Fatherhood amidst the flames
How to cope with new life when the world is burning
The first thing I felt when the ash cloud smothered the sky was relief. Relief from the sun that had baked the land uninterrupted since the last rains in early April. Relief from the scorching heat which, with the sun stifled behind blankets of smoke, subsided from over 100 degrees to around 80 – making life in our non-air-conditioned home almost bearable. As the skies darkened, the blistering, blinding August days dissolved into a twilight more reminiscent of a grey February dawn back home in London than summer in California. Yet this has been a false respite – like traipsing thirsty through the desert to stumble upon the sea. The water may look refreshing, but if you drink it, it will hasten your demise.
Our temporary home in San Jose (my wife and I have moved here to be close to her parents during the COVID outbreak) should hardly be on the frontline of climate change. The weather in this part of the world is usually benign, there is little risk of flooding, and we live over four miles from the city limits that wildfires could conceivably reach. Yet for weeks Silicon Valley has been sandwiched between two huge blazes, one that ripped through the once-lush redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains to the west and another larger conflagration that has torched nearly 400,000 acres in the arid Diablo Range Mountains to the east. These infernos have been dwarfed by even larger wildfires raging elsewhere in California, Oregon and Washington. In total the blazes have claimed at least 26 lives and incinerated more than five million acres – an area approximately the size of New Jersey or Wales. Entire communities have been displaced, while a plume of air that’s classified by the EPA as unhealthy or worse, stretches almost uninterrupted 2,000 miles from Mexico to British Columbia. It’s large enough to smother most of Western Europe. Some parts of rural Oregon have experienced pollution that is literally off the charts, and so hazardous that scientists cannot predict what health impacts it might have in the months and years to come. It’s a particularly stressful time for those who’ve lost loved ones or seen their homes burn down. But millions of other people are also struggling in this shadow. My anxiety is heightened by the fact that I have just become a father.
My daughter is less than two months old, and every time she coughs and sneezes I can’t help but wonder what injury her tiny lungs are suffering. Hoping to protect her and insulate ourselves from the toxic air, my wife and I have gaffer-taped leaky windows, jammed rolled-up towels under the doors and installed a whirring second-hand air purifier in the bedroom. Despite our efforts we can’t erase the lingering campfire odour – one that conjures nostalgic feelings of childhood that seem so incongruous as the Earth burns all around – while my eyes continue to itch, my mouth is parchment-dry and my throat tickles. This attempt to hermetically seal ourselves off from nature strikes me as a metaphor for what mankind has been attempting for hundreds of years – a project taking on ever greater urgency now that nature seems bent on violent revenge.
The scale and the ferocity of the fires, the eerie, silent streets, and the other-worldly crimson sky that loomed over San Francisco last week has provoked ubiquitous chatter about Hell-on-Earth. But I don’t think Hell is an accurate description of the state of the world. Surely there is no worse place than Hell, yet in years to come we may discover that the conditions of 2020 were benign in comparison to what the future has to offer. As a concerned father eager that my daughter should have the opportunity to grow up in a hospitable world (but far from confident of this outcome) this feels more like purgatory.
Mankind collectively faces two choices. To mobilize on an unprecedented peacetime scale to rebuild our economy and reimagine our way of life to make it compatible with nature and stave off the worst of climate change. Or to procrastinate and see much that we cherish destroyed. Our precious baby has just reached eight weeks and it seems almost impossible to imagine what the world will be like when she’s eight-years-old, let alone by the time she reaches my age. Will we have to spend her childhood finding ever more desperate ways to tape up the cracks in the windows as the world burns, or do we as a species have the collective will to reimagine our lives and give her and her generation a fighting chance?