‘If you give us the best place in the world, it is not so good for us as this’

How can we cope with the fear, if we cannot overcome the causes of the fear? How can we live on the volcano of civilization without deliberately forgetting about it, but also without suffocating on the fears—and not just on the vapors that the volcano exudes?                        

--Ulrich Beck, Risk Society

 Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.

–Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World

 By the end of August 2020, in a year that seemed to serve up nothing good, a fresh new contagion had broken out in the U.S. West. Wildfires blanketed much of a sweltering California in smoke and falling ash. In Claremont, a southern California bedroom community 35 miles east of Los Angeles, I live in the shadow of two transverse ranges where the bone-dry forest was combusting in two bookend fires. The temperatures had risen in parts of the region to 117 degrees over a hellish Labor Day weekend, and thick haze of smoke made me conscious of every breath I took behind the mask I had on for the simultaneous emergency of particulate matter from the fires and Covid-19. With air conditioning broken, the days inside my home had become unbearable, not least of which because the nightly ritual of opening all the windows to usher in the evening cool only sent ash and soot through the house. As I brushed ash off the shoulder of my t-shirt when I walked outside, I wondered at the thought that these were bits of trees that had been alive the day before, maybe only hours before. My eyes burned, my throat burned, my chest hurt.

In the jagged San Gabriel Mountains that rise over Los Angeles and Pasadena and Alhambra to the north and west of me, some unknown spark, probably from an electrical wire or a transformer, set the forests of the San Gabriel Mountains ablaze in a fire that would rage through September and early October for five weeks and burn 116,000 acres. To the east, where the San Bernardino Mountains tower over harder-luck and hotter cities of Fontana and Colton and Riverside and Jurupa, the fires and smoke compounded to make a toxic atmospheric soup in a mountain bowl that captures air circulating from the east and leaves it to linger for days at ground level, lung level.[1]

The San Bernardino fires had become, in the stifling moment, a source of popular outrage. In Yucaipa, a semi-rural hamlet at the base of the majestic 11,000 foot Mount San Gorgonio, a young couple, eager to share their joy about a son they would soon bring into the world, used a pyrotechnic device for what was meant to be a burst of noise and blue smoke. They ignited the smoke bomb in a field of grass in a county park, and readily set off a fire that consumed 23,000 acres of forest in two counties.[2] This inferno, soon dubbed the El Dorado fire in what I wondered might be a touch of official irony by the marshals at CalFire, prompted a familiar round of popular recriminations, violent memes and death threats to the couple sent over social media.

Whether the couple’s lethal stunt was borne of willful malice or just wholesale ignorance of their surroundings is of little consequence; the collective outrage said more about what our real problems are. Recrimination for wildfires is a stupid California diversion, sort of a slot machine. We pull the lever every time, hoping the spinning dial will ring up the headline, “100 Years in Jail for the Stupidest, Most Evil Arsonists Ever.”

Meanwhile, our golden state burns, and we do our best to suppress our deeper knowledge that fires here can no longer be controlled so long as we live here the way we do. The fires will come because the heat waves are longer and more intense by the year, the trees are dry and increasingly afflicted by billion-bug armies of shot hole borers and bark beetles. The problem is all of us climbing the mountains with our view-lot subdivisions and leaving federally-owned forest lands defunded and untended.

Mike Davis reminds us that a collective obsession with finding culprits for fires stretches back to the 1920s, when a policy of fire suppression in California’s natural fire ecologies merged with voracious real estate development in places like Malibu and Topanga Canyon. After the Woolsey Fire burned 100,000 acres in northern Los Angeles and Ventura Counties in 2018, Davis wrote in a postscript to a new edition of Ecology of Fear, “Since 1993, almost half of California’s new homes have been built in fire hazard areas. Yet, as a contemporary Galileo might say of defensible space [and other “fire smart” practices], ‘still it burns.’” 

Our woes in Southern California were dwarfed by fire catastrophes to the north of us. Fires north and south of the Bay Area burned 700,000 acres between them in five weeks. And those fires in turn were smaller in magnitude than the monster August Complex fire, an inferno set off by dozens of lightning strikes from Tropical Storm Fausto. This wildfire—a dreaded convergence of four separate fires in the Mendocino, Shasta Trinity and Six Rivers Forests covering parts of seven of California’s giant counties-- burned so hot and rapidly that by late August, much of the Coast Range had become its own raging weather system, a monstrous wind-fueled and wind-producing blowtorch that was consuming more than acre of forest every ten seconds.[3]

This fire, along with two other burns of unthinkable proportions, have given rise to a grim neologism, a gigafire, for fires that burn through more than a million acres.

“I cannot be here anymore,” I heard myself say out loud as I walked through the superheated bank of the late afternoon.” I looked up at the electric wires across the railroad easement that runs parallel to my street and thought about the voltage pulsing through them, powering the fans and vents and the air conditioners and the refrigerators and computers that make my home seem like a space capsule on a hostile planet.  

With my work as a professor converted to a virtual format because of the pandemic, I have the bitter luxury in being able to drive away from this for a few days. I thought about the ways that I, too, am a vector of megafires, with my car and my climate control and meals made from food grown with petroleum and preserved with it too in thousand-mile-long cool chains. A skill I have acquired in these days of climate change is deftly corralling my own guilt while letting it talk to me from the sidelines. I considered the ethics of escaping Southern California when in fact my actions were contributing to the heat that is combusting the forests. I thought about the people who didn’t have the option to do their work remotely, or whose jobs had evaporated in the pandemic.

Accepting the fact that one is implicated in the obliteration of the sheltering landscape—its forests and its songbirds and its coastlines and tree-lined arroyos—is as excruciating the spectacle of watching it burn, smelling it burn, even tasting bitter ash on the tongue. I heard Alice Walker in my mind, in an essay I assigned to my students where she describes a conversation with an angry forest. “The Earth holds us responsible for our crimes against it, not as individuals, but as a species—this was message of the trees,” Walker wrote. “I found it to be a terrifying thought. For I had assumed that the Earth, the spirit of the Earth, noticed exceptions—those who wantonly damage it and those who do not. But the Earth is wise. It has given itself into the keeping of all, and all are therefore accountable.”[4]

These are fires in fire ecologies. By some accounts, what is happening now is simply overdue clearing of brush that is part of forest regeneration. But they are more catastrophic than generative in their current form, burning hotter and deeper into the soil, burning through the bark of ancient evergreens such as the redwoods, Giant Sequoias that have seen centuries of fire,[5] and leaving landscapes that are heavily characterized by non-native plants and grasses. Ecologists use the term “type conversion” to describe this  ecological change from one plant community to another.[6] What were largely pine forests before these fires and the megafires that have preceded them in the last decade in 2018, in 2017, in 2015, in 2012, will give way in many regions of California and the U.S. West to shrubland ecosystems. Evergreens will likely be replaced by oats, forbs, pampas grass, waxy scrub, low woody bushes and some fast-growing deciduous trees.[7] 

Back in my house, eyeing the foggy air through my window screens, the light filtering through the smoke summons a memory of fires elsewhere, in North Carolina, in November 2016, in what would turn out to be some of the last days I would spend with my father before he died three months later. I had flown to east to see my parents, alarmed by a casual note my father had sent when he reported having blacked out the week before and having spent the night in the hospital. “Just a syncopal spell, as the doctors called it,” he had written me, “but they didn’t find anything wrong.”

He knew it wasn’t nothing, and I knew it too. I landed in Asheville three days after Donald Trump was elected, and two days after forest fires began in Appalachian forests in southwestern North Carolina and northeastern Georgia. Unlike the arid West, these were not ecosystems adapted to fire. The Rock Mountain Fire and Pinnacle Mountain fires in North Carolina and Georgia were dangerously close for comfort in the mountain community where my parents lived— as the air filled with smoke and falling ash, I felt, amid the election, my father’s ill health, the evacuation warnings on the radio, that something was ending.  

I thought of my father, thought of the sadness of those days, when we both knew that things would get worse than they were—with the fires, with his health, with a looming Trump presidency.

Scanning maps of air quality through the southern half of the state, I determined that I would breathe better in the desert east of San Diego. It is a peculiar wonder that in these days when the federal government and the South Coast Air Quality Management Board are working to roll back air quality regulations, their diligent career employees continue to produce more abundant and more precise data on air pollution—the quantities of particulate matter, the ozone in the air, the daily forecasts of air quality for each zip code.

For the next day, I booked a motel. My two dogs were uneasy as I packed. They had been clingy and anxious since the fires started. My terrier mix, Saffron, normally an unflappable canine, had begun waking me up in the middle of the night all week, something she had not done since she was a near-puppy and a new rescue. I reassured her and her little brother Jupiter, who takes his cues from his adopted protector-sister Saffron, that we were all going on vacation. I distracted them with squeaky toys and treats, but I knew they could read my face and they sensed that I was on edge.

