I heard the classic holiday tune “White Christmas” on the radio the other day, but I don’t think what we’re dealing with here on the Central Coast is what Irving Berlin or Bing Crosby had in mind.
It’s been days now of brown skies, deep orange sunrises, and a blood red sun looming over us, but that’s not even the worst part. Billowing clouds of white and gray ash have rained down, flocking windshields and homes with the airborne aftermath of the Thomas Fire, which is now licking its flames deeper into south Santa Barbara County.
It’s beginning to look a lot like an industrial dystopia movie, like Hardware (Iggy Pop, anyone?) or the cutesy yet still depressing Disney/Pixar WALL-E. Unfortunately, we don’t have futuristic robots to fight these historic California wildfires or clean up all this ash; people have to do it! Our county Fire Department was working nonstop to help put out the Thomas Fire before it even hopped the Ventura/Santa Barbara county line, and now the smoke has spread so far that schools across the county closed rather than expose kids to that ash.
What can we do about all this? Well, for starters, get a mask! The county is passing them out in just about every town in the county, including at Santa Maria’s fire stations, at the CVS in Buellton, and the Home Depot in Lompoc. Seriously, they’re better than just wrapping a scarf around your face and hoping for the best.
It’s hard not to feel hopeless in situations like these, when nature rears its ugly head and leaves a massive wake of destruction. Hundreds of homes have burned in Ventura, Carpinteria, Montecito, Ojai, and elsewhere in LA and San Diego counties.
And Gov. Jerry Brown didn’t do much to make me feel better at a recent press conference in Ventura, where he said that this year of historically high wildfire activity in the state could be our “new normal” thanks to climate change. Geez Jerry, looks like your “moonbeams” are shining through a pretty dark cloud. Oh wait, that’s all the smoke, again.
Speaking of feeling helpless about giant messes that need cleaning up, how do you think people who live in Casmalia feel about the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) plans to “clean up” the Casmalia Superfund site? Not very hopeful, is my guess.
The EPA’s plan—which is to extract, cap, and contain the toxic sludge swamp—comes with a $100 million price tag and an estimated 100 years to accomplish. Wow, talk about setting long-term goals.
But it isn’t just Casmalia’s residents that should be concerned about the Superfund site, we all should be. Casmalians are just closest to the poisonous cocktail, have to smell it on the regular, and would be most directly affected by any seepage into ground water or soil.
I have to give props to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-California) for prodding the EPA over how it plans to manage Superfund sites considering natural disasters and climate change. I mean, just imagine if a wildfire tore over the hills in Casmalia, setting the Superfund site ablaze. We’re going to need more than just basic breathing masks if that toxic waste dump ignites.
The Casmalia site is just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean, let alone the surrounding communities—so flooding, fire, it’s all a potential risk to life on the Central Coast. If, like Jerry said, wildfires are the new normal, part of that century-long containment plan in Casmalia should include protecting the site from natural disasters.
There are things we can control and things we can’t, and knowing the difference is key to actually making progress on big, complex problems.
Take the wildfires. What can be done? Many are calling for more controlled burns by local fire agencies to clear out all this dry brush, but how much can they really burn? Some agencies argue for strategic burns to create break points in certain areas where wildfires could spread.
Our old friend Andy Caldwell from COLAB floated some of his ideas to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors on Dec. 12, saying we should open up the Los Padres National Forest to loggers. That’s right, loggers. It’s a pretty typical response from the conservative side of the aisle: “Hey, I noticed this big environmental problem you’re facing. You know who can help? My industry buddies!”
Caldwell also said goats and sheep might help clear all of the dry vegetation that has left our backyard a veritable tinderbox. Seriously? You’re going to need lots of goats and sheep to clear even a fraction of the 1.75 million acres in the Los Padres.
These responses ignore the one big problem, which as gloomy as ole Moonbeam sounds, at least he’s looking it full in the face: climate change.
How many headlines do we have to read with the word “historic” before words like “drought,” “wildfires,” “hurricanes,” and “flooding” before we truly address the problem here?
The reason why the Thomas Fire and others were so prolific this year isn’t because enviro-hippies won’t let fire agencies fight fire with fire or set bands of roving sheep loose into the forest, it’s because the state has suffered through an unprecedented drought, which Santa Barbara County got hardly any relief from this year. The U.S. Forest Service estimates that around 27 million trees have died in the last 13 months, and 2 million trees are dying every month. These dehydrated trees are also getting decimated by the bark beetle, which have increased in number as the winters have got warmer. That’s something everyone should be concerned about, not just because all those trees are now wildfire kindling.
When it comes to climate change, conservatives—including 4th District Supervisor Peter “climate change? It’s called weather” Adam—love to point back to estimates from the 1970s about climate change that didn’t end up happening. Climate studies is an applied science, much like medical science, so pointing to some predictions from 50 years ago as if it’s a smoking gun that climate change doesn’t exist is an incredibly disingenuous argument to make.
You know what the majority of the scientific literature from back then did agree on and predict? Warming, and that’s what we’re seeing now. It’s why the hurricanes are worse. It’s why the wildfires are worse. It’s responsible for burned homes and flooded neighborhoods.
We’re not going to get out of this predicament with controlled burns, goats, or businesses as usual. But it is within the realm of our control how we act on the local, state, nationwide, and global level. What else is it going to take to act?
The Canary wants to get past the doom and gloom and see action. Send your thoughts to [email protected].
