Alex is a grown, adult man with an MD in psychiatry, and, apparently, some people non-ironically ask him for help with their mental health. But, since I’ve known him since we were wildly immature teenagers, an abundance of caution is about the last thing I would ever expect to hear him express. Imagine my surprise when I asked him about his experience in the Glass Fire in Northern California and he said, “My biggest lesson is that if there’s a fire nearby, you need to evacuate early.”
Alex lives about 200 yards from the area burned by the Glass Fire. He and his family evacuated safely and more or less uneventfully. But, he told me, if you wait until the last minute to evacuate, you risk getting stuck in traffic, unable to move at all, while the fire continues its march towards you. “All my patients who have PTSD from the fire have it from being stuck in traffic,” he said. “There could be fire all around you, and there’s just nothing you can do when you are sitting in traffic. At least if your house is on fire, there’s still something you can do about it.”
That reminds me of the last time I fried chicken. I was following one of my favorite recipes from Alton Brown on the Food Network, though I should mention, what happens next is absolutely not Mr. Brown’s fault. He is quite clear that I should have melted shortening until it came to about a third of an inch up the side of the pan. I was using somewhat more shortening than called for in my large cast iron pan. I added the buttermilk-marinated, spiced and floured chicken pieces to the pan. It smelled divine. The weight of the chicken brought the oil almost all the way up to the top of the pan. I admired my work for the requisite 10-12 minutes for the first side, and then I reached in with my tongs to start flipping the chicken. Oil splashed on to the burner, caught fire, and then set the entire pot on fire. I needed to move this heavy, cast iron pan, full of oil, chicken, and now flames off the heat and put the lid on it. I needed someone really strong to help. I shouted for my husband to come quick!
Matt came into the kitchen, assessed the situation, grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wine rack (Why doesn’t everyone keep a fire extinguisher on the wine rack? It fits perfectly.) and heroically sprayed the pan, the chicken, the cabinets, the stove, the floor, everything.
When the dust had (mostly) settled on absolutely every surface of our kitchen, I turned to my husband and said probably the last thing he thought I would say: “What the hell are you doing? We were gonna eat that chicken.”
He said, “Your kitchen was on fire!”
We were not newlyweds at this time, so the argument quickly resolved into a decision for him to take the kids out to pick up some KFC, while I started to clean up the (his) gigantic mess in our blessedly un-burned-down home.
“At least if your house is on fire, there’s still something you can do about it.”
Right. There was never any question that we would act—even if we had different strategies in mind— we saw the situation for what it was and acted. And that action protected us from the trauma of helplessly watching the fire advance, and it saved our house.
Our planet is heating up and, often, literally on fire. We’re suffering the trauma of watching it burn, instead of acting with the urgency we would act with if it were our house on fire.
Some of the ways we think about climate change would be ridiculous if it were our house on fire and not just the planet we live on. Can you imagine responding to a house fire like we respond to climate change? We would:
Sit and watch it burn, while saying things like, “House fires are such a complex issue, there’s nothing that one person can possibly do to put an end to them.”
Continue to throw fuel on the fire, making it worse.
Sadly come to terms with our children and family dying in the heat and figure we should just do what we want to enjoy our last minutes here.
Say things like, “I’m just dealing with this by compartmentalizing so I don’t have to think about it.”
Hope that someday science or someone else comes up with an economical solution to house fires.
Say things like, “I’m so inspired by how the next generation really seems to care about house fires. I sure hope our children come home soon to pull us out of this fire.”
Ask ourselves, why should I spend my time and money putting out this fire when nobody else is doing anything?
And, yet, these are all thoughts I have had—and heard repeated by my friends and family—about climate change. Our planet—our home—is quite literally on fire. Why aren’t we acting like it?
This piece is part of my work on my upcoming book titled (for now) A Climate Pessimist Finds Hope. Please comment! Is there something here that makes you think, “well, yeah, but, what about….” Tell me about it! Do I use a particularly persuasive or not persuasive argument? Tell me before the bad stuff ends up in the book!
For more on the book see:
In my ABC days our elementary age Sunday school curriculum urged children to call the fire department at the first sign of fire. Wrong. The first thing a child does in a fire is get out. Our curriculum division reprinted 100,000 copies of that semester’s lessons.
I have so much to say having lived through many fires myself as a child, in the city of Cambridge MA, as a teen in the small village of Vachos (Greek name from the Roman Bacchus, in Laconia Greece in Peloponnesus), as an adult in year 2007 when the entire southern part of the country almost burned, the fire of Rafina see my post: https://healthliteracyweb.com/2018/10/21/post-rafina-fires-i-saved-my-family-and-property-one-familys-story/
And more posts I cannot include here! I have students working on eco-anxiety studies, and we have the UN sustainability goals …I can gladly help you co-author a chapter !