I’ve heard people say they couldn’t live in Los Angeles because they’d miss the changing of the seasons, but spending much of my childhood on a ranch in Malibu, I watched as the storms rolled in during the winter months, the land turning green and lush, then blossoming in wild colors and sweet scents in spring, browning and drying out in summer before the air turned crisp in autumn and orange leaves fell from trees to blanket the ground.
There were groves of oak trees, endless green pastures and a pond where ducks made their home every year. Tiny frogs jumped all over the banks of the pond. I’d scoop some up in my hands and laugh when they leaped out, back into the mud. When the winds kicked up in October and November, parts of the ranch did burn a couple of times. But then the rains would come and the land would heal.
The ranch was where we spent our weekends. During the week we lived in Pacific Palisades, so quiet it felt almost like a secret refuge from the noise and busyness of downtown. But that was Los Angeles, too. Now that world is gone.
To look at the footage and the photographs of what the voracious fire turned those neighborhoods into is like looking at a war zone. Everyone is trying to process the grief, the shock. The truth is we’d lost it all well before the fires so mercilessly swept through. The flames just sealed the deal.
I once thought that the land I loved so much would last forever. I couldn’t imagine an Earth that would groan and rage and turn chaotic because of human carelessness, human greed and the ignorant assumption that we could just keep pumping poisons into the atmosphere with no repercussions.
Often over the past few days, I’ve been reminded of the aftermath of Sept. 11, how no one seemed like a stranger.
During these fires, my own home was spared, but everywhere you go people are sharing stories, asking how others are doing. People who never met before, and may never meet again, stop on sidewalks, in stores, to share their fears, their despair. To weep over their losses. To try to make sense of it.
My anger over what we have done to this fragile, exquisite Earth was muffled by grief until the other evening when I was watching a news program that had a panel of commentators. The subject was Los Angeles on fire, and one person mentioned climate change as a cause. Another commentator smirked and said he didn’t believe it was the cause.
I felt rage surge up past my grief.
My first thought was: “You think you know more than scientists? The scientists who have been warning us for decades?” Then I thought: “This young man wasn’t even born when I was running through tall green grasses at our ranch beneath skies that were clear and blue. He has no idea what Earth used to be like.” The beauty I grew up around seems like it was so long ago, but it really wasn’t.
I’m still heartbroken, but I want us to be angry. Not a destructive anger, a righteous anger. I want us to stand up for an Earth that was created with perfect balance, with beauty and mystery and a divine artistry. An Earth that was put here not for our consumption and our greed but for our nourishment. An Earth that has so much to teach us, and that needs protection, now more than ever.
We have thrown an entire planet out of balance, and now we are suffering the consequences — weather patterns so severe we have no idea how to combat them, and the resulting fires, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, more severe than anything we’ve known before.
We can grieve and be righteously angry at the same time. Or there is another scenario. We can be nomads wandering across barren acres of land that were there for our sustenance, if only we’d had the sense to know that and protect the Earth we were given.