Not my new normal

It’s happening. Again. Once more I’m breathing in house plants, quilts, walls, dining room tables, the dust bunnies under beds that could never be reached with a broom. I’m breathing in brooms, mops, vacuums, grasslands, chaparral, forests. Pine, fir, bay, madrone. Two-inch leaves and two-foot trunks. Car upholstery, propane tanks, the labels on old paint cans, insulation, cracked plastic storage tubs tucked in the corner of the garage.

Another town has been wiped off the map. Another community has been displaced. Greenville: no one knows how much of it will return when the Dixie Fire’s flames are finally out. But we all know what it feels like to stay up all night, evacuated to a hotel/campground/someone else’s house, watching wildfire cameras, glued to news. Is the school still standing? Did the fire jump the road? Tell me the wind speed, give me containment numbers. I need to know.

I need to know: When we breathe in the smoke from an incinerated community, do we also inhale their collective trauma, and exhale their collective loss?

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My mom’s a tough lady. She got a restraining order against her husband, then a divorce, then re-entered the workforce and raised three kids on her own. (My father was eventually convicted of felony failure to pay child support.) Recently, my mom said to me, “Is it just because I’m old, or is the world really more f***** up?”

I assured her it wasn’t just because she’s old.

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Climate change, political polarization, a pandemic: that would be enough for us all to navigate on a macro scale. But here in Sonoma County, over the past four and a half years, disaster has been personal. Intimate. If you weren’t directly impacted, you know someone who was. Together we’ve weathered two floods, one extreme drought, and four catastrophic wildfire events. (Three of the wildfire events, it should be noted, included multiple separate blazes. The Kincade also included the largest evacuation in the history of the county.)

Over the past four years, in the seasons and months when we weren’t on fire, our neighbors to the north and east often were, leading us to hunker down for days — weeks, months — in the face of abysmal air quality.

You’d think that would be enough, right? Then, for good measure, throw in a pandemic. Kids out of school. Jobs lost, businesses shuttered. And in West County, a high school — the only rural high school — closing its doors, displacing students who arguably carry a greater psychological burden than any generation before them. The burden our children carry comes from unprecedented repeat trauma with no end in sight: trauma that will only worsen as the climate continues to change. In a survey of 4,500 Sonoma County high school students last year, 71% reported that “feeling anxious about the future” was their number one barrier to distance learning.

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But here’s the thing. I refuse to let this new normal be the new normal. When the phrase first started popping up, I kept calling it “the new abnormal” instead. Why should our children inherit a world without coral reefs, without kelp forests, without penguins and polar bears? Why should our children inherit a world that is constantly on fire?

Over the course of human history, great transitions have come out of great crises. Crisis brings with it the opportunity for reinvention. Pick your metaphor: the Phoenix rising from the ash. The butterfly, which was only hours ago a melted down caterpillar, bursting forth from a chrysalis in all its colorful glory. On many days, change feels much more like a tadpole emerging from a swamp to become a frog. And yet, the frog emerges.

We can’t let the new normal become normal without a fight. There is still time — six years — to avert worse impacts from the climate crisis. And there’s still time for us to define our own new normal: a more socially just, equitable, livable, sustainable planet. Now isn’t the time for lukewarm, tentative, halfhearted change. Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work.

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