On Fire

by Naomi Klein

  We need warriors in this fight, and warriors don’t step up against the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere, not on its own, anyway. Warriors step up for the right to clean water, to good schools, to desperately needed decent-paying jobs, to universal health care. Warriors step up for the reunification of families separated by war and cruel immigration policies.

  You already know that there will be no peace without justice—that’s the core principle of the Sydney Peace Foundation. But here is what we need to understand just as well: There is no climate change breakthrough without justice, either.

  Perhaps I should apologize for this kind of battle talk at an event celebrating peace. But we have to be clear that this is a fight, one in desperate need of a warrior spirit. Because as much as humanity has to win in this battle, the fossil fuel companies have a hell of a lot to lose. Trillions in income represented by all that unburnable carbon. Carbon in their current reserves and in the new reserves they are spending tens of billions to search out every year.

  And the politicians who have thrown their lot in with these interests have a great deal to lose, too. Campaign donations, sure. The benefit of that revolving door between elected office and the extractive sector, too. But maybe most important, the money that comes when you don’t have to think or plan—just dig. Right now, Australia is getting windfall profits from exporting coal to China. It’s not the only way to fill government coffers, but it’s most certainly the laziest: no pesky industrial planning, no tax or royalty increases on the corporations and billionaires with the resources to buy limitless attack ads.

  All you have to do is hand out the permits, roll back some environmental laws, put new draconian restrictions on protest, call legitimate court challenges “green lawfare,” trash the greenies nonstop in the Murdoch press, and you are good to go.

  Which is why we shouldn’t be surprised by the scathing assessment offered just last month by Michael Forst, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders. After a visit to Australia, he wrote:

  I was astonished to observe mounting evidence of a range of accumulative measures that have levied enormous pressure on Australian civil society. . . . I was astounded to observe what has become frequent public vilification of rights defenders by senior government officials, in a seeming attempt to discredit, intimidate and discourage them from their legitimate work.

  It is striking that many of the people doing the most crucial work in this country—protecting the most vulnerable people and defending fragile ecologies from industrial onslaught—are facing a kind of dirty war. And we know all too well that it doesn’t take much for this kind of political and media war to turn into a physical war, with very real casualties.

  We see it around the world when land defenders try to stop mines, deforestation, and mega dams, from Honduras to Brazil. We see it when communities in India and the Philippines have tried to stop coal power stations because they are a threat to their water and wetlands. Not a metaphorical war, but real war, with lethal live ammunition fired into the bodies of the people getting in the way of the bulldozers.

  According to Global Witness, this worldwide war is getting worse: They report that “More than three people were killed a week in 2015 defending their land, forests and rivers against destructive industries. . . . These numbers are shocking, and evidence that the environment is emerging as a new battleground for human rights. Across the world industry is pushing ever deeper into new territory. . . . Increasingly communities that take a stand are finding themselves in the firing line of companies’ private security, state forces and a thriving market for contract killers.” About 40 percent of the victims, they estimate, are Indigenous.II

  And let us not tell ourselves that this happens only in so-called developing nations. We are seeing the war for the planet escalate right now in the United States, in North Dakota, where police and private security who look like they stepped off the battlefield in Fallujah brutally repress a nonviolent Indigenous movement of water protectors.

  The Standing Rock Sioux are trying to stop an oil pipeline that poses a very real threat to their water supply and, if built, would help hurtle us toward planet-destabilizing warming. For this, unarmed land defenders have been shot with rubber bullets, sprayed with pepper spray and other gases, blasted with sound cannons, attacked by dogs, put in what have been described as dog kennels, strip-searched, and arrested.

  My fear is that the vilification of land defenders that we are seeing here in Australia—all the various and overlapping attempts at delegitimization, layered on top of openly racist portrayals of Indigenous people in the media, coupled with an increasingly draconian security state—prepares the ground for attacks like these.