Voluntary displacement such as mine, even temporary, carries with it a grief at what is disappearing as one drives away. On the I-10 driving eastward, the fires mixed with the everyday crush of traffic, with a smoke so thick that slow-driving cars and trucks had headlights at mid-day. Trucks, heavy on the freeways, reminded me that commerce in and out of the region doesn’t stop, never stopped, and that if at some point they did, we would be about 24 hours away from empty shelves and widening regional panic.[8]

Driving east and then south, one appreciates how much people continue to want to live in Southern California, or perhaps how much people need the jobs available in the tangle of 1.1 billion square feet of warehouse space and transport depots that make up the region’s logistics industry that moves 40 percent of the goods going in and out of the United States through two gigantic sea ports in Los Angeles and Long Beach.[9] Despite the housing costs and the hazards, the inland expanses of this region are among the fastest-growing regions in the United States.[10] Heading east and then south from my home on the I-15, I drove past construction on thousands of new homes stretching into the dry grasslands around Temecula, Lake Elsinore, and Murrieta.

This corridor, hilly but not mountainous, these days looks to me like a Marine recruit getting a buzzcut, with patches of the sage-chaparral vegetation in place alongside strips that have been shaven bald. Near the Cajalco Road turnoff in the boom city of Corona, where colossal warehouse complexes and big box stores have replaced citrus orchards, ranches, and dairy farms, I instinctively steered into the left-most lane of the freeway to take a glimpse at a hillside that was covered in orange poppies last year. It is now scraped free of its topsoil where a housing subdivision is being built.  Looking down from the freeway, one sees a small canyon with a corridor of elms, cottonwood and sycamore where the ephemeral Temescal Creek runs through in wet year. As the hillsides go from poppies to lawns, the ferruginous hawks, orioles, and woodpeckers, and tadpoles I saw a year ago in the spring of 2019 will have to find another place to go. This, too, is an ecosystem that would burn periodically in its natural from lightning strikes, but now will simply go because the urban areas upstream will need to store the rain when it falls for lawns and taps and even, yes, demonstration conservation gardens.

An hour south of where I live, at the city of Temecula, I exited the interstate onto California Highway 79. This corridor stretching down from Lake Elsinore put me further on edge. The cities here are new developments, outposts of a peculiar kind of debt-fueled 21st century middle-class striving. The distances to white collar jobs in Los Angeles and Orange County are long, but the monthly mortgage payments on single-family homes with modest yards are in reach of people willing to put up with the sprawl. It is an area that incongruously white, Anglo and arch-conservative in an increasingly nonwhite, Latinx and stalwartly left-of-center California. The city attracted the wrong kind of attention from the Anti-Defamation League in 2020, when it published a heat map of white supremacist hate groups and ballooning extremist right-wing propaganda,[11] with Temecula earning one of the largest heat polygons in the region.  I am reminded of this as I pass the Rancho Community megachurch campus. At a stoplight, I found myself behind a white Ford pickup that a few seconds back had swerved in front of me. I stared at the scratches in the chrome next to a bumper sticker with an assault rifle on it.

During these pancaking calamities of disease and pandemic and economic crisis, I wondered what other people in traffic next to me were thinking. Temecula is the heart of California’s deep-red 50th district on the border of Riverside and San Diego Counties. In 2018, Duncan Hunter, a congressman already indicted for campaign finance violations, won over his opponent Ammar Campa-Najjar, a Latino-Arab California, in a rancid, race-baiting campaign.[12] After Hunter resigned to go to prison in 2020, the seat remained empty as a multi-way race left Campa-Najjar running a second time for Congress, this time against Darrell Issa, a notorious influence peddler, race-baiter, probable arsonist and gay-baiter who represented a next-door district San Diego County until 2018.[13]

Ten miles of repeating business loop of franchises and housing tracts gives way to ranches, oak and chaparral lands. Beyond Temecula, in oak and chaparral ranch lands, gated communities of mansions lie incongruently among the wood and stone small houses of people who settled in this arid, once-remote region to insist on silence and distance from the sprawl. Their presence, though, with their manicured hedges and covenants and elaborate iron fences and their dollars to spend on urban amenities, are like prospectors’ stakes, in which it is only a matter of a few years before the space between them and the outskirts of the mass subdivisions disappears into more concrete and commerce. It was this very pattern of exurb-and-infill that fueled a fractured, dual-headed antigrowth movement in the 1970s.

The smoke eased; a hazy blue sky emerged as Temecula disappeared behind me. After 30 minutes, I passed the oak-lined village of Sunshine Summit and drove through an area of sheer loveliness and wide fields and low peaklets of sage scrub meadows near the town of Warner Springs. The town of 1500 people, almost none of whom are ever in sight from the road, is eternally at the edge of a leisure-industry boom. A sign indicates that a local country club with manicured greens is for sale again.

There was no smoke in Warner Springs, no helicopters dropping fluorescent slurries of fertilizer and viscous water on the forest, but fires of a different sort lingered in the air. Warner Springs is an eerie place, the site of a the most significant revolt of native peoples in this region after the invasion of Mexico in 1846 and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 that would make Alta California the property of the United States. The new California legislature was eager to rid the new national acquisition of any prior claims to it, and in 1850 had passed the perversely-named Act of the Government and Protection of Indians that subjected native Californians to forced labor, fines, and crippling local taxes. Two years later, the legislature would drop any pretense of protecting native Californians and would allocate $1.5 million to pay bounties on the scalps of native Californians. Realizing that land invasions, violence, and hunger would end the worlds of all the native bands in the region, Antonio Garra, a cosmopolitan in the native California world—a man who was possibly Quchan by birth, but who spoke five Indian languages and had been appointed a naat, or headman of the Cupeño people near what is now Warner Springs. Garra—assembled a coalition of tribes to resist the invaders in 1851. “If we lose this war—all will be lost—the world,” he declared to the fighters in the coalition.[14] 

The revolt was short-lived; a betrayal by one of the leaders of the coalition resulted in Garra’s capture and execution. Anglo settlers meanwhile burned Cupa to the ground, and the Cupeños were denied the right to live on the lands they had occupied for a thousand years, and to which they had a U.S. Constitutional right under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. With some in exile and others in defiant occupation of lands nearby, generations of Cupeños continued to insist that the land was theirs, and they fought their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1901, in the case Barker v. Harvey, the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed California courts’ opinion that the village of Cupa belonged to the white men occupying it. Two years later, in what the Cupeño call their Trail of Tears, an Indian Bureau agent arrived with 44 armed guards to evict the Cupeño holdouts and force them on a march to the Pala Valley, where the federal government had purchased reservation lands they considered more than suitable for the needs of Cupeño.[15]

Nonetheless, the loss of home was a wound that yet has not healed. Echoed in the speech of Chief Cecilio Blacktooth in 1902, explaining to government agents why one “suitable” piece of land could not be exchanged for home, he said:

You see that Eagle-nest mountain and that Rabbithole mountain? When God made them, He gave us this place. We have always been here. We do not care for any other place. It may be good, but it is not ours. We have always lived here. We would rather die here. Our fathers did. We cannot leave them. Our children born here – how can we go away? If you give us the best place in the world, it is not so good for us as this.[16]

Contemplating home and the loss of it, my eyes began to follow a turkey vulture circling above a rural airport built for glider planes on a flat plain that likely once was a carefully fire-managed pasture and vernal pool. Stopping for a few minutes, I noted that the heat was still intense, but the air did not burn when I breathed, and, now finally away from the incessant din of freeways and generators and endless construction and lawn maintenance in Claremont, there was silence. The vulture, never once flapping its wings, rode a thermal upward.  I marveled at its prowess in flight.

The turkey vulture, alowwahkah to the Cupeño and the Luiseño,[17] remains a bit player in the animal pantheon of the Anglos who took over here. Chalk it up, possibly, to the compound name that evokes orneriness and a holiday dinner, on the one hand, and cadaver-eating on the other. The Cathartes aura evokes few appreciative nods when compared the awe expressed at sightings of bald eagles or the red-tailed hawks or ospreys or even the scavenger cousin of the turkey vulture, the California Condor.

