Is this the world we want?

All National Forests are now closed in California until at least September 17 to mitigate fire danger. This means more than half the PCT is unwalkable.

The Dixie Fire, which started as I reached Quincy? It’s 800,000 acres. The Caldor Fire, which started August 14? Almost 200,000. Nothing but winter rains can put out fires like this. The firefighters can try their utmost to contain the blazes, to keep them from spreading while we wait, but I fear I may look back at this post in the future and smile sadly at how huge these fires seem now.

Hiking this year meant walking through the effects of climate change. You can no more deny that the world is changed than you can deny the existence of the rocks beneath your own feet.

I was saving what follows for later because it’s unpolished, but I’m in a particularly despondent mood, so here goes: a poem I wrote in my head while I hiked.

How the world was unmade

Mountain majesties shimmer,

above a skillet of barren stone,

mirages twelve thousand feet up.

Alpine streams run thin as hot oil.

Fish gasp,

their lives sucked into the ground.

Dry lakebeds gape,

rings of silt and rust, black and red

as an old sore..

See the white sand beach,

pristine, untrammeled!  Sun-bleached?  Crackling?

Wait, are these bones?

One hundred miles from cell reception,

a refuge, I thought I’d found.

But the invisible fist reaches even here.

Here, where snowmelt boils into thunderheads

that rain only fire

on a forest of matchsticks.

Here, where mushroom clouds bloom on the horizon,

blue-brown and orange,

bringing twilight at noon.

Where ash falls in flakes,

the last kind of snow,

still legible, the words of books.

Books that say God made this world

in six whole days. 

Then He rested.

We’ve unmade it

for a century and more.

When will we rest?

Is this the world we want? It’s the world we’re making. It’s the world we’ve made. And yes, please, let us all do our parts: let us reduce our energy consumption, switch from fossil fuels if we can, let us tread more lightly on the earth. But just as oil companies pushed the idea that plastic is recyclable to assuage our guilt in using it, so too have corporations convinced us that we are the problem. If only we drove less, flew less, used less energy! And they say all this even though 25 companies are responsible for 50% of global carbon dioxide emissions since 1988. Perhaps the most harmful emission from these companies, however, is more subtle: blatant lies engineered to discredit climate science. I may be cynical, but unfortunately cynical is not a synonym for wrong, especially when so much money is involved.

So yes, please do your individual part, but in addition to driving less and using fewer plastic bags, let’s make our collective voice too loud to ignore: We, who want a world fit to inhabit. We, who want a world fit to inherit.

I’m sad tonight, sad for what I saw on my hike. I love this world, but I feel I’ve glimpsed its future, and its future is bleak.

Thumbnail image shows Greenville after the Dixie Fire passed (Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images).