Plus: How smoky air hurts people and how to help wildfire victims
|  | Wednesday, September 16, 2020 | | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPHS BY STUART PALLEY | | Readers: This is a special newsletter dedicated to the environment, coming as America faces one of its biggest battles against fire.
By Robert Kunzig, Senior ENVIRONMENT editor
Dave Johnston lost his house when the Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, California, in 2018. His siblings, parents, and cousin all lost their homes, too. Johnston is an engineer for CAL FIRE, the California forestry agency that has become, by necessity, the world’s largest all-purpose fire department. Last week writer David Helvarg and photographer Stuart Palley met Johnston and his crew outside Oroville, California, about 20 miles southeast of Paradise. They were fighting to protect someone else’s home from the North Complex Fire, the deadliest in California this year, so far. (Above, the Creek Fire burns Monday night.)
Climate change is not the only factor contributing to this record-setting fire
season, and to the smoke that is choking people along the West Coast. A century of trying to suppress all forest fires, and a population boom at the “wildland-urban interface,” are major factors as well, Helvarg writes. (Below, working the El Dorado fire.)
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| But the extra heat and drought brought by climate change have definitely primed California to burn—as its extra heat and rain and sea level rise have primed Louisana, say, to flood.
On my browser today the tab for the CAL FIRE incident map is right next to
the one for the NOAA Hurricane Center. As I write, it looks like New Orleans
will escape a direct hit from Hurricane Sally. But the storm is rapidly intensifying over the warm waters of the Gulf, as hurricanes do these days. It has veered east toward Alabama. Birmingham, where I’m sheltering from the pandemic, may escape with four inches of rain or so, according to NOAA. But the gorgeous old town of Mobile and other parts of the Gulf coast are looking at as much as 15 to 20 inches, “historic, life-threatening flash flooding,” as well as “life-threatening storm surge.”
We’ve seen fire and we’ve seen rain before. If there’s one thing science is clear about, it’s that we’re going to see much more of both in the future. We’re going to be depending a lot on the Dave Johnstons of this world. It would be good to be working on more comprehensive solutions, too. | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID MCNEW, GETTY IMAGES
| | | What happens when the winds really kick in? | | The Santa Ana and Diablo winds stream down every fall from California’s high-elevation deserts and mountains toward the coast. They often carry flames toward communities, particularly when it is hot and dry, as it is now. “Wind-driven fires are the ones most associated with catastrophic losses,” says ecologist Alexandria Syphard. | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY MARCIO JOSE SANCHEZ, AP PHOTO
| | | The smoke is now scarier than the pandemic. The West Coast wildfires have produced the world’s worst air in recent days. How does breathing in wildfire smoke affect the body? Experts say the chronic impact of smoke from longer-lasting, more frequent wildfires could have serious health impacts. | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY NOAH BERGER, AP PHOTO
| | | Amid heat, smog, and wildfires, people are picking our food. How? We just do, says Rosa Villegas, a California farmworker who kept on when the fire looked like lava on the mountain, when the smoke blotted out the mountain—and even the end of her row of romaine lettuce. The south Salinas Valley, known as the “salad bowl” of the world, runs on workers, many of them undocumented, who are considered “essential” but have few legal rights. | | | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN SULLIVAN, GETTY IMAGES
| | | Last year, we asked how California could prevent mega-fires. Here’s what we found. Limit unprecedented wildland housing sprawl, which is putting more Californians in harm’s way. Start supervised low-intensity “prescribed fires” to clear higher amounts of accumulated brush. “Of 33 million acres of forest in the state, 8 to 10 million acres need urgent mechanical thinning and burning to prevent similar disasters,” David Helvarg wrote for Nat Geo in December. | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY NATHAN HOWARD, GETTY IMAGES | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID DOUBILET, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | | | |
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