According to Luiseño scholars, vulture feathers were prized in regional trading circles for skirts and ceremonial uses.[18] Vultures elsewhere are also noticed and venerated. In antiquity, Egyptians assigned their native vulture a hieroglyph for the letter “A” their vulture and believed that they were all females and were born without the intervention of males. They symbolized purity and motherhood and the endless cycle of birth and death.[19] The aura in the North American vulture’s taxonomic name means gold. Cathartes, comes from the Greek term καθαρτής, meaning “to purify.” In Tibet, vultures are disguised angels. In a death ritual still practiced in parts of Tibet, the deceased are offered to the vulture, the soul is transported to the sky, where it awaits reincarnation.[20] 

Is it because of its smaller wingspan, or is precisely because the turkey vulture has done relatively well in peri-urban landscapes that we make so little of its presence among us? Dissimilar to the California Condor, who in earlier times the vulture often led to food sources, Cathartes aura have not succumbed to the bioaccumulation of chemicals and heavy metals in the carrion they feed on.  They in fact appear to have considerable ability to adapt to us, to thrive with us on our discard landscapes. Biologists have noted their ability to use anthropogenic methane vents from landfills and power plants to scavenge extra hours of the day and thus to increase their staying power in the world we have made.[21] Their innovation recalls the essays of biologist Helen MacDonald, who remarks on birds’ nests made from cigarette butts, old wire, or underwear stolen from clothes lines. “Their meaning is always woven from things that are partly bird and partly human,” she writes.[22]  Adding to that, one might consider Cathartes aura our golden purifiers, living with us in what anthropologist Anna Tsing has called a “contaminated diversity.”[23]

Anna Tsing and her collaborators in the Anthropocene Project conceived at Aarhus University a half dozen years ago have become more than useful academic theorists to me, but instead storytellers who are putting names to things I only viscerally in this period of loss, of grief, of guilt, and of disbelief at the speed at which both whole ecosystems and our collective will to spare them are coming undone. In their recent volume of brilliant, often non-linear accounts of people dealing with death and life, madness, and memory in the wake of environmental plunder and exploitation in Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, they offer the idea of ghosts and monsters as frameworks for describing experience during capitalism’s final, sputtering stages. “Monsters are bodies tumbled into bodies,” they explain, pointing to the inextricability of the human from the nonhuman, of species from species, of life-forms from the inorganic. “The art of telling monstrosity,” they insist, “requires stories tumbled into stories.”[24]  Ghosts, in turn, are events of the past that lose form in imperfect memory in their absence as a community of beings. They haunt events of the present, shaping outcomes. The Cupeños are no longer their natal village, no longer harvesting acorns and managing the bunchgrasses and sage and vernal pools. After their expulsion, cattle, sheep, and later chemicals and mowers on manicured golf greens, and Cathartes aura haunts the night on the thermals created by landfills and concrete runways still warm from the day’s sun. Again, thinking of MacDonald’s reflections on non-human sentience of birds, interacting with us in ways that often make us uneasy: “What have they made out of what we have made of this world?,” she asks.[25]

I drove onward from Warner Springs into a borderline ecosystem where oak and chaparral to give way to high desert. Around the tiny hamlet of Ranchita, there are giant protruding granite boulders pushed up from the deep earth by the ancient magmatic explosions of the Cretaceous period that also created the Peninsular range of the Santa Rosa plateau. I don’t know much more about the geology than that, but I always associate this tiny settlement of 100 odd souls with the first time I passed through here twenty-five years ago. My partner at the time, an avid outdoorsman, told me that he had hiked in groups many times in the surrounding desert with a guy he called Ranchita Ted, an itinerant man who, my partner told me, had made a pledge sometime in his youth to live on no more than $5,000 a year. No one in hiking circles knew much more about him, even his last name, where he slept, whether he had a family, what he did to earn the tiny allotment he lived on. But he carried the respect, even veneration, of other hikers, who wondered why they labored for so many hours a week to earn multiples of Ted’s pledged maximum, mostly to gather their greatest happiness in the same desert wilderness that Ranchita Ted lived in every day. I never met Ranchita Ted, never saw a picture of him, but whenever I pass through, I look for him. Or his ghost.

Beyond Ranchita, the Santa Rosa plateau ends, and suddenly the vast Sonoran Desert comes into view 3,000 feet below. The valley is not flat, though; the far-off horizon is slanted, with the southern horizon rising over the north. This is the contour of the Imperial Valley tilting into the Salton Sink, now the Salton Sea, another haunted landscape with bodies tumbled into bodies, stories tumbled into stories. 

On a winding ecotone road leading into the valley below, sage scrub becomes dormant brittlebush becomes cholla, cacti, and creosote. I stopped in Borrego Springs, nestled at the feet of the Santa Rosa range. My dogs were antsy—it had been a long drive, and they are stalwartly home-accustomed creatures. The car was artificially cooled, but their noses were up against the windows in 108 degree heat. They knew we were not where we should be.

Given that this is a destination for the masses in springtime when rains are followed wildflower blooms in the Anza-Borrego State Park that surrounds the town, I had imagined that I would be joining hundreds of people escaping the smoke in Los Angeles and the Inland Empire. But I seemed to have bucked a trend. I checked into a motel and RV park as one of two guests in the Borrego Palms Motel and RV Park, a low-brow, unpretentious place styled to look like an Old West town. Or maybe, given the photographs of Clint Eastwood and The Magnificent Seven in the motel lobby, it’s styled to look like a movie set copy of the Old West, in a sly reference to the glory days of this corner of California when the Rat Pack and Sonny Bono and John Wayne would take their leisure in Palm Springs and the nearby Salton Sea.

On the false fronts built into the motel buildings, there are jaunty signs for a bank, a dry goods store, a cantina, a Miss Kitty’s Dance Hall. My room was in the barber shop, complete with a red, white, and blue barber pole. As I clambered up the stairs with my suitcase and two dogs in tow, the other guests-- two sunburned blond men, waist deep in the swimming pool holding beers in foam cozies, yelled up to me, asking me jovially about getting a haircut. I was reminded, thinking back to the crawling normal traffic on the smoky freeway, that most people were normalizing the moment, forests on fire, world pandemic and all.

I ensconced my dogs in the motel room, with water and treats and beds brought from home. I decided that I absolutely could lose my mind entirely here, in an ersatz barber shop. Drinking seemed like the right thing to do. The attendant at the front desk generously gave me four bottles of cheap prosecco as a welcoming gift, so I descended to the pool area to chat with the sunburned men and I drank one of the bottles of fizzy wine. The sunburned men are from Newport Beach. One told me he manages an ultra-luxury Pavilions grocery store; the other said he builds houses. They remarked that they are there for four-wheel driving expedition, and they explain all the features of the grocery manager’s new 2020 Ford 150 Raptor. This is an off-road truck that has, I now know, a 3.5-Liter EcoBoost V6 that lays down an impressive 510 pound feet of torque, climbs rock piles with ease, and propels the truck to 60 mph in 5.1 seconds. 

Through the haze of heat and the prosecco, buffered by the pool, I looked at the empty motel-cum-Old West town and I decided that the resort is neither imitation nor irony at all. Jean Baudrillard would call it an instance of the “hyperreal” in which there is no distinction between the real and the represented. In one memorable essay, Baudrillard theorized about Disneyland, in Orange County, where the men are from, deciding that Disneyland was what he called a third-order simulation, in which its Frontierland and its Tomorrowland and its Main Street, U.S.A. were neither representations of reality or distortions of reality, but instead markers of the absence of a fixed reality. “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the 'real' country, all of 'real' America, which IS Disneyland,” Baudrillard wrote. “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and simulation.”[26] Like Disneyland, this Old West motel functions as a necessary counterpart to Temecula and Lake Elsinore and Corona and Claremont, which present themselves as real and sustainable urban settlements but which ultimately are as ephemeral as this pretend Old West town at the edge of the desert.

Southern Californians mask the aridity of their arid region with tropical vegetation and lawns and work assiduously to suppress the fire in their fire ecologies. But they are also obsessed with the true desert that lies beyond their mountain barriers.  From this Sonoran Desert up through the Mohave Desert and the Great Basin stretching through Nevada and Utah to Salt Lake City, they party in them, create art in them, build jackrabbit weekend homesteads in them, build empires of irrigated fields in them, explode nuclear bombs in them.

