When You Smell Smoke...

Isn't it odd how things creep up on us? We've been seeing the signs for all of my life: climate change (then called global warming) was something we 80's kids knew was coming, but we were waiting for more "signs". We were told that as it progressed, as fear and eventually drought and sea-level-rise and food shortages happened, humanity would fall into civil strife. Eventually there would be an even bigger gap between the rich and the poor. Eventually there would be slow but widespread panic, as people noticed the signs and began competing for resources, power, and land, and eventually it would all devolve into collapse, and we'd either fall into war or climb out via revolution. Maybe both.

Smoky red sunset as the wildfire smoke blanketed our island this summer.

The trouble is that every time we see the signs, every time these predictions work their way slowly into reality, they're like these wildfires that keep popping up all over the place this summer. We here on the coast hear the news, see it coming in bit by bit. We see the odd person bravely go north to help with the fires, and eventually the smoke drifts down to wrap us in its embrace, until our eyes sting and our throats tense, and we complain about the smoke and share sad stories of friends of friends whose livestock died or whose houses burned. But it's so much easier to go back to our beach dinners and festivals and family road trips, to lean on all our many privileges or blinders and just keep going, because we don't know how we'd fix it all anyway. Somebody else is doing that for us. We keep seeing the smoke drift in, but we're accustomed to it now. It's hardly different than last week.

The war or revolution will happen this way too: creeping and drifting until we're accustomed to it, like the smoke. Yes: Timbuktu, Quetta, Charlottesville, Ouagadougou, Konduga and stupid prejudiced quips by ignorant little men are acts of war. Each of these is a blanket of smoke billowing down through the valleys to tell you something is happening out there. When you sit down with your kids to help them understand white or financial or gender privilege, or when you make an effort to shop at the native-run lumber yard just because it's native-run, or when you choose not to buy that thing you don't really need... these are acts of revolution. Each of these is you looking up to the smoke and blowing some of it away.

Revolt. We can do it. We are doing it. We *must* look back in twenty years and know that we each individually did everything we could. Because when billions of us are doing that, we will BE the change.