I took these photos at midday as I went about my usual chores. The forest fires that have been burning across California sent ash over San Francisco turning the sky a freakish shade of orange. Birds sat on the ground looking confused. The streetlights remained on since their sensors indicated it was still night at noon.
Darius Emrani
Darius Emrani
Darius Emrani
My neighbor sent up his drone and captured images from directly above our building. I got an instant Blade Runner 2049 vibe. Is this life imitating art? Or is art giving us a sneak preview? As grim as the air quality is in the city it’s even worse in the countryside closer to where the fires are burning.
I had to drive down to the tech suburbs south of the city and the scenes were equally spooky. The YouTube headquarters, Merck, SAP, and Walmart’s IT center were all wrapped in an orange shroud.
The maintenance shop for prototype autonomous vehicles out by the airport seemed welcoming compared to the outside world. As nature becomes ever more stressed humans are retreating into our machines.
Every time there’s been a wildfire in California for my entire life the authorities and media insist on finding “the person” who started it. There’s always a camper that lights up a barbecue in the woods or a teenager who thinks it would be fun to play with matches. The reality is that these same activities in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania simply don’t result in half the state catching fire. The California landscape wants to burn periodically and people just happen to be in the way.
What we’re witnessing is a shift from one baseline climate to another emerging baseline climate. The fossil record from prehistory shows that California has gone through many periods of multi-century mega droughts as well as long periods of increased precipitation. At times there was much more or much less tree cover in the state depending on rainfall and temperature. I suspect we’re going to keep having more fires until Northern California has a landscape that’s closer to Southern California. And Southern California’s landscape will resemble Baja down in Mexico.
Civilizations spring up in certain locations during favorable periods and tend to decline when conditions change. History suggests people are obsessed with short term concerns and don’t alter much of anything until they have absolutely no other choice. Eventually failure fixes itself…
Granola Shotgun 
Pennsylvania state law requires that fire prevention be taught to school children every year. The state is heavily wooded. The last time I drove across the state, we could see lots of dead trees from the highway. One or more invasive insects have gotten loose there. So Pennsylvania may become a bad example of a state that doesn’t burn.
Johnny,
Very, very dramatic pictures. Doubtless a devout person from an earlier age would be thinking the End Times are truly here.
I had the same thought as you when I saw the title to the video. The gender reveal was the spark, but something would have eventually sparked it. Even so, I was startled when the first words were “Start packing up”. My god. Why wouldn’t you try to put that fire out?
Yes. That’s why I am happy to live far from nukes (lived downwind of TMI in the 70s when its accident happened), at the edges of tornado and Madrid Fault zones, and south of extreme winter cold.
Clearly you see the same positives in the Ohio Valley, although there is a nuke plant near Cincinnati.
Your closing paragraph reminds me of Collapse by Jared Diamond (did I pick up that reference here? I can’t remember). The book researches civilizations around the world rising, gaining momentum, then fizzling out due to 1 reason or another. Example – Easter Island was a forested island prior to people showing up… and eventually clearing the entire island. He attempts to explore the inevitable question of why? Why didn’t ‘they’ notice what was happening? A good read.
I read Jared Diamond’s books as they were published. Later I read other books by different authors who had alternative interpretations. For example, Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo wrote, “The Statues Walked” based on their research of Easter Island. They came to the opposite conclusion than Diamond. Basically, the people of the island were remarkable good caretakers of the environment, but failed anyway due to external forces. My guess is the truth is somewhere in between the two interpretations.
I’m a California native. I love this land unconditionally. The smell of dry brown grass in the summer & wet green grass in the winter. Fires are natural here. It’s just the intensity and proximity to urban areas that is unprecedented. And yes, San Francisco may become San Diego at some point, both climatically and politically. The reasons are complicated.
But no one wants to hear about complexity in 2020. People are just plain mad about everything. I sympathize but when I hear the solutions I’m terrified. Hard to judge how long The Troubles will last. The rest of my productive lifetime? Possibly. Argentina is the most geographically blessed country in the world with a beautiful culture and yet…
The Spanish introduced the grass that goes brown in the summer because it produced better feed for cattle.
We could re-plant native grasses, clear ladder fuels, allow sustainable logging and grazing per Cal Fire’s suggestions in their huge report, but we won’t. Seems like our plan for clearing the tens of millions of acres of forest that need clearing is to let them burn. As Johny says, *shrug*.
Yeah I don’t think the Troubles are going to get better.
We, up in the Olympic Peninsula/Puget Sound region, are going to soon get a taste – ‘hack’ .. ‘cough’ .. ‘wheeze’ – of what our neighbors to the south have been experiencing.
Sunday supposedly will be the worst of it, before the next weather system arrives to clear things up a bit, as that smoky plume inundates us from both the south, and the west ..
I’ve hosted a down the surrounds .. AND the wood pile (tarped) perimeter as an added precaution, and will continue to do so as conditions warrant.
My bees will no doubt be pissy, with that mass of particulates headed our way .. so I will have to whisper extra sweet nothings to them before changing-out their syrup jars. As a general rule, I don’t smoke the hives when opening them up. It just agitates them!
Patience is of the unmost order where multiple-thousands of stinging creatures are concerned.
Will this finally convince some folks to leave and move to places without earthquakes, water shortages/drought, hellish fires, intermittent electrical service, and high housing costs?
