Fire! All Hands on Deck!

Penned by Nick

Having just returned from a weekend hiking Half Dome in Yosemite (see picture below), it’s disheartening to see California in the throes of another summer of wicked wildfires. Currently more than 1,000 (yes, one thousand) are burning in the State concurrently, wreaking havoc on the air quality, stretching firefighters dangerously thin, and even more frightening, the weekend heat and dryness promises to bring more fires online despite the fact that only 1/4 are currently contained. All said, we’ve lost nearly 160,000 acres of forest, though thankfully there’ve been relatively few deaths.

So what’s an environmentalist to do? Education is the first step, as it’s important to get a handle on the fact that (a) many of these are annual, natural occuring fires that help to purge deadwood from the forests, and so in some degree are healthy, however (b) the number of fires–much like the number of hurricanes–is increasingly rapidly year-over-year, leading many to speculate that the earth’s essentially being ravaged by environmental cancers and sicknesses.

Next steps beyond that: do something to green your lifestyle, help lower GHG emissions, and lessen your environmental footprint. Small steps like these help take pressure on our immediate, surrounding ecosystem, and allow nature a bit of time to start healing. If you’re really feeling frisky, check this.