William Fox writes in the brilliant short monograph Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty that “the low humidity and lack of verticals play games with our visual field. Light does not scatter on droplets of water; colors often don’t shift to blue in the distance. The far and the near are not clearly distinguished; this makes deserts transformative spaces—perception of paleo brain is at once one of danger from the lack of green, but also of fascination…If the lack of visual cues leads to our walking in a circle, it can also dramatically increase our haptic, or whole-body, perception of the landscape. In the desert you can feel as if, by being radically diminished in size, you are properly scaled to the planet.”[27]

In this corner of California, a calamitous illusion of the empty was the 19th century quest to turn the land a stone’s throw southeast of Borrego Springs into verdant expanse of farms and orchards. The idea was to use the new science of irrigation to “reclaim” the land for white Christian civilization, in an explicit reference to Genesis. Irrigation was not just technology conveying water from rivers to fields. It was men wielding a tool of the divine: reversing God’s expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden. As California Governor George Pardee proclaimed to reclamation boosters at the National Irrigation Congress in 1903, referring to the triumph of the City of Riverside and its surrounding orchards, “With the factor of moisture under the control of man, his control over the creation of wealth is vastly enhanced. Civilization is based upon the existence of wealth, since empires are based on population … Man can be his will create [irrigation] States, and in the exercise of his power he does most truly resemble the gods.”[28]

Land developers were ecstatic at the prospect of turning these lands of creosote and cholla, seized in great part decades before from the Kumeyaay and the Tipai peoples by Spanish missions, smallpox, and bullets. The developers painted a picture for investors of a forsaken desert giving way to anointed fields of wheat, alfalfa, apricots and dairies. Charles Rockwood, the founder of the California Development Company, recruited irrigation wunderkind George Chaffey, who had built celebrity and a fortune in the Inland Empire in the 1880s building “model colonies” of irrigated, ready-to-buy citrus homesteads along the new Santa Fe and Standard Pacific railroad line. Now, he had Chaffey turn his sights to this bigger, more ambitious venture in the Sonoran Desert. As Chaffey had done in Etiwanda (now Rancho Cucamonga) and Ontario, Chaffey and Rockwood’s company would build alcohol-free, white, Protestant townsites complete with electricity, schools, and town squares laid out in grids for well-heeled buyers who would have clean air and a salutary rural life, but also avoid the drudgery of farm life through the magic of a seemingly endless supply of East Asian and Mexican immigrant laborers and native Californians, whose reservations, where they existed, lacked the water and acreage to provide their own subsistence. 

Demigods in the local broadsheets they often published themselves, irrigators had made fortunes previously with irrigation schemes in the Inland Empire. But in this place, they did not begin to know what they did not know.  Issuing ample stock certificates for the land company to gather cash for expansion but not overspend it on water operations, the California Development Company engineers built a 14-mile-long canal with a wooden headgate connecting the fissiparous lower Colorado River to the northward-trickling channel of the small Alamo River.

Chaffey and his engineers understood little of the workings of the Colorado River that brought the snowmelt of 246,000 acres in six mountain states from Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. Their first problem was dealing with its enormous silt loads. Named by the Spanish for its turbid, red waters the river carried 500,000 tons of silt and sediment per day—enough to fill 1,400 ship cargo containers every 24 hours.[29] When the river was low in the dry season, the canal simply silted up faster than workers could clear it. By 1905, the company was near bankruptcy, and George Rockwood ordered a makeshift diversion into the Alamo River from the Colorado, this time with no gates to control flows of water. In the spring of 1905, following high snows in the West the previous winter, floodwaters poured into the diversion at a velocity that scoured the tiny Alamo, and the entire river changed course, now flowing backward, northward, toward the Imperial Valley and into the Salton Sink, a basin that lies below sea level twenty five miles east of Borrego Springs. From 1905 to 1907, the Salton Sink filled with Colorado River water until makeshift levies made of odd materials, including old train cars thrown across the river’s path, forced the river back into the channel leading southward to Mexico and the Sea of Cortes.

It was not the first time by any means that water flowed there: over a period of 40 millennia, water had appeared and disappeared for intervals lasting centuries. In its last iteration ending in the 16th century, the ancient Lake Cahuilla had supplemented mixed economies of agriculture, gathering, and fishing in the region.[30] Absent new deliveries from the Colorado River, the Salton Sea would have dried up once again after some decades in the searing heat of the Sonoran Desert. But in the 20th century, California’s newest, largest lake, 40 miles in length and 10 miles in width would have a new role. In 1928, the U.S. government set about building a canal running parallel to the U.S.-Mexican and diverting enough water to irrigate 650,000 acres of desert in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys, which would then drain their wastewater into the Salton Sea.

The amount of river the U.S. federal government diverted toward farmland in this desert was a king’s ransom in where water is more precious than gold. Here, where it rains on average just 3 inches a year, the fields that cover over 1,000 square miles each receive enough water to cover each bit of land to a depth of five feet. Even today, with federally-mandated cutbacks to the diversions, diminished lower Colorado River, desert irrigation in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys puts as much water on land as the rainiest state in the continental U.S., Louisiana, where godwater falls on the fields 60 inches per year on average.[31]   

The Salton Sea became the ghostly photonegative image of a 21st century California wildfire—an unsolvable dilemma of what do once a set of settled water rights and river basin engineering created a regional economy, a way of life, and a powerful set of landowners who in turn would shape the local water agencies. The latter agencies ostensibly exist to build and maintain the infrastructure that sends the water to people who hold legal claims to it, but they also advocate ferociously on behalf of the landowners themselves, who can use their allocations to water their fields or sell their year’s water to thirsty water agencies in Los Angeles and San Diego.  

The Salton Sea carries a history of these arrangements. Its placid, broad blue surface for a brief time became a chimera of American mid-century utopia: a world where modern industrial agriculture could provide win-win arrangement for farms and people. In the early decades of the 20th century, sport fishermen flocked to its shores and bird watchers delighted at the flocks of migratory birds that descended in multitudes. But by the 1980s, where Rock Hudson once water-skied, and where Frank Sinatra and Jerry Lewis visited their friend Guy Lombardo’s yacht in the Salton Sea in the 1950s, where the Beach Boys lounged at the North Shore yacht club, and where President Dwight Eisenhower golfed, there was little left of leisure culture.[32] Within a generation, though, the lake fell from favor as salts and nitrates accumulated in this sea with no outlet. A sulfuric stench took hold of the basin, a smell so strong that on days when temperature and humidity are high, even the tony residents of Palm Springs can smell the sea 30 miles away.

Plans for exurban subdivisions that would line this desert vacationland were mostly scrapped by the 1980s. In Salton City, on the west side of the sea, a web of curvilinear streets and home pads lie mostly unoccupied. The curbs have crumbled, the streets are decaying. A few boosters remain. Salton City Realty, ensconced in a decaying, two-story building clad in salvaged metal siding and rimmed at the top by a broad wooden sconce painted to resemble Spanish tile advertises “Lots for Sale! WILL FINANCE FOR $100 DOWN!”

The east side of the Salton has fared better by embracing the irony and catastrophism of the place. The Skin Inn bar at Bombay Beach, on the stinking shore of the sea, surrounded by sand, animal skeletons, pieces of machines that have come apart, is now a destination for Those In The Know.  A motley assortment of drifters, artists, musicians and filmmakers have taken over the ruins of a World War II Marine training camp at Slab City and stage concerts and parties on the weekends on a makeshift stage for Los Angeles hipsters who arrive for an off-the-grid desert experience. Heightening the experience, one passes by the massive art installation of Leonard Knight, who over decades has used tens of thousands of gallons of paint and innumerable reclaimed objects to make Salvation Mountain. At the center of the installation, in giant red and pink letters on a painted hillock, built up over years of daily labor with layers of adobe clay, is the message, “God is Love.” A memorable part of the movie, “Into the Wild” with Leonard DiCaprio was filmed here. Referencing the film or simply each other’s online stories, thousands of people now pass through, taking pictures of themselves in the thin desert air, the riotous colors filling the frame around them.

Art world weekend sojourners come and go for their selfies with this desert Thanatos, but the Salton Sea is an essential habitat in decay that no one knows how to deal with justly. The Audubon Society notes that the sea has become one of the most important places for birds in north America and cites 400 species of birds who nest, stop over, or winter on its shores or in the riparian zones of the drainage canals and the two embattled rivers that feed it.[33] The accumulating salts, however, require a heavy energy output for even salt-tolerant birds to filter through glands, leaving them hungry and vulnerable to disease. Meanwhile, other species who utilize the less saline riparian areas of the New River and Alamo River in the south are vulnerable to pathogens, such as the avian cholera outbreaks that in recent years have cut down legions of birds at the outlet of the New River. A grim task of the biologists at the Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge is to collect the tens of thousands of cadavers for disposal in an on-site incinerator in hopes of containing the bird pandemic.[34] Even with a steady incineration of the birds in the refuge, bird cadavers litter the sides of the sea outside the reserve where their systems were overwhelmed by salts, by poisons that have accumulated in the fish, or simply by hunger as even the salt-tolerant tilapia and crustaceans in the sea diminish in number. The successive die-offs are such that the Salton Sea’s beaches are now an accumulation of carbon matter and bleached bones that crack underneath the shoes of anyone who walks on its spongy shores.

The Salton Sea is an anthropogenic succession ecology. A federal agreement that had kept water going to the sea until 2017 has now expired. This means that the Salton Sea will recede again, this time because water rights holders in the Imperial Valley increasingly are leasing their allocations to the Metropolitan Water District that serves 23 million urban customers from Los Angeles to San Diego and to growing desert cities like Palm Desert. The Salton Sea has a small number of champions who tout the possibilities for its rehabilitation as a recreation zone, but the greater number of people who pay attention to the calls to save the Salton Sea are doing so to do things: first, managers maintain the embattled surface of the sea for birds; and second, they must keep bottom of the sea covered because it is, effectively, a toxic waste dump.

