Welcome to The Breaking Point, a weekly newsletter that explores the historical legacies of injustice based on the news cycle or culture trends to understand what in the world is going on.
How did it come to this? The Atlantic’s Ed Yong asked at the beginning of his brilliantly written and reported article on how the pandemic defeated America. As hurricanes wreak havoc on fossil fuel-friendly Louisiana and wildfires continue to rage across the West Coast, I can’t help but ask the same question. How did it come to this?
Last week, I took a break from writing because as a journalist who covers climate science and environmental justice, witnessing these climate disasters unfold in concert with the pandemic as the nation’s president merely focuses on his self interests and boosting his campaign, everything was just overwhelming and anxiety-inducing. It’s not because 2020 is bad luck or cursed, but these “unprecedented” disasters have actually been building up in the last few decades. And because climate change apparently is not an “immediately seen” danger, we as a collective society chose to ignore its threats and have failed to stop it. We instead exacerbated and compounded the crises.
Despite multiple reports and scientific research sounding the alarm that temperatures are warming (and that COVID-19 is set to kill more people), many Americans have adhered to ignorance and chose to believe the cocktail of conspiracy theories and misinformation they encounter on their social media feeds. This divide in beliefs is thanks in large part to Silicon Valley’s wealthy tech moguls who continue to feed the vast growth of political polarization through algorithms embedded in their social media apps. And because they make billions of dollars off of our addiction to social media, these money-making tech executives could care less about spreading fake news, influencing a crucial election, and widening the gap in our society. Seriously though, I just watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix during the weekend.
When I first launched this newsletter in July, I had just finished binge-reading a few apocalyptic dystopian books like Parable of the Sower and The Handmaid’s Tale — and I was having deep thoughts about everything going on from the wildfires in Australia to the floods that inundated Jakarta to the COVID-19 pandemic to anti-Asian racism and to the police killings of Black people. It was — still is — overwhelming. The images of Australia’s blood orange skies and flying embers that we saw at the beginning of 2020 are the same images we’re now seeing come out of the wildfires blanketing the West Coast of the United States. It has become the poster image for a climate apocalypse. But why are the fires so much worse this time around?
Read: “Unprecedented”: What’s behind the California, Oregon, and Washington wildfires by Umair Irfan,Vox
Figure of the week: 15 billion
The number of doses the world would need if the COVID-19 shot is a two-dose vaccine, according to Adar Poonawalla, CEO of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer. He warned that not enough COVID-19 vaccines will be available for everyone on the planet until the end of 2024 at the earliest. (Source: Financial Times)
Climate change, duh
But let’s talk about “prescribed burning” and listening to Indigenous voices
Our world is literally on fire. And it is only going to get worse if we fail to tackle the root of the problem: climate change. Saving a warming planet requires slashing our greenhouse gas emissions — but it’s easier said than done. Since the 2016 elections, it has become a lot harder for the U.S. to make progress with climate action especially as the crisis accelerates. Not only did Trump publicly call climate change “a hoax,” but his administration also overhauled 100 (and counting) environmental regulations, some of which are still in progress. He also withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement, which commits countries to drastically reduce carbon emissions.
For thousands of years, before colonizers arrived on Indigenous lands, Native Americans have maintained the balance with nature and kept forests healthy by periodically setting them on fire. Indigenous folks around the world were actually the original forest management experts. They embraced fire as part of the balance with nature. These cultural, controlled and intentional burns, also known as prescribed burning, have long been an Indigenous practice of modifying the landscape by setting small fires during dry periods. The ancient technique renews vegetation, provides medicinal and cultural resources, creates habitat for humans and animals, and more importantly, reduces the risk of larger and more dangerous wildfires.
Think of this type of controlled burning as the medicine for large wildfires like the ones we’re seeing ravage the West Coast. But just as the industrialization boom became the breaking point that gave birth to a fast-warming planet, modern society — specifically the government — thwarted these Indigenous practices. In many places, it is technically illegal for Indigenous folks to practice cultural burning. But in some parts of the West Coast, especially in California, local and state leaders are already looking to native tribes for help. Here is an excerpt from a 2019 article from The Guardian, ‘Fire is medicine’: the tribes burning California forests to save them:
Margo Robbins, the executive director of the Yurok Cultural Fire Management Council and head of tribal education for the local school district, remembers a childhood spent sledding down the wide grassy meadows in the Klamath foothills. Now, after decades without fire, nearly all that formerly open space is dense with pine trees and blackberry brambles.
“The fire suppression and the rules that govern who can put fires on the land pretty much criminalized the average person from burning,” said Robbins.
“It’s called arson now if you want to go out and do any burning,” said Bill Tripp, deputy director of eco-cultural revitalization for the Karuk tribe Department of Natural Resources. “It has been a continual practice, but there may be only a few individuals or families doing it on a small scale here today.”
When colonists arrived in native lands, they were appalled by the “foreign” idea of periodically setting the forest floors on fire for regrowth. John Muir, the founder of the environmental organization Sierra Club, even called the fires “the great master-scourge of forests” and that extinguishing controlled burning would be his “divine mission.” (Yes, Sierra Club has a white supremacist history and the group recently acknowledged their racist past last July.) Muir lobbied for federal forest protection and fire suppression measures with every politician out there. He garnered huge support including from then-New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. However, according to Scientific American, the funds and attention needed to take care of the land never materialized to the extent that Muir imagined.
As a result, the once park-like expanses of the Yosemite he had heralded soon became overcrowded through unchecked growth. At the same time, the U.S. was saddled with the high cost of suppressing every fire that ignited because the build up of fuel on the forest floor now threatened to wipe out the entire region. The conservation decisions of the nineteenth century have left a legacy that is still felt today.
The disregard of Indigenous voices and elimination of their cultural practices, like controlled burning to keep the forests healthy, in part, got us into this fiery situation. “Who knows better how the land behaves than Indigenous people?” 18-year-old climate activist Xiye Bastida told me on the phone two weeks ago. Now add rising temperatures and climate denial to the mix, we have a preview of a climate apocalypse. We may as well be living in the future. If we don’t curb emissions and pass equitable solutions as soon as possible, think about how much worse it could get.
I don’t say this to alarm you, but rather ask which side of history will you choose to be on?
ps* stay safe everyone — and please, for the love of your God, wear a mask!!
Story breakers 📖
Social media disinformation on US west coast blazes ‘spreading faster than fire' by Jason Wilson, The Guardian
Essay: From fires to pollution, smog has been California’s dark companion for centuries by Maria L. La Ganga, Los Angeles Times
Opinion: We are Black women. Stop calling us ‘women of color’ by Donna F. Edwards and Gwen McKinney, The Washington Post
How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled by Laura Sullivan, NPR
The Hospital System Sent Patients With Coronavirus Home to Die. Louisiana Legislators Are Demanding an Investigation by Annie Waldman and Joshua Kaplan, ProPublica
'Unprecedented': the US west's wildfire catastrophe explained by Maanvi Singh, The Guardian
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