Coping with change
Lessons from the age of wildfires and wildlife decline
This morning, social media reminded me that on December 13, 2017, I went for the first walk on the trail near my house after the area had been burned by the Thomas Fire—the largest wildfire in California history at the time, though soon surpassed by its successor.
In retrospect, the tree trunks that continued to smolder underground did make the walk in the woods quite unsafe, but after having been evacuated and living with my entire family at a friend’s for over a week without knowing whether our house still stood, my sense of what was safe and what wasn’t was de-calibrated.
So, I went for a walk.
There was still enough smoke in the air to need an N95 mask. Fine ashes swirled around my ankles in the warm, dry breeze. The underbrush and downed wood were completely gone, and the fire had opened up a view all the way to the creek, which hadn’t been visible before the fire.
Under the smoky sky that blocked out the sun, the same word kept coming to mind: moonscape. This perception was tempting. It was, after all, gray above, gray below, gray everywhere: trees and shrubs and wood and scrub and some of my neighbor’s houses, all reduced to smoke and ash.
But it wasn’t a moonscape. The moon is devoid of life. What now stood out was what the fire had left behind: the massive oaks who still had strong hearts (the ones with heart rot had been burned from the inside, their cavities creating chimneys for the flames); the confused migratory White-crowned Sparrows who were just passing through for their annual visit looking for rest and a snack; the Western Gray Squirrels—who, to my astonishment, had sheltered in place deep in their nests high in the strongest oaks; and the stream that ran through the middle of it all.
I was recently asked to share my reflections about living through the experience of the fire, and so read through some of my writings about it. Last year I published an essay in a climate change-oriented literary magazine, and found that though the story is the same, with each passing year, the trauma’s grip loosens.
A month after the fire, I seemed to be looking for the silver lining, the hope buried in the ash. The opening of the forest felt like a massive pruning, and the clearing of the underbrush felt like a cleaning out of old debris, which it was. I described it as a “change of clothes”.
I was living in a much-changed community, one which was now bombarded from the outside world about its own experience with words like “devastating” and “disaster” and “inferno of hell”. We saw photos of our neighborhood coupled with sensationalized headlines to be fed to the masses as clickbait, our horror turned into a sideshow for entertainment.
Perhaps in part due to the timing of the fire, there was an outpouring of generosity toward the survivors who lost their homes and animals. Our community—which before the fire was more of an everyone-keeps-to-themselves place—began coming together. Neighbors checked in on each other and shared resources and stories.
We learned that someone we had never met who lives a few houses down from us had probably saved our home by standing at the fire line with a garden hose mere feet from our driveway.
Three years after the fire, all of the burned houses on our street seemed to be rebuilt and finished at about the same time. It was noticeable as they went from construction zones to lived-in houses with holiday lights and decorations. They looked so shiny and new, like lotuses emerging from the mud.
The fire arrived at a time that it felt like things weren’t going to change. It was the last thing on my mind on December 4, 2017, despite the strong winds that made the power lines whistle and blew giant sycamore leaves into my hair and kicked dust into my eyes. It was the holiday season, which does not—did not—coincide with fire season. But things have changed.
Coping with change
There is opportunity in the grief of living on a rapidly changing planet.
I would love nothing more than for there to once again be abundant and enormous steelhead trout in the streams near where I live. The conditions for them to return, however, are not yet present, if they will ever be. That doesn’t stop extraordinary efforts to remove the passage barriers that will prevent them from thriving if they are ever able to return.
A tension in conservation and restoration exists between knowing when to cut our losses and recognize that bringing something back is a losing battle, and knowing when to continue the fight.
A prime example for many is the California Condor. There was an enormous debate in the 1980s whether the last few birds should be brought into captivity in an attempt to jumpstart a captive breeding program, or whether they should be left in the wild to die out “with dignity”.
The conversation around this debate recently re-emerged on social media and I cheered when a friend and colleague commented, saying, effectively, “It would be very arrogant and unwise to assume that we have any idea what constitutes dignity for an animal of any other species than our own.”
This person nailed it in a way that they may not have intended: that in all of these cases where we aim to restore nature, we are tending a wild and highly altered garden of our own making1. It is the global ecosystem of the Anthropocene. What constitutes right or wrong, dignified or otherwise is entirely composed of layers of judgment that we put on it ourselves.
In her excellent book about bees, beekeeping, and beyond, Song of Increase, Jacqueline Freeman describes her thought process around her efforts to save a single bee from her garden shed:
Being kind to one bee, even when it likely won’t make much of a difference to the hive or even the bee community, is a good thing for us humans to do. Maybe the world won’t change because I saved a bee. But, too often, the callousness of my inattention denies me the opportunity to develop benevolence…When we treat all beings as deserving of our consideration, even a little bee can assist us in our task of becoming gentler, more thoughtful, more human.
Sometimes, in my lower moments, I question why I am working so hard to bring back amphibians from the brink of extinction when much of the planet is unlikely to be hospitable for them in the not-too-distant future. Many ongoing thought experiments later, I often come to the same conclusion, akin to Jacqueline’s:
Even if the result of the effort does not make a difference for the species as a whole, the act of the effort is in itself valuable. It is the act of trying that is making the change, even if it does not produce the desired outcome.
We cannot shy away from trying just because we do not have a guarantee of the results. It’s not blind faith that things will turn out better; it’s hope that the effort itself will provide an outcome better than if we don’t try, even if we can’t know what that outcome is.
I often think about the story of the kid on the beach who is standing among hundreds of stranded sea stars, throwing them back into the water one at a time. Someone asks her why she’s bothering, because it won’t make a difference. As she throws one in, she says, “It matters to that one.”
Sure, it might matter to that one, but doesn’t it also matter to that kid? That compassion she’s fostering with the action she’s choosing to engage in could just change the world, even if it doesn’t save any sea stars. It is certainly changing her.2
From mud to lotus
I would have never asked for any of the terrible, life-altering experiences that I’ve had to face in my life. And yet, they arrived, delivering with them opportunities for growth, renewal, and change. My life is better in the long run because of many of these awful things that I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
But there is a catch: I had to eventually come to perceive my experiences in this way in order to achieve this effect. The reason I have chosen to orient this newsletter toward hope is because hope can be transformational, and transformation can only happen from a shift in perception.
This year, on the sixth anniversary of the Thomas Fire, it seems to be reemerging as a kind of check-in: what have we learned? What has changed? How does this process of healing (for us and the ecosystem around us) work? All of the answers have the same theme: they are not what I would have expected.
I no longer run to my phone and open the county’s emergency app every time I hear a helicopter. I’m being asked to share my wildfire experience with increasingly wider audiences. My neighbors remain more community-oriented than before. The California Holly berries are having a banner year; and just in time for the holiday season.
Here I’ve linked to the book, Engineering Eden, by Jordan Fisher Smith, about the environmental history of grizzlies in Yellowstone. It exemplifies this idea of nature being what we manage it as, and the deadly consequences that can come when managers ignore what scientists advise. It is an excellent book.
Aside from the people involved, the reintroduction feasibility research also produces important information about the species because it is kept in flow-through enclosures in streams where they can be monitored. We have learned a lot about parasites in this species, for example, and its developmental flexibility under different temperatures, just from being able to observe it in semi-captivity. The methods my colleagues and I are developing are also contributing to the broader science of reintroduction.