The Salton Sea floor scares even the most sanguine politicians and career officials in the state’s health and air quality agencies. The areas of greatest population in Imperial County lie to the southeast of the Salton Sea in and around Imperial Valley agriculture. Brawley, Niland, Calexico, Westmoreland, Calpatria, El Centro are decidedly un-fancy towns where many residents’ employment is tied to agriculture, and where the cost of living is lower than any other part of Southern California. Median household income, at around $45,000 is a third below the national median, and at any given time over 20 percent of the county’s mostly Latinx residents are living below the poverty line. Country living, however, is anything but healthful here: the air quality is often the worst in the state, and the county has the highest rates of emergency room visits and hospitalization for children in California.[35] With the Salton Sea receding and desert winds frequently blowing over 10 miles per hour in the valley, particulate matter reaches dangerous levels for months at a time. The aerosols and dust coming off the fields and the exposed sea bottom are a witches’ brew of toxins. Selenium and arsenic are in high concentrations, as are pesticides. Maps on the website Tracking California that show georeferenced data from pesticide use reports shows that growers are applying between 2000 and 8000 pounds of pesticides per square mile.[36] Also, due to dust and tillage, outbreaks of a disease borne of a fungus endemic to these soils, Valley Fever, sends scores of people, especially children, to the hospital.

As California’s population grows and the state warms, the multi-year droughts will force the state and the federal government to reckon with so many people living up against its forests and in so doing, unwittingly setting them ablaze. It will also have to make choices about what to do about its engineered hydroscapes that also have wide-ranging effects on the lower atmosphere.

In Borrego Springs, I spent my days mostly indoors conferencing with my students and colleagues through the bizarre and yet not wholly impersonal electronic environment of a Zoom interface. Saffron and Jupiter were confused but remained mercifully patient while I mostly ignored them for hours at a time. The interludes we all looked forward to were the periods just before dawn and at just before dusk when the desert’s blistering heat lifted and we could hike on paths leading north, east, and west of us toward open land, hills, and mountain canyons. I felt grateful for the desert. At dawn when a raven flew overhead, I could hear the air displaced by its wings. The faint scraping sound of beetles digging holes in the ground called me to stop and watch in wonder. 

We walked slowly. I rid their paws every so often of cactus spines; a little cholla ball broke off at one point into Saffron’s wiry fur and she fussed as I disentangled the cactus and ended up with a hand full of spines myself. I worried that these suburban rescue mutts would have no residual instincts to steer clear of rattlesnakes. On one morning before sunup, silence and soft pink light around us, we listened to a column of coyotes in high pursuit of some prey, probably one of the hundreds of jackrabbits we saw in great abundance all around us at the motel. The coyotes made short work of their breakfast, whose capture they celebrated with whoops and screams. Seconds later, the pack emerged from the brush, ready for a second course. They spotted us, a hundred yards away and on the other side of the road. I knew they knew that I was too big for them to risk attacking the three of us, but there was a long staredown with the well-fed, muscular alpha female who trotted up the side of the road toward us. She neared, and then sauntered back into the brush with her pack, sending an insouciant look at my bigger dog Saffron, who stared in wonder at the pack leader. I know better than to impose human thoughts on nonhumans, but it felt like the alpha taunted Saffron, saying, “Hey, look here! No leash on me…”  

Overhead, the skies were turning hazy. The smoke from the fires was thickening, though it was still far better than in Claremont. On the news, I noted a story reporting that the smoke in the high atmosphere had reached the East Coast.[37] Other stories indicate that the fine ash from these millions of burned trees will travel thousands of miles more, even disastrously to Arctic glaciers, where the black soot from the fires absorbs solar radiation, reduces the heat-deflecting albedo of the white snows, and thus accelerates melting and temperature rises.[38]  None of us are outside this loop.

The smoke clouds streaking the sky were a brownish-white—more Aarhus ghosts, colliding temporalities.  We live on this planet, breathing, moving, living and dying in an ancient atmosphere that now bears the measurable physical accumulation of carbon and chemicals that we have sent into it over generations. And we are led to believe that we are locked into pumping exponentially more of it for generations to come.

Realistically, can we, can our culture, can our states and institutions of law—back away from base assumptions of ever-normalcy, of business-as-usual? In 1903, the Supreme Court, bolstered by federal agents who had assured the justices that land just as good as what was in their ancestral homelands had been secured for the exiled Cupeños, opined that John Trumbull Warner’s ranch had been obtained illegally, but that sixty years of white owners on the land made it theirs in perpetuity.

Similarly, do the decades of profligate burning of fossil fuels in the atmosphere and release of persistent toxins make the present belong to the generations who put them there? As a professor, I honestly did not think I would be facing college students in the year 2020 with no binding global restrictions on carbon emissions and U.S. President denying the existence of climate change and further deregulating and subsidizing a minimally regulated and obscenely subsidized fossil fuel industry.

In the face of foot-dragging, inaction, and even violence by national states and legislatures, and outright lies and strong-arming by the world’s behemoth oil and chemical companies, what possibly should call our attention most inside movements for climate justice is a body of lawsuits around the world led by children. 

Many respected legal analysts consider cases being put before courts by youth plaintiffs in venues such as Holland, Portugal, Pakistan, Colombia, Ireland, Canada, Uganda, Norway, New Zealand, and Australia as risky long shots.[39] But what if they are the only substantive long shots we have? Much as the Cupeño continue to claim, following Chief Blacktooth more than a century ago, that land and home are not fungible and that Cupa must be returned for future generations to the descendants of its original occupants, we are living through a period of pivotal claims-making in the courts by members of communities elsewhere insisting that their earthly homes are not theirs for others to obliterate.

In the U.S., thirteen youth plaintiffs, aged 12 through 22, are suing the State of Washington for having taken insufficient measures to curb carbon emissions. In Aji v. Washington, they assert that the State, Governor Jay Inslee, and several state agencies, by causing and contributing to climate change through the State’s Fossil Fuel Energy and Transportation policies, have violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, property, and equal protection of the law, and has caused impairment of essential public trust resources.

Their complaint had been filed two years before in King County Superior Court on February 16, 2018. In that instance, the judge ruled, much in the fashion that other district court judges have done in youth plaintiff cases alleging that inherent in constitutional due process clauses on life and liberty is an inherent right of children to a livable climate, that child plaintiffs’ claims were compelling, but that courts were an improper venue for what they deemed to be a policy question. The issue is one for legislatures and executive branches, not the courts, judges have indicated thus far.

Perhaps the most critical and risky part of Aji and other cases like it, such as the federal suit Juliana v. United States, that wound through the federal court system from 2015 to 2019, is litigants’ strategy of having a case tried in front of a jury on the merits. The strategy is two-fold: first, attorneys would present juries of ordinary citizens with an incontrovertible case that government administrations at state and federal levels have been in possession of overwhelming amounts of hard evidence and scientific opinion since the 1960s indicating that climate change was happening, that it was human-caused, and that it stood to cause great harm to human populations and the natural environment.

Second, architects of this litigation would put youth plaintiffs in front of adult jurors in a public performance of intergenerational dialogue. What in fact would it look like to have children speak directly to adults in a court of law, explaining their fears about the livability of their own future? In courtrooms packed with children, as has occurred during procedural hearings where judges have presided over arguments about standing, magistrates’ discomfort with the situation is palpable.  In a trial, a generation of adult jurors would be asked the harrowing question, point blank, whether children’s lives have value. During testimony, children would explain how their lives have already been affected by climate change. Plaintiffs such as Aji Piper, for example, have seen their worlds crashing in their short lifetimes: eutrophic zones expanding in Puget Sound, wildfires forcing their families to move from their farms, asthma keeping them indoors and out of school for days at a time. Plaintiff James Charles D., Plaintiff James Charles D., a 17-year-old member of the Quinault Indian Nation, lives in Taholah a coastal village that must be relocated because of sea level rise. His traditional cultural activities such as digging for clams both on and off the Reservation are now limited because of algal blooms, ocean acidification, and warmer ocean temperatures. Plaintiff Adonis D., who spends every moment outside could speak to his experiences fear and traumatic reactions to seeing will ruin the natural places that he loves to visit and the animals he adores seeing in the wild. “Adonis is also deeply and emotionally impacted by the death and destruction of other wildlife and living creatures,” reads the 2018 legal complaint. “Adonis finds it hard to think about, imagine, and plan for his future when that future is constantly and quickly being destroyed by ocean acidification, droughts, wildfires, and other Climate Change Impacts.”[40]

