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Heavy summer smoke in California is a return to pre–fire-suppression normal. “Prehistoric fire area and emissions from California’s forests, woodlands, shrublands, and grassland”: https://nature.berkeley.edu/stephenslab/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Stephens-et-al.-CA-fire-area-FEM-2007.pdf (Oldish and doesn’t properly address Native practices, but useful.)
There is a crisis happening here. People lost their houses last night. Personally, I’m terrified to see news from Medford. And it is very much entanged in the climate crisis. Among other things, it released a lot of CO2.
But the orange skies in San Francisco, as unsettling as they are, are not the crisis, and some (attenuated) version of them will keep happening even in the utopian indigenous-led sustainable fire management solarpunk future.
If you read this @susie_c article I keep recommending, look for the brief mention of the salmon. What that’s saying is that smoke is actually a way to lower peak summer temperatures: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-prescribed-burns-california-native-americans
We’re in a system that’s dangerously out of balance but the smoke is the (unwelcome, much too intense, severe side-effect–carrying) return of something that had been missing. Something I try to think about as I react to it.
– Is this what climate change looks like? Kind of. The whole world today is what climate change looks like. There’s no neat division between 
natural and human-dominated or -perturbed parts of the world anymore. As you know if you’ve read any post-1975 environmental thinking.
natural and human-dominated or -perturbed parts of the world anymore. As you know if you’ve read any post-1975 environmental thinking.
– Is is scary that no one alive today can remember seeing this kind of smoke before? Yes. But if you’d been alive for 500 years, you might remember a lot of this. And Native histories and traditions are much older even than that.
It’s my lunch break, the sky’s still orange, and I remembered another way I try to think about this. In Washington there are cattle ranchers who keep shooting the wolves that are finally returning. I find this outrageous. Wolves were there first. They belong and cattle don’t.
For the ranchers obviously it must feel intolerable to have wolves around eating your cattle and smelling your children from over the next ridge, and what, you’re supposed to 
𝓬𝓸𝓮𝔁𝓲𝓼𝓽
with pack-hunting apex predators?
𝓬𝓸𝓮𝔁𝓲𝓼𝓽 with pack-hunting apex predators?
Maybe this analogy doesn’t work for you but it helps me: the smoke is like the wolves. It was here before; it’s here again. And it’s bad for people: for example, there will be an uptick in fatal heart attacks this week.
But there’s no way for these ecosystems to flourish in themselves – or to support humans – without it. Unlike covid, there’s no straightforward way to be done with it. So it’s on me to find a way to live with it.
And by “on me” I mean that it’s our collective responsibility to manage fire in such a way that it doesn’t come in huge, intense, unpredictable burns, and also to recenter the economy on things like the need to breathe clean air, “even if” you have asthma or pneumonia.
Outfits like @maskoakland show a way forward here. That’s one way climate adaptation – and more broadly ecological adaptation – can look.
