[October 8-10 marks the 150th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied that tragedy and four other historic fires, leading up to this somber special post on the crucial context for our current crops of horrific wildfires.]
On the
longstanding history of defining environmental disasters, and how it’s not
nearly enough to understand the present.
In one of my
very first posts, just under eleven years (!) ago, I highlighted (as a
context for the great film Chinatown) one of my favorite works of
AmericanStudies scholarship: David Wyatt’s Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the
Shaping of California (1997). As you might expect from his title,
Wyatt’s focal fires are mostly metaphorical/symbolic (specifically around
issues of race and culure), although he does feature the 1906 San
Francisco earthquake and the accompanying, actual fire as one of those
five. But there’s certainly also a case to be made that natural disasters,
including that 1906 catastrophe among the many other floods
and hurricanes
and volcanic
eruptions and the like that I’ve written about in this space during this
week’s series and beyond, offer a potent way to frame and analyze American
history. After all, while virtually everything about America and the world has
changed over the last few centuries, the presence and potency of natural
disasters, and their ability to affect and reshape so much of society, has
remained a constant.
One of the first
major global news stories of 2020 was a horrific such natural disaster, the
wildfires that absolutely ravaged so much of Australia
for more than six months (from September 2019 through March 2020). And here
in the United States, that news story foreshadowed our own year-long, historically
horrific California wildfires, which by the year’s end had burned more than
4% of the state’s land, making this the worst wildfire season in recorded
history (and it was a season
that extended and has continued
to extend well beyond the Golden State). For those of us on the East Coast,
it was at times possible (if not ideal) to forget just how much of the United
States was devastated, affected, and threatened by wildfires throughout
2020