These lawsuits, best developed in Juliana v. United States, allege that the governments’ actions that cause climate change have violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources. The cases worry some veteran court watchers in environmental circles, who see the rectitude of litigants’ claims, but who warn that precedent is established in U.S. courts in tiny steps over long periods of time. An extension of the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fifth Amendment and the equal protection of the Fourteenth Amendments to apply to the right of children to a livable climate may be, on the face of the present planetary emergency, morally unexceptionable. But such a broad extension of those principles, and a broad extension of the courts’ interpretation of the Public Trust Doctrine, is unlikely to prompt any single judge or panel of judges to default to stare decisis, the principle that courts should adhere to principles laid out in earlier cases. This doctrine was one of the reasons why the road to the decision in Brown v. Board of Education took decades of prior litigation. In Brown, according to histories of the case, a majority the Supreme Court justices who originally heard the case in 1951 under Chief Justice Fred Vinson were disinclined to rule for the plaintiffs. While three of the judges opposed court desegregation because of racist beliefs or a deference to states’ rights, two of the judges who opposed ruling for the plaintiffs, Felix Frankfurter and Robert Jackson, were staunchly opposed to segregation but viewed Plessy v Ferguson as settled law.[41] They believed simply that it would be improper for the courts to reverse course. The opinion issued in 1954 after Earl Warren assumed the helm of the court, along with a decision the following year in a second case known as Brown v Board II, was landmark jurisprudence not just for what the cases for civil rights, but also for the ideational leap in forcing the federal government to devise specific measures to integrate schools and universities nationally.

What difference might these youth plaintiffs’ cases make? In Europe, courts employing common law proceedings are producing far-reaching verdicts at a rapid pace. The Dutch Supreme Court ruled for plaintiffs in December 2019 in a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit group Urgenda. Suing Dutch government for failing to meet its emissions reductions goals, Urgenda successfully argued that the Netherlands had a positive obligation under the European Convention of Human rights to take stronger measures for the prevention of climate change.[42] In Ireland, the Supreme Court ruled in a case brought by the nonprofit Friends of the Irish Environment that the government’s national mitigation plan was insufficient to make the transition to a low-carbon, climate resilient, and environmentally sustainable economy by 2050.[43] In Portugal, in a much-watched case filed on September 3rd of this year, six children from Portugal affected by the country’s devastated wildfires, represented by the global Legal Action Network, filed a complaint before the European Court of Human Rights in the first legal attempt to extend the court’s boundaries of human rights claims. Although some observers worry that this court, which relies on case law, may not make the leap that national courts have done, and may in fact find the case inadmissible due to the lack of prior litigant engagement of the Portuguese courts,[44] the momentum of the legal movement for court action is undeniable. 

What happens in Aji v. Washington is critical the course of youth climate litigation around the world. Its timing may also be fortuitous: in a televised court hearing in Seattle, a panel of three judges sat in masks in an empty courtroom due to the pandemic. Meanwhile, outside the courthouse, the worst wildfires in the history of the Pacific Northwest had darkened skies and rendered the nearby mountains invisible. As Chris Reitz, Assistant Attorney General for the State of Washington argued that the case had business in a court of law, that the courts, by their very nature, could offer no judicial remedy to the plaintiffs’ claims, a visibly impatient Judge David S. Mann showed signs that he might be inclined to send the case back to a lower court for a declaratory judgment, as he queried Reitz about his claims. “For the last 10 days, I can’t go outside,” he said. “If I go outside, I’m threatening my life. I have asthma. So I have to stay inside with the windows shut. Why isn’t that affecting my life?” Justice Lori Smith followed her colleague’s reasoning, asking, “Couldn’t the courts indicate that the timeline isn’t sufficient [to protect plaintiffs’ rights]?”

This break in judicial bearing is significant. It echoes and amplifies judicial language in the federal case, Juliana v United States. In that case, which astounded both the Department of Justice attorneys dispatched to quash the case and skeptics in the legal community, plaintiffs’ attorneys prevailed in every procedural challenge in the case’s five-year journey through district and appellate courts, with even one procedural ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. Supported by dozens of law firms and nonprofits who authored an astonishing 40 amicus briefs, the case failed to go to trial by jury after a ruling in favor of the defense in January 2020 in a 2-1 decision in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

The ruling, which remains under appeal to be heard en banc in a plenary session of the Ninth Circuit, favored the government’s claim that the case should not be tried by a jury. However, the decision by the panel majority, Justices Mary Murguía and Andrew Hurwitz, was anything but a clear victory for the government. In an opinion that read more as apology to the youth plaintiffs’ than a strong opinion backing the government, “The record left little basis for denying that climate change was occurring at an increasingly rapid pace” Hurwitz wrote for the majority, ”[and] that that the unprecedented rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels stemmed from fossil fuel combustion and will wreak havoc on the Earth’s climate if unchecked,” He wrote also that the injuries plaintiffs cited were “concrete and particularized” and that federal policies were substantially contributing to their injuries. In siding with the government against the plaintiffs, Hurwitz wrote simply that it was beyond the power of an Article III court to order, design, supervise, or implement remedial plans for climate change action.[45]

The document in the case that may be historically as important as the majority opinion, however, is the searing dissent by District Judge Josephine Staton, who sat on the panel. She opened her dissent with a judicial shout, writing, “The government accepts as fact that the United States has reached a tipping point crying out for a concerted response—yet presses ahead toward calamity. It is as if an asteroid were barreling toward Earth and the government decided to shut down our only defenses.”[46] Reviewing her colleagues’ acknowledgement that the youth plaintiffs were indeed facing imminent climate chaos, she wrote that the case did have a place in the judiciary, and that even if the courts could not deliver immediate relief from climate effects, the courts were absolutely obliged to issue rulings in favor of plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to a livable planet. “Unlike the majority, I believe the government has more than just a nebulous ‘moral responsibility’ to preserve the Nation.”[47] She chastised her fellow justices for framing the case as an environmental case per se, but insisted that the youth plaintiffs had brought a case pertinent to the perpetuity principle of the U.S. Constitution that prohibit the willful dissolution of the Republic.[48] “Waiting is not an option,” she wrote. “Those alive today are at perhaps the singular point in history where society (1) is scientifically aware of the impending climate crisis, and (2) can avoid the point of no return.”[49]

In Borrego Springs, the night before I return to Claremont, I walked with Saffron and Jupiter in the warm, dark desert. I looked up, but there were no stars. The smoke had covered them. Or rather, the stars were still there. We had simply altered our atmospheric view of them. I remembered a line from Amitov Ghosh’s meditation on climate change in The Great Derangement when he considers what future generations will make of the absurd ever-normalizing ideas and cultural forms we clung to. “What can they do­ other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight?”[50]

I thought about the cases being argued by kids, who are so like my own college students, terrified of the future the adults around them have conceded may be unlivable, and hopeful that their teachers, their leaders, their neighbors, their fellow citizens, will set them, us all, on a path of seeing and healing.

[1] Los Angeles County Fire Department, “Bobcat Fire,” https://fire.lacounty.gov/bobcat-fire-status/, accessed September 21, 2020; CalFire, “El Dorado Fire,” https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2020/9/5/el-dorado-fire/, accessed September 21, 2020.

[3] Calculated from figures provided in Don Thompson, “California Fires Growing Bigger, Moving Faster than Ever,” AP News, September 10, 2020. Accessed September 15, 2020 from https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-forests-holidays-fires-california-dc30bcead69e5b67004711b78bbda868#:~:text=Fire%20officials%20said%20they'd,24%20kilometers)%20in%20a%20day.

[4] Alice Walker, Living by the Word (Boston: Mariner Books 1983), 142.

[5] Peter Greenfield and Mette Lampcov, “Beetles and Fire Kill Dozens of ‘Indestructible’ Sequoia Trees,” The Guardian, January 18, 2020, accessed September 25, 2020 at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/18/beetles-and-fire-kill-dozens-of-california-indestructible-giant-sequoia-trees-aoe

[6] California Chaparral Institute, “Type Conversion: The Impact of Excessive Fire,” website article accessed September 21, 2020 at https://www.californiachaparral.org/threats/too-much-fire/; see also Jiang, X. et al. Projected Future Changes in Vegetation in Western North America in the Twenty-First Century. Journal of Climate, 26 (2013), 3671–3687.

[7] Bart RR, Tague CL, Moritz MA, Effect of Tree-to-Shrub Type Conversion in Lower Montane Forests of the Sierra Nevada (USA) on Streamflow. PLOS ONE Vol 11, No. 8 (2016) e0161805. 

[8] Hannah Ziady, “Can’t Find What You Want in the Grocery Store? Here’s Why,” CNN Business, April 2, 2020, accessed September 30, 2020 at https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/01/business/food-supply-chains-coronavirus/index.html.

