The remainder of a neighborhood that burned in a firestorm in Sonoma County, CA. Photo by Josh Fields.

Each of us have been touched by climate change in different ways. I am a climate refuge from California.  After years of watching firestorms creep ever closer to the farm my husband and I had been cultivating for 10 years in Sonoma County, we decided we had had enough.  I will never forget the day when we stood outside in our orchard and could see the smoke from three wildfires in different directions surrounding our property.  It was late summer, and the beautiful heirloom tomatoes we’d babied all summer were covered in the toxic ash from burned buildings and cars floating down from the sky.  Our lungs were also full of that ash.  Later that day we would evacuate for the third year in a row and spend days hoping that our home would survive (it did).  That was the moment when we finally decided to move away from the west.  The results of climate change–increasing heat and years of drought–became impossible to ignore, and unfortunately, impossible to live with.

A firestorm, for those lucky enough to have not experienced one, is a fire that has become so powerful that it creates its own wind system.  Firestorms have so much energy that they can change the weather.  They occur in places that you’d expect, like the west, and have started to happen in unexpected places, like Hawaii.

Californians grow up expecting small wildfires out in the hills and forests, just as Vermonters grow up expecting the occasional small flood.  Wildfire is a natural part of the ecosystem, and plants native to the area are adapted to regenerating after fires.  But as the climate continues to warm thanks to humanities’ use of fossil fuels, our natural disasters are becoming more frequent and significantly more intense.  What was once thought of as a 100-year fire (or a 100-year flood), is happening regularly.  The conditions that allow for such catastrophic events become more common as our planet warms.  In the case of the wildfires in California, the swing between a very rainy year (leading to a lot of underbrush growth) and an extremely dry year (leading to the underbrush drying into tinder) creates the perfect conditions for an intense fire.  The higher temperatures caused by climate change also increase the intensity of the winds in the area, spreading the fires further than we’ve seen before.  Cities burning every year was not a normal part of growing up in California, but in the last 10 years it has become a part of life there.

There is no place to escape the effects of pollution and climate change.  We are all impacted.  Sometimes in very big and obvious ways like days of intense rain and rivers rising to flood stage, and sometimes in small everyday ways that enter so slowly into our lives so that they seem normal – fewer butterflies in the garden, loud machines running in the background to blow a few leaves off the neighbor’s lawn, more children with asthma.

It’s easy to give in to despair and to think that our individual daily actions will not make a difference.  And while it is true that it will take a collective and political change to heal our planet, sometimes the only thing that we have control over is what we ourselves do.  One of the best things that we can do right now is to be a model for our youth and to show them that we will keep trying to make a difference for our planet and their future.  The choices that we make in addressing climate change not only impact the planet as a whole but also shape the world that our youth will inherit and the type of lives that they will have.

Photo by Paddy O Sullivan

From the wildfires raging in the west, flooding in the east, hurricanes, and a myriad of other human-caused disasters happening around the world – climate change is a problem that we can no longer ignore.  As we transition to a federal leadership that does not support climate action, our individual and local actions will become even more important over the coming years.

The word firestorm has another meaning, and can be used to describe a public outcry.  In these next crucial years for our environment, I hope that our individual actions will become so powerful that added together, they create an unstoppable change.