  So, though I continue to feel queasy about the carbon I burned on the flight, I am more than happy to be here, if only to play the role of the confused foreign meddler, the one saying, “Hold up a minute. We know where this leads, and this is a dangerous path you are going down.” This beautiful and beautifully diverse country deserves better.

  Oh, and this idea that your coal is somehow a humanitarian gift to India’s poor? That has to stop. India is suffering more under coal pollution and the climate change it fuels than almost anywhere else on earth. A few months ago, it was so hot in Delhi that some of the roads melted. Since 2013, more than four thousand Indians have died in heat waves. This week, they closed all the schools in Delhi because pollution was so thick that they had to declare an emergency.

  Meanwhile, the price of solar has plummeted by 90 percent and is now a more viable option for electrification than coal, especially because it requires less infrastructure and lends itself so well to community control. Many communities are demanding it, but in India, as elsewhere, the biggest barrier is the nexus of Big Government and Big Carbon: When people can generate their own electricity from panels on their rooftops, and even feed that power back into a micro grid, they are no longer customers of giant utilities; they are competitors. No wonder so many roadblocks are being put up: Corporations love nothing more than a captive market.

  It is this cozy setup that the Indigenous rights and climate justice movement threatens to upend. And upend it we will—but let us be clear as we celebrate peace that it’s going to be the fight of our lives.

  * * *

  I. In 2016 and 2017, triggered by warmer ocean temperatures, the Great Barrier Reef underwent a mass bleaching, which turned what had once been a riot of jewel-colored life into an eerie, ghostly white graveyard. Approximately half the vast reef’s coral died in that period. In April 2019, new research was published revealing that the reef was not recovering. As New Scientist reported, “The amount of coral larvae on the reef in 2018 was down by 89 per cent on historical levels. ‘Dead coral doesn’t make babies,’ says Terry Hughes of James Cook University in Australia, who led the work.”

  II. This war has entered a new, more lethal phase with the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil. Bolsonaro has made opening up the Amazon to unfettered development a top priority and has attacked Indigenous land rights, declaring ominously that “We’re going to give a rifle and a carry permit to every farmer.”

  SEASON OF SMOKE

  It begins to strike me how precarious it all is, this business of not being on fire.

  SEPTEMBER 2017

  THE NEWS FROM THE NATURAL WORLD THESE DAYS IS MOSTLY ABOUT WATER, and understandably so.

  We hear about the record-setting amounts of water that Hurricane Harvey dumped on Houston and other Gulf cities and towns mixing with petrochemicals to pollute and poison on an unfathomable scale. We hear, too, about the epic floods that have displaced hundreds of thousands of people from Bangladesh to Nigeria (though we don’t hear enough). And we are witnessing, yet again, the fearsome force of water and wind as Hurricane Irma, one of the most powerful storms ever recorded, leaves devastation behind in the Caribbean, with Florida now in its sights.

  Yet, for large parts of North America, Europe, and Afric
a, this summer has not been about water at all. In fact, it has been about its absence; it’s been about land so dry and heat so oppressive that forested mountains exploded into smoke like volcanoes. It’s been about fires fierce enough to jump the Columbia River; fast enough to light up the outskirts of Los Angeles like an invading army; and pervasive enough to threaten natural treasures like the tallest and most ancient sequoia trees and Glacier National Park.

  For millions of people from California to Greenland, Oregon to Portugal, British Columbia to Montana, Siberia to South Africa, the summer of 2017 has been the summer of fire. And more than anything else, it’s been the summer of ubiquitous, inescapable smoke.

  For years, climate scientists have warned us that a warming world is an extreme world, one in which humanity is buffeted by both brutalizing excesses and stifling absences of the core elements that have kept fragile life in equilibrium for millennia. At the end of the summer of 2017, with major cities submerged in water and others licked by flames, we are currently living through Exhibit A of this extreme world, one in which natural extremes come head-to-head with social, racial, and economic ones.