[9] Weber Logistics, “Distribution Centers in the Inland Empire,” Weber Logistics Blog, March 6, 2013, accessed October 2, 2020 at https://www.weberlogistics.com/blog/california-logistics-blog/bid/274162/Distribution-Centers-in-the-Inland-Empire-Space-hard-to-find-but-more-development-is-predicted.

[10] Southern California Association of Governments, “Subarea Forecasts,” (2017), accessed October 10, 2020 at http://www.scag.ca.gov/DataAndTools/Lists/GrowthForeCastingTabs/AllItems.aspx.

[11] ADL Los Angeles, “Southern California Heavily Targeted in 120% Increase in White Supremacist Propaganda,” la.adl.org, February 18, 2020, accessed October 11, 2020 at https://la.adl.org/news/southern-california-heavily-targeted-in-120-increase-in-white-supremacist-propaganda-in-u-s/.

[12] Jeff Daniels, “‘Race-baiting’ and ‘disinformation’ roil CA contest between indicted GOP Rep. Hunter and Democrat Campa-Najjar as polls tighten,” CNBC.com, October 18, 2018, accessed October 10, 2020 at https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/17/race-baiting-roils-ca-contest-involving-indicted-gop-rep-hunter.html.

[13] See, for example, story by Eric Lichtblau (2011), “A Businessman in Congress Helps His District and Himself,” The New York Times, August 14th in which he identifies Issa as one of the most corrupt members of Congress, writing,  “As his private wealth and public power have grown, so too has the overlap between his private and business lives, with at least some of the congressman’s government actions helping to make a rich man even richer and raising the potential for conflicts.” See also Carla Maranucci, “ Issa defends himself from accusations of 'gay-baiting' in campaign ad,” Politico.com, January 24, 2020, accessed October 15, 2020 at https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/01/24/issa-defends-himself-from-accusations-of-gay-baiting-in-campaign-ad-1254753. 

[14] Benjamin Madley (2017), An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1848-1873 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 203.

[15] Merrie Monteaguido (2019), “From the Archives: 1901 Supreme Court Decision Evicted Indians from Warner Ranch,” San Diego Union-Tribune, May 13, accessed October 11, 2020 from https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/local-history/story/2019-05-13/from-the-archives-1901-supreme-court-ruling-evicted-cupa-indians.

[16] Phil Brigandi, “In the Name of the Law: The Cupeño Removal of 1903,” Journal of San Diego History Vol 64, No. 1 (2018), accessed October 10, 2020 at https://sandiegohistory.org/journal/2018/august/in-the-name-of-the-law-the-cupeno-removal-of-1903/.

[17] The Cupeño language is no longer in use; Cupeño language was an Uto-Aztecan language related to the Cupan group, which includes the Luiseño people, whose home is in what is now San Diego and Los Angeles Counties. The Cupeño traded frequently with the Luiseño, who lived just west of them. The languages share many place and animal names, according to online Luiseño dictionaries and the Cupeño dictionary in Jane Hill and Rosinda Nolasquez, Mulu' Wetam the First People: Cupeno Oral History and Language (Banning: Malki-Ballena Press, 1973).

[18] “Luiseño Ethnozoology,” accessed October 14, 2020 at https://www2.palomar.edu/users/scrouthamel/luisenoz.htm.

[19] LIFE Egyptian Vulture Project, accessed October 2, 2020 at https://www.lifegyptianvulture.it/en/.

[20] Karma Lekshe Tsomo Bhiksuni (2001) “Death, Identity, and Enlightenment in Tibetan Culture, The International Journal of Transpersonal Studies 20 (2001): 151-73.

[21] James Mandell and Keith Bildstein, “Turkey Vultures Use Anthropogenic Thermals to Extend their Daily Activity Period,” The Wilson Journal of Ornithology Vol. 199, No. 1 (2007): 102-105; D.A. Freire et al., “Use of Thermal Power Plants by New World Vultures (Cathartidae) as an Artifice to Gain Lift,” The Wilson Journal of Ornithology Vol. 128, No. 1 (2015): 119-123.

[22] Helen MacDonald, Vesper Flights (New York: Grove Press, 2020) 4.

[23] Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 30-34.

[24] Anna Tsing et al., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), M10

[25] Helen MacDonald (2020), 4. 

[26] Jean Baudrillard, “The Procession of Simulacra,” in Brian Wallis, ed, Art After Modernism:  Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum, 1984): 253-281, p. 262.

[27] William Fox, Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty (Reno and Las Vegas: University of Nevada Press, 2002), 12.

[28] George Pardee, “Relation of Irrigation to Civilization,” speech reprinted in Pacific Rural Press, vol 66, no 13 (1903), September 26, 1903, retrieved from UC-Riverside Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research, https://cdnc.ucr.edu/?a=cl&cl=CL2.1903&sp=PRP&e=-------en--20--1--txt-txIN--------1

[29] James Powell, “Calamity on the Colorado,” Orion Magazine, July/August 2010, accessed October 10, 2020 at https://orionmagazine.org/article/calamity-on-the-colorado/.

[30] See Don Laylander, “The Chronology of Lake Cahuilla’s Last Stand,” Proceedings of the Society of California Archaeology, Vol. 8 (1995): 69-78, accessed October 2, 2020 at https://scahome.org/publications/proceedings/Proceedings.08Laylander.pdf; Michael Waters, “Late Holocene Lacustrine Chronology and Archaeology of Ancient Lake Cahuilla, Quaternary Research Vol. 19, No. 3 (1983): 373-383.

[31] The amount of water drawn from the Colorado River by California irrigators decreased from highs of probably around 4 million acre feet in the mid-20th century to 3.85 million acre feet in 2003 under a federal agreement known as the Quantitative Settlement Agreement. Water districts serving irrigators in the Imperial and Coachella Valleys have legal claim to 3.4 million acre feet. See Water Education Foundation, “Quantification Settlement Agreement,” accessed October 12, 2020 at https://www.watereducation.org/aquapedia/quantification-settlement-agreement; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, “National Temperature and Precipitation Maps,” accessed October 12, 2020 at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/us-maps/.

[32] Regina Graham, “A ghost town in the making: How Salton Sea - California's largest lake - went from bustling resort popular with celebrities to a 'public health disaster' where the remaining residents choke on toxic dust, Daily Mail, June 13, 2018, accessed October 14, 2020 at “https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5839677/A-ghost-town-making-Salton-Sea-went-busy-resorts-public-health-disaster.html.

[33] California Audubon Society, “The Salton Sea,” accessed October 13, 2020 at https://ca.audubon.org/conservation/conservation/important-bird-areas/salton-sea.

[34] Erik Anderson, “Change at the Salton Sea is Affecting Bird Populations,” KPBS.org, March 6, 2019, accessed October 2, 2020 at https://www.kpbs.org/news/2019/mar/06/change-salton-sea-affecting-bird-populations/.

[35] Frank Freedman et al., “Spatial Particulate Fields During High Winds in the Imperial Valley, California, Atmosphere Vol 11, No. 1 (2020), 88;  Sagar P. Parajuli, Charles S. Zender, “Projected changes in dust emissions and regional air quality due to the shrinking Salton Sea,” Aeolian Research, Vol. 33 (2018): 82-92.

[36] Tracking California, “Agriculture Pesticide Mapping Tool,” accessed October 15, 2020 at https://trackingcalifornia.org/pesticides/pesticide-mapping-tool.

[37] Scottie Andrew, “Smoke from Western Wildfires Has Reached New York,” CNN.com, September 14, 2020, accessed October 15, 2020 at https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/14/weather/wildfire-smoke-new-york-trnd/index.html.

[38] James Hansen and Larissa Nazarenko, “Soot climate forcing via snow and ice albedos,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science Vol. 101, No. 2 (2004): 423–428; S. McKenzie Skiles et al., “Radiative forcing by light-absorbing particles,” National Journal of Climate Change, 8 (2018), 964–971;  J.L. Thomas, et al., “Quantifying black carbon deposition over the Greenland ice sheet from forest fires in Canada,” Geophysical Research Letters, 44 (2017): 7965– 797

[39] Laura Parker (2019), “Kids Suing Governments About Climate: It’s a Global Trend,” National Geographic, June 26, accessed October 10, 2020 at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/06/kids-suing-governments-about-climate-growing-trend/.

[40] Aji v. Washington, Superior Court of the State of Washington (2018), accessed October 10, 2020 at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/571d109b04426270152febe0/t/5a870db69140b70db78e78d3/1518800312335/Complaint.FILED.2.16.18.pdf.

[41] Cass Sunstein, “Did Brown Matter?” The New Yorker, April 26, 2004, accessed at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/05/03/did-brown-matter.

[42] André Nollkaemper and Laura Burgers, “A New Classic in Climate Change Litigation: The Dutch Supreme Court Decision in the Urgenda Decision,” EJIL:Talk! European Journal of International Law Blog, January 7, 2020, accessed October 5, 2020 at https://www.ejiltalk.org/a-new-classic-in-climate-change-litigation-the-dutch-supreme-court-decision-in-the-urgenda-case/.

[43] Orla Kelleher, “The Supreme Court of Ireland’s Decision in Friends of the Irish Environment,” EJIL:Talk! European Journal of International Law Blog, September 9, 2020, accessed October 5, 2020 at https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-supreme-court-of-irelands-decision-in-friends-of-the-irish-environment-v-government-of-ireland-climate-case-ireland/.

[44] Ole Pedersen, “The European Convention of Human Rights and Climate Change-Finally!” EJIL:Talk! European Journal of International Law Blog, September 22, 2020, accessed October 5, 2020 at https://www.ejiltalk.org/the-european-convention-of-human-rights-and-climate-change-finally/.

[45] Juliana v United States, Ninth Court Circuit’s Decision on Interlocutory Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, January 17, 2020, p. 4 accessed January 18, 2020 at https://static1.squarespace.com/static/571d109b04426270152febe0/t/5e22101b7a850a06acdff1bc/1579290663460/2020.01.17+JULIANA+OPINION.pdf.

[46] Ibid, 32

[47] Ibid, 36

[48] Ibid, 40

[49] Ibid, 43

[50] Amitov Ghosh, The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 11

what makes us so smart?

July 1, 2020

Welcome to our blog! We couldn’t be more excited to have you here with us.

For the moment, let go of the distance and the electronic medium, and imagine this space as we would make it in a universe of our choosing.

See yourself walking toward of a stone and wood farmhouse with a wrap-around porch at the end of narrow dirt road. The lane is lined with cottonwoods, sycamores, and laurel trees, scented with the fragrance of wildflowers in the lower story of the gallery forest.

Take a breath and imagine pale swallowtail butterflies gathering near a seep on the side of the road dance in your path as you walk up the drive through shadow and late spring sunshine. You step carefully through their gathering, keeping an eye on the ground so as not to step on any of the dancing Papilionidae.

Tranquility brings with it happy noise. Borrowing words from the great poet Mary Oliver, the din of a living planet announces your place in the family of things. A breeze rattles the canopy of the trees on the path. Bees are gathering pollen in the elderberry blooms and in the sage blossoms. A mockingbird in an elm tree nearby is cycling through its broad repertoire. In one moment, mockingbird is a house finch, then a bluebird, then a titmouse, then a lizard. Is mockingbird showing off, or is this just what mockingbird does to feel most alive?  You hear the sound of a cow in a pasture beyond the cottonwoods and sycamores ambling through pasture grass—a multigreen mix of clover and borage, blue wildrye, brome, nettle,  and deergrass. Then, behind you at the bottom of the lane, near a farm pond, an insistent quacking enters the day’s songscape.  It’s a mother duck signaling the way for her fifteen ducklings as they cross the lane from grass to cool water.

You’ve walked up the lane, you’re on the porch now. There’s no need to knock. Come on in. We’ve been waiting for you. Estás en tu casa. You are in your home. If at this moment the place we summon in words here stands in contrast to the place you are now, let it be a shared destination of the mind. Let it be a stopping place for considering the work than can and must be done in the world’s cities and countrysides, its forests and estuaries, its grasslands and deserts, its rivers and bays, its islands and coastal marshes, its open oceans.  

Consider this your blog, your sounding board for ideas and commentary on food and agriculture. We mean to think expansively about an approach to food and agriculture that is not just about eating, buying, growing and harvesting, or even about the moral and social questions of who may eat, who may buy, and who may grow or harvest.  This blog is also meant to be a lively stopping-place for talking about books, film, art, scholarship, activism, home pilot projects, networks of like-minded people pursuing alternative food system projects small and large,  and for notes on public interest litigation and lawmaking that deal with the urgent and maybe impossible task of preserving food-bearing natural infrastructures for human beings and their co-resident life-forms on Earth.

Agriculture and food are inseparable from planet’s physical systems of atmosphere, water, land, oceans, the Earth’s tectonic and magma. But food itself is a matter of carbon-based life—and as such, is part of what makes this planet unique in the universe as we have observed it up until now. As Stephen Pyne wrote in the introduction his classic book, World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth, “We are uniquely fire creatures on a uniquely fire planet. Other planetary bodies in the solar system have elements of combustion—Jupiter has an ignition source in lightning; Mars, traces of free oxygen; Titan, a methane-based fuel. Only Earth, however, has all the essential elements and the means by which to combine them—only Earth has life. Marine life pumped the atmosphere with oxygen, and terrestrial life stocked the continents with carbon fuels.”

Much has been made of the question of whether we carbon-based life forms are alone in the universe. Surely not, say astronomers who calculate that the universe contains some two trillion galaxies, each with somewhere around 100 billion stars. The odds are that the physical building blocks of life have combined on other planets with similar Goldilocks conditions, and simple microbes or even complex ecosystems have emerged through some combination of serendipity and inevitability of the eons and great numbers of planets thrown into the orbit of innumerable stars.

At the same time, the gossamer-like nature of our universe, so abundant in stars but so vast as to be mostly empty space, simply teases us with the possibilities of all the things we cannot see. It is a vast and intriguing field of the possible, combined with the improbability of physical or even real-time encounter through radio-encoded broadcast.

But we here on Earth, are we alone? And are we, homo sapiens, the intelligent life here on the planet? And if so, are we looking for complex life marked by consciousness and memory in the right places, out there in the cosmos? Might there also be universes to discover? Are worlds we cannot see and have not yet begun to know? Underneath our feet in the soil biome where somewhere between 10 and 100 billion bacteria of up to 50,000 species reside every gram of soil pursue collective and rival destinies. In our forests and groves, trees communicate with one another through fungal filagrees in systems some compare to the internet. The deep seabed may be a natural Library of Alexandria, yet undestroyed, that could tell us about the origins of life on Earth through its living microbial archive of bacteria and archaea whose DNA have remained isolated and intact in the abyssal sediments.    

The human brain, seemingly distinct among Earth’s species in its hard-wired capacity for symbol-making and language, has enabled us (along with our prehensile thumbs) to manipulate our environment. A moment ago in Earth’s history, around 2.6 million years ago, bipedal ancestors of Homo sapiens used the first tools in China, Africa, India, and Europe. Somewhere around one million years ago, hominids made fire, and, by 200,000 years ago, had become so adept at it that they had the power to burn and chop down the forests from which they came.

Modern humans some 30,000 years ago began selecting plants and seeds that served their needs. Although the process of making settled agriculture has often been seen as a process of human domination of nature, Michael Pollan argued provocatively in his classic book, The Botany of Desire, that it may have certain plants who seduced us. For the lucky organisms who managed to attract the desire of our ancestors— wild variants of tomatoes, potatoes, wheat, rice, coffee, citrus or maize— competition with other plants become a matter of waiting for human farmers to plant their seeds in fertile soil, uproot their rivals with sticks and hoes, water their habitat soil when the rains were scarce, and herd their domesticated animals through fields to nourish the soil with their manure.

But these plants, if they won temporarily, may have made a devil’s bargain when human economies sought prosperity through uniformity, yield, and scale. With our machines, powered by the remnant carbon of ancient life, we have captured the world’s rivers and turned them into batteries for more machines, into highways for our ships that ferry grain and mined minerals from field to silo and back into machines, and finally into sprinkler systems for our desert plantations, manured with mined carbon and minerals. We combined elements and split atoms, created new molecules, and even learned to mix and match the amino acid inside cells so that radically different life forms might be made to exchange properties in a way that seemed to useful to us.  Now even the plants who seduced us are having trouble surviving our crush on them. Some 93 percent of the biodiversity of all the cultivated seeds humans selected and bred and harvested and replanted has disappeared in the last century.

We, the clever fire-makers, have grabbed carbon from the ground and put carbon in the atmosphere at concentrations that likely cannot be put back in the ground and the oceans by the cleverest of our machines. We, the clever chemists have grabbed gigatons of nitrogen from the atmosphere and put it on the ground and in our rivers and oceans at concentrations that similarly, will not return easily and harmlessly to the air from which it was summoned.

Our greatest intelligence, our last best idea, lies not in our ability manipulate our environment to our present convenience, but to observe and document the assemblages of life from which we came, of which we are a part, and which, in the form of our bodily biome, makes us each who we are.   

We are not alone in this universe. We are not alone together on this planet. We’re superorganisms ourselves, treading with every step on universes we have barely begun to explore. Our salvation is in our curiosity, in our love for the dark matter of Planet Earth.