So… Iowa was just devastated by a severe derecho followed by unusually cold weather and snow way too early in the year. (So much for the corn and soy crops this year.) Houston has experienced repeated massive floods in recent years and is likely to see more. Miami is half an inch above the sea and regularly gets hit with hurricanes. Nashville -including its airport – was smacked hard by tornadoes. The correct action isn’t to move to a perfect place that doesn’t experience problems. There aren’t any of those… The goal is to understand the challenges of your place and occupy it in a simpatico manner.
Horrifying photos. I hope you are able to breathe! We are having some movement here to Maine from California with subsequent very strong real estate prices here.
Agreed, except California isn’t and hasn’t been occupied in a simpatico manner. Simpatico occupation is not something just one household can do.
CALFIRE reports 3.1 million acres burned this year. That’s close to 5,000 square miles, nearly the area of Connecticut or Puerto Rico. People have to evacuate and stay away for days or weeks. Their places of work might be burned up too. Electricity and water pumps may not flow for weeks. There’s a significant difference in magnitude that isn’t made up for by extreme rarity of occurrence…5 of Cali’s 10 biggest fires are within the past few years.
I honestly don’t know how or why folks live with that frequency and magnitude of threat that can destroy their property and kill them. That’s what I was trying to express above.
We’re in agreement. What I wish to convey is that the scale and frequency of California’s troubles are likely to be felt in many other parts of the country and world, although the particulars may vary. What might it be like to live in Texas or Florida after the seventh Cat 5 hurricane in ten years? Or Iowa when a derecho and early snow destroys crops every couple of years? Or freaky droughts or floods hit New England repeatedly? Other parts of the country get earthquakes too, including Memphis and D.C. And let’s not forget about all the aging and insolvent nuclear power plants smeared across the vountry. It’s not the events themselves that matter, it’s our ability to cope…
Yes. That’s why I am happy to live far from nukes (lived downwind of TMI in the 70s when its accident happened), at the edges of tornado and Madrid Fault zones, and south of extreme winter cold.
Clearly you see the same positives in the Ohio Valley, although there is a nuke plant near Cincinnati.
Chris B, there is the Fernald Preserve, a former nuclear site that has been decommissioned and is monitored and going through bio-remediation. But all of the facilities are long gone and while it might be a little ‘hot’ in spots, it’s a park that is in parts open to the public and I imagine the risk is negligible of residual radiation damage, and since there are no facilities or processing, there is zero chance of meltdown. I believe the nearest power reactor is on the northern edge of the state by the lake, and there is a research reactor in Columbus. By and large though, Cinci is about as safe from nuclear threat as you can get east of the great plains (where you can still enjoy the benefits of all of those things in your top paragraph).
I was thinking of the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Site 80 miles east of I-275:
https://www.energy.gov/pppo/portsmouth-site
and this story:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/frantic-parents-fear-kids-after-radioactive-contamination-found-ohio-middle-n1005771
That’s in the general area Johnny has talked about having an interest in. I have distant relatives who are farmers in that part of Ohio.
The reality is every part of the country has its own special collection of nasty facilities to cope with. Nuclear waste, aging chemical plants, petroleum refineries, leaking oil tank farms, military bases full of leaching toxic goodies, unlined landfills, farmland saturated with who knows what kinds of synthetic crap…
ProPublica has a long form piece on climate migration within the US:
https://www.propublica.org/article/climate-change-will-force-a-new-american-migration
Along with maps showing that much of the US may become marginally habitable:
https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration
And if that is to be the fate of the US, it won’t just be those already in the US who migrate:
https://features.propublica.org/climate-migration/model-how-climate-refugees-move-across-continents/
Inland Maine is starting to look good. Pity about the lack of jobs at the moment.
Yes, and the threats do change over an adult lifetime. Fire in Cali is a much bigger threat and much more common than when I was a teenager there decades ago.
The trick is finding a “local minimum” where the threats are fewer and farther between and not subject to increasing frequency, and the perceived benefits are acceptable.
New England doesn’t experience the problems you describe. They don’t have earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or landslides. Yes, it’s cold in winter, but people can live with that.
Earthquakes, no. We do get some hurricane damage but rarely catastrophic. Tornadoes are getting more common here – it isn’t Tornado Alley, but downtown Springfield MA took a direct hit a few years ago and I had to take shelter from a tornado this summer. I am told that never used to happen.
Floods are an increasing threat here – it is already a very wet climate and as it warms we get more large rain events that cause flooding. Vermont had terrible flooding a few years ago.
The rain has gotten less reliable, so we get more big storms and more periods of drought in the summer. Early thaws followed by late frosts have been tough on agriculture – we lost the entire peach crop a few years ago. But local agriculture is probably diversified enough to avoid a knock-out blow.
Sea level rise is going to be a big problem since so much of the state population lives in or near Boston.
That said, we are probably better positioned than most of the US.
No! Listen to Johnny! Keep Californians in California!
For the record, many “Californians” are transplants from other places. People drift in and drift out all the time. And we’re hardly a monolith.
Wow…ominous pictures. So finally a scientifically valid reason to wear a mask? Lol
They blew up something in the middle of a dry, grass field and didn’t even have an extinguisher on hand? Seriously? “Failure fixes itself”, indeed….
Idiocy is a moveable feast …..
As a Homosapien we do not like in anyway change(s). We do not/will not change our behavior until our pain reaches ten. As our pain level goes up, we keep making more and more excuses for our pain. We’re not going to change our behavior until Mother Nature starts killing lots and lots of us.
There is a beautiful essay I read today in the Paris Review about the ecology of the San Francisco Bay. It ties into everything we are experiencing now including your ghostly orange photographs of the city. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/09/10/the-nature-of-gary-snyder/
Just finished reading the Gary Snyder story. Thanks for the link.