  #FAKEWEATHER

  I checked the forecast before coming to British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast, a ragged strip of coastline marked by dark evergreen forests that butt up against rocky cliffs and beaches strewn with driftwood, the charming flotsam from decades of sloppy logging operations. Reachable only by ferry or floatplane, this is the part of the world where my parents live, where my son was born, and where my grandparents are buried. Though it still feels like home, we now get here for only a few weeks a year.

  The government of Canada weather site predicted that the next week would be glorious: an uninterrupted block of sun, clear skies, and higher-than-average temperatures. I pictured hot afternoons paddling in the Pacific and still, starry nights.

  But when we arrive in early August, a murky blanket of white has engulfed the coast, and the temperature is cool enough for a sweater. Forecasts are often wrong, but this is more complicated. Somewhere up there, above the muck, the sky is clear of clouds. The sun is particularly hot. Yet intervening in those truths is a factor the forecasters did not account for: huge quantities of smoke, blown up to four hundred miles from the province’s interior, where about 130 wildfires are burning out of control.

  Enough smoke has descended to turn the sky from periwinkle blue to this low, unbroken white. Enough smoke to reflect a good portion of the sun’s heat back into space, artificially pushing temperatures down. Enough smoke to transform the sun itself into an angry pinpoint of red fire surrounded by a strange halo, unable to burn through the relentless haze. Enough smoke to blot out the stars. Enough smoke to absorb any possible sunsets. At the end of the day, the red ball abruptly disappears, only to be replaced by a strange burnt-orange moon.

  The smoke has created its own weather system, one powerful enough to transform the climate not just where we are, but in a stretch of territory that appears to cover roughly a hundred thousand square miles. And the smoke, a giant smudge on the satellite images, respects no borders: Not only is about a third of British Columbia choked, but so are large parts of the Pacific Northwest, including Seattle, Bellingham, and Portland, Oregon. In the age of #FakeNews, this is #FakeWeather, a mess in the sky created, in large part, by toxic ignorance and political malpractice.

  Up and down the coast, the government has issued air quality warnings, urging people to avoid strenuous activity. Beyond a certain threshold, fine particulate matter in the air is officially unsafe, bad enough to cause health problems. The air in parts of Vancouver is three times above that safe threshold, with some smaller communities on the coast significantly worse off. Elderly people and other sensitive populations are being urged to stay inside—or, better yet, to go somewhere with a decent air-filtration system. One local official recommends a trip to the mall.

  INLAND INFERNOS

  At the epicenter of the disaster, where the flames are closing in, the air quality is far worse. Anything over 25 micrograms of fine particulates per cubic meter is considered unsafe. Kamloops, the city currently housing many of the evacuees, averages 684.5 micrograms per cubic meter. That rivals Beijing on some of its very worst days. Airlines cancel flights, and people suffering from breathing problems pack emergency rooms.

  Since this disaster began, some 840 separate fires have ignited, forcing, at this point, some 50,000 people to evacuate their homes, according to the Red Cross. In early July, the government declared a rare state of emergency and by the time we arrive, it has already been extended twice. Hundreds of structures have been razed, and some whole communities, including Indigenous reserves, have been reduced mostly to ash.

  So far, roughly 1,800 square miles of forest, farm, and grassland have burned. That makes this the second-largest fire disaster in British Columbia’s history—and it’s still going strong, putting the all-time record within grasp.

  I call a friend in Kamloops. “Everyone who can is taking their kids far away, especially little ones.”

  Which puts things into perspective for us on the coast. It may be smoky, but we’re damn lucky.

  IT WILL BLOW OVER

  Since the New Year, and the new US administration, I haven’t taken a day off, let alone a weekend. Like so many others, I’ve attended way too many meetings and marched until my feet blistered. I wrote a book in a blur, then toured with it. And my husband, Avi, and I helped start The Leap, a new political organization. Throughout the winter and spring, “B.C. in August” was our family mantra. It was the finish line (albeit a temporary one), and we fully planned to collapse on it. It was also the way we kept our five-year-old son, Toma, in the game. On cold nights in the east, we mapped out the forested walks we would take, the canoe trips, the swims. We imagined the blackberries we would pick, the crumbles we would bake; we listed the grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and old friends we would visit.

  This break (“self-care” in the parlance of my younger coworkers) took on mythic qualities in our home. Which may be why I am a bit slow to clue in to the seriousness of the fires—and the smoke.

  On the first day, I’m sure the sun will burn it away by noon. By evening, I announce that it will blow over by morning, revealing at least a glimpse of actual sky. For the first week, I greet each day hopefully, convinced that the drab light peeking through the curtains is just morning mist. Every day, I am wrong.

  The placid weather forecast that seemed so promising before we traveled turns out to be a curse. Sunny, windless days mean that the smoke, once it is upon us, parks over our heads like an unmoveable outdoor ceiling. Day after day after day.

  My allergies are going nuts. I bathe my eyes in drops and pop antihistamines well beyond the recommended dosage. Toma breaks out in hives so severe he needs steroids.

  I keep taking my glasses off and cleaning them, rubbing them first with my shirt, then a microfiber cloth, then proper glass cleaner. Nothing helps. Nothing makes the smudge disappear.

  MISSING BLUE

  A week into the whiteout, the world begins to feel small. Life beyond the smoke starts to seem like a rumor. At the ocean’s edge, we can usually look across the Salish Sea to Vancouver Island; now we strain to see an outcropping of rock a few hundred feet from shore.

  I’ve been on this coast for whole winters when we barely saw the sun. I learned to love the steely beauty, the infinite shades of gray chiseled in the mountains. The low sky and the movement of the mist. But this is different. There’s a lifeless quality to the smoke; it just sits there, motionless and monotone.

  Blankets of smog are something a lot of people on this planet have learned to live with in big polluted cities such as Beijing, New Delhi, São Paulo, and Los Angeles. Smoke from wildfires is a little different. In part because you know that you are not breathing pollution from power plants or exhaust from cars but, rather, smoke from trees that were very recently alive. You are breathing in forest.

  I decide that the animals ar
e depressed. The seals seem to pop their heads up in a purely utilitarian fashion, just to take a breath and then disappear again beneath the gray surface. They do not play. The eagles, I am convinced, are flying for function, not fun—no soaring or wind surfing. There’s little doubt I’m imagining all this, projecting, anthropomorphizing—it’s a bad habit.

  I email a friend in Seattle, a prominent environmentalist, to ask him how he is faring in the smoke. He reports that the birds have stopped singing, and he is mad all the time. At least I’m not the only one.

  WHAT IF WE’RE NEXT?

  It begins to strike me how precarious it all is, this business of not being on fire.

  This part of British Columbia, technically a temperate rain forest, is a tinderbox. So far this summer, less than half an inch of rain has fallen. The forest ground cover, usually moist and squishy, is yellow and desiccated and crunches underfoot. You can smell the flammability.

  The roads are lined with yellow signs announcing a total ban on open fires. Every time we turn on the radio, we hear warnings, increasingly frantic, about open fires, cigarettes tossed out of cars, and fireworks. One guy earned himself a night in jail and over a thousand dollars in fines after he drunkenly celebrated the fact that his home had survived a brush with fire by setting off fireworks—which could well have set yet another blaze.

  It’s clear that one lightning storm, or a couple of careless campers, would be enough to send this place up. We’ve come close before. Two years ago, a serious wildfire threatened part of the coast about twenty minutes from here, taking the life of a local man who was helping to fight the flames. Yet, despite the years I have spent living here, until this week, I’ve never really thought about what it would mean if a fire like that ever got out of control. Now I do, and it’s unsettling. The Sunshine Coast has a year-round population of thirty thousand people served by a single highway that ends in a ferry dock. What the hell does an emergency evacuation look like in a place with no roads out?