BY GAURI KAUSHIK ’23
A week ago, I opened up my laptop and waited for Facebook to load. As posts popped up on my screen, I began to laugh. My friends looked over to see what meme or status update I found so funny; instead, they found me scrolling through updates of my friends at home marking themselves safe from various wildfires. Of course, I don’t find the destruction of my state funny. But to me, there was something disturbingly humorous about opening a page, expecting it to be filled with lighthearted content and instead finding reminder upon reminder that climate change was once again showing its ugly face back at home.
I can’t speak for my fellow Californians — the thousands who have lost their homes, the ones who have had family, friends or pets taken from them and those who have had to rebuild the ruins of their neighborhoods. I can remember every high school football game, canceled because of the smoke. I remember checking the air quality index to see if we could eat lunch outside (we never could) and wondering each morning if school would be canceled.
California is the state that welcomed my immigrant parents more than 20 years ago and allowed them the opportunities to provide for my brother and I. It has offered me the beauty of redwood forests and beaches, the rich culture of San Francisco and Oakland, drives along the coast and hikes through towering trees and along creeks with my friends and our dogs.
Now, fires race through the same vineyards and forests I used to visit, and smoke blankets my neighborhood. With each passing year, the fires get bigger and harder to contain. The 2018 wildfire season was the worst in California’s history, with 8,527 fires burning an area of 1,893,913 acres. It began in mid-July and stretched to November, when the deadliest and most destructive fire to date in the state, the Camp Fire, broke out. That fire alone killed at least 85 people and destroyed more than 18,000 structures.
Wildfires are part of California’s natural state, but since 1972, the fires have been on average 500 percent bigger. The average length of wildfire season has increased by two months and California has seen an average temperature increase of about three degrees Fahrenheit, compared to the average one degree seen in the rest of the world.
Every year, more and more of my home state is devastated by unrelenting fires. And if we don’t do something now — by using our votes and our voices to support climate action, by changing small things about our own ways of life, by accepting that we are the last generation that can change what we have done to our world — the home we all share will be in ruins as well.