When Living in California Means Fearing the Outdoors
Every weekday after dawn I run a few miles around a large parking lot that’s been converted to a coronavirus vaccination clinic. When the air is clear and the light is right, you can glimpse the Pacific Ocean three miles to the west. Fog often obscures the view. And on some days, so does smoke, blowing in from distant and not so distant wildfires.
A few miles east, in an industrial corner of San Francisco not far from a Superfund site, a herd of goats lives next to a native plant nursery. The goats function as ecologically friendly weed control, rented out to public agencies and private citizens eager to clear their land of tinder. With California still coping with drought after two exceptionally dry winters, a mere ember can erupt into a conflagration.
Thanks to the weather havoc caused at least partly by warming temperatures, climate change has produced not only dry weather in California; the phrase “atmospheric river” — essentially a massive rainstorm — has recently entered our lexicon. The combination of these storms and fire-ravaged landscapes has caused an increase in catastrophic mudslides. Still, for many people in California, the primary experience of climate change is drought. And drought means wildfires.
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