet more carbon into the atmosphere). This was certainly the year of the fires - from the Turkish coast and the Greek Island of Evia to the American West.
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