Simple cause and effect: Considering our choices in a complex web
I feel lousy today, after getting my Covid booster yesterday. Evusheld/preventive antibodies two weeks ago and two more weeks until the vaccine is at full effect and I’ll reach maximum “almost normal” protection for a time. I am tired and achy after an achy nights sleep.
So I don’t want to look inward. And my head can only handle so much.
That being said: I need to write a bit about what is happening all around me. Fires rage on either side of us - twenty five miles to the north east:
Photo Credit: Martha Crawford
and twenty five miles to the west and north west.
Photo Credit: Martha Crawford
We see the smoke. I know and know of people whose homes are directly underneath those plumes and pyrocumulus clouds. I know many more who are packed and go-bag ready. When the wind changes the basin and valley in front of our home fill with thick particulate smoke, stinging eyes and irritating airways.
The knowledge that so many people so near to us have been evacuated from their homes, many who will lose everything, their homes, their livelihoods up in smoke. There are many that have already. Many praying for it to pass them over. The only security many have in rural and mountain communities comes from the grasslands and the forests themselves: hunting, tracking, farming, gathering and selling firewood.
The pain of this is a constant buzzing in the brain and heart. This fear and sorrow and grief drones loudly above the pandemic noise, the dissociations, the distortions, and the death toll. A constant ringing, like a psychological tinnitus.
Constant and compounding safety assessments: “Which way is the wind blowing? Whose home is in GO-zone? How many are wearing masks at the grocery store where we are buying goods to shuttle up to evacuees? If I agree to meet a friend for lunch is it clear that I won’t be eating inside because of Covid and that we will have to cancel if the wind shifts and we find ourselves eating in a cloud of wildfire smoke?”
Our own go-bags are packed in case a power line comes down or a transformer blows, lighting up these hills like a dried out Christmas tree in a fire safety video. The hills around us are covered with dead brown piñon, killed swiftly and suddenly when the pine beetle young hatch from eggs laid there a year before. The drought and the overgrowth stress the trees, allowing the beetles to gain purchase. Fire has been suppressed for decades here in the Urban-Wilderness Interface. The beatles now thin out the weaker trees, and the fire comes to clean up the bones.
Our mostly white neighbors, many who have lived here for thirty years or more, seem to be completely oblivious to the complex signs of environmental imbalance all around them. There are homes near ours that are completely surrounded in three hundred and sixty degrees in crispy brown pine trees. I’ve seen neighbors watering beetle-dead trees hoping they will “green up.” Last year, one neighbor screamed at us because their wife’s morning yoga was disrupted by the crew of foresters and wildfire firefighters with their chainsaws that we had hired to thin our tree stand, remove the dead wood, and allow the remaining trees and desert grasses to thrive.
“Trees die, that is just New Mexico…” one neighbor said about the thirty or more dead trees on his property. No. No it is not. Whole mountains in extreme drought covered with dead trees, the Rio Grande running dry, this is not “New Mexico” this is climate change. But I am used to having my words completely absorbed by the baffling they seem to have stuffed in their ears that I save my breath. I’ve been a Cassandra for too long, in many different scenarios, and I’ve learned to preserve my efforts for the moments where I might be effective.
Others seem to rely on the simplest environmental equations: Trees = Good. More trees = Better. White people really like trees. We are not initiated by our Western educations and the dominant culture to seek out more complex formulations beyond the most direct fulfillment of our wishes and desires. We imagine trees stand alone in hyper-individualism just like we do.
I know that ultimately in deep, planetary time, that the fires are necessary, part of the long and compensatory cycles that emerge to keep the land in balance. But the human toll and the danger to human life make these paradoxical realities almost impossible to hold alongside each other. Fire isn’t destructive to the ecosystem, it is a full fledged and functioning charter member of the ecosystem itself. The way that our dominant industrialized capitalistic cultures live on the earth is the true destructive force. And the choices made by people who live psychologically estranged from the land seem to impact those who are immediately dependent upon it first and most severely.
It is so hard for so many people to grasp the subtle, interconnected, and nuanced stories that tell the truth about our interdependence on this earth. For some the first “web” they have ever paid attention to is the the online one, where an off hand sentence can fly around the world in a flash, through an intricate network of millions upon millions of random interconnections. The spread of Covid 19 operates in much the same way. Every choice we make has thousands of potential consequences.
And most of us cannot tolerate what it would mean to incorporate inalienable interdependence into their behavioral calculations. It hurts the head.
So much easier to opt for a simple story that reassures us that something thirty miles away won’t really effect you, that watering a dead tree will bring it back to life, that it doesn’t matter if I wear a mask or not. It might hurt the head, and be too much to bear to comprehend all the choices we make, all the impacts we generate, and all the damage we have caused unthinkingly.
To support fire survivors in New Mexico:
Please donate if you can. There are thousands and thousands of unhoused and evacuated people in desperate need:
A mutual aid Go Fund Me for residents in Mora NM .
To send support funds to the Cochiti Pueblo fire department via Venmo who are in need food supplies and hydration.
The All Together New Mexico Fund is accepting monetary donations at alltogethernm.org. Grants from the fund will go to emergency shelters, food and water distribution and access to medical support.
The Food Depot Disaster Relief Fund is accepting money, food, water and hygiene items for evacuees and emergency responders. Visit thefooddepot.org/disaster-relief.