Yosemite is burning.
Let those words sink into your skin for a moment. One of our
most iconic public lands is being ravaged by fire. These are the mountains that
called to John Muir, the mountains that he answered with the force of his
writing, his communities, all in celebration and fierce love for these lands that
spoke to him. This is a place that appears in countless family photo albums, in
unknowable scores of memories of uncommon times in a common place. This is a
place I have never seen but love, in abstract, for what it has meant to
friends and strangers.
The reality is that our grotesque consumption and fear of
change are leading us to destroy some of our best protected homelands, that we
are proving unequal to the gift of these places. That sadness sticks.
I do not want to assign blame for climate change, for the
burning forests and melting glaciers and eroding shorelines and shrinking
alpine zones. Instead, I ask for responsibility.
And I am as responsible as the next person. While Yosemite
has been burning this week, I have been dealing with the headache and expense
of a blown out tire. If a thousand things were different in the structure of
America, of the world, then it would not matter that I ran over a nail,
punctured a tire, and now need four new rubber donuts for my OPEC-supporting,
dinosaur-fossil guzzling, climate-changing, metal box, in order that I may
drive each day to work, to earn the dollars that will feed me, house me, keep
the lights and heat on via unsustainable fuel sources, clothe me, back-pay
for my education, and pay for the repairs to said automobile so that I may
continue the same old cycle.
If a thousand things were different…and I begin to imagine
what that could look like. All I want, truly, is to live in a way that doesn’t
hurt anyone so badly, including myself. That doesn’t set National Parks, or any
other land, on fire. That doesn’t melt snowpacks and acidify the sea, that doesn’t have
entire ecosystems migrating, that doesn’t entrench a national and global caste
system deeper and deeper.
I have some ideas of what thousand things I would revise to
re-make a better world. And everything I think of calls me to make my own world
smaller and smaller—less distance between me and my food, between me and how I
earn my living, between my electricity and heat source and my home. I do not think these things to become insular and isolationist, rather the opposite. Something
good, some best bit of myself, seems to grow larger whenever my physical world becomes limited and that is the person I want to be in this or any world. We have
allowed ourselves, encouraged, limitless growth in this land since before we
were her people. So much so that we had to set aside pockets and parks,
protecting some of the richest landscapes from our own insidious manifest. The
same American attitude that led us West, always West, always looking for more
and faster and easier...the child of this destiny is a world on fire, a
nationally beloved landscape destroyed by the same nation. I suspect that more
of us know than are saying so that the empire has no clothes, that the empire
and the corporate-bought emperors are killing us and forcing us to kill our beloved places, our
beautiful world.
It is hard to say those things when you worry that you are
alone. You, we, are not. This is the one thing about a climate-change fueled
forest fire rampaging through a National Park that I find good—this is a place
that lives in the souls of millions of people. And, as such, I do not believe
its damage and the cause of that damage can escape an increase in
responsibility for its continued health.
I have seen too much good, too much that is beautiful and seemingly eternal to believe that our destiny must be one of fire
and destruction. There are other ways of being. A thousand others, if we let
ourselves think of them, if we speak of them. And, if we can think them, speak
these words and ask these questions, then we can begin to live-find the ways and answers to these better lives.
Now. Even as we have more questions than answers, even now,
this is the time to begin living out our thousand different, better ways of
life.
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