A climate hockey stick that melts ice - Albany Democrat-Herald

A climate hockey stick that melts ice

… soon enough, no one will be safe from the sorrow of ecocide. — Naomi Klein, "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate," 2014

It’s a tale of two towns and two fires.

In 2017, the 24,000-acre Milli fire roared through Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest toward the charming mountain community of Sisters, home to more than 2,000 people. It seemed that nothing would stop the conflagration from torching the whole town.

Nothing, that is, except the forest itself, which grew right up to Sisters’ edge. That’s because, earlier that year, the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project, a group of local volunteers consisting of loggers, environmentalists, firefighters and others, thinned the smaller trees and burned the underbrush — a process known as controlled or prescribed burning — in the woods surrounding the town.

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When the wildfire reached that buffer zone, lack of fuel caused it to slow enough so it could be extinguished by firefighters or, in some areas, die out on its own. Yet the beautiful, mature trees, though somewhat blackened, still stood like guardian spirits at the town’s boundary.

In 2023, two environmental factors, neglected ecosystem management and climate change, combined to reduce the historic Hawaiian oceanside town of Lahaina to smoldering embers.

The management negligence was the failure — or refusal by the state and local governments, influenced by corporate landowners — to heed the warnings of ecologists about the fire hazard of vast fields of invasive grass growing down the nearby volcano slopes to the edge of town, despite several previous, large-scale grass fires on the island.

No prophylactic measures, such as allowing goats to eat the grasses near Lahaina, were taken.

The climate factor was twofold. During the weeks leading up to the fire, an abnormal, rapidly intensifying drought (“flash drought”) rendered Maui’s grass fields tinder dry. Then, just before the fire, a seasonal high-pressure zone north of the island combined with a low-pressure zone caused by an unusually strong hurricane passing to its south to produce high winds that rushed across the grass fields toward the town. Then something sparked the fire, and a few hours later 97 lives and 2,000 buildings were lost.

But the Lahaina fire was just one of many severe, and often tragic, impacts of climate change this year. To many environmental observers, 2023 marks the crossing of a threshold into a precarious future in which such impacts strike with greatly increased frequency but at unpredictable times and locations.

If so, the question becomes, “What are we going to do about it?”

Perhaps another way to put that question is, “Should we emulate Sisters? Or, Lahaina?”

The obvious answer is for us to take a proactive approach and prepare for climate disasters — be they fires, extreme heat waves, flash droughts, flash floods or tornadoes — as well as we can.

To start, we must accept two premises: (1) Yesteryear’s climate is gone, and next year’s climate impacts are potentially menacing, no matter where we are on the planet; and

(2) Focusing some of our attention and resources on survival doesn’t mean we should reduce our efforts to stop emissions, addressing only the symptoms and not the cause of the climate crisis. It is clear that we must do both. But we have to stay alive, and protect our infrastructure and economy, to maintain our capacity to tackle emissions.

While the task of building responsive and resilient systems to survive a global threat of climate change might seem daunting, we should remember that the hazards can be broken down into locale-specific types, with floods prioritized in some areas and tornadoes in others, according to assessed local vulnerabilities.

Much of the response, then, can be community based, as was the DCFP’s work to save the small town of Sisters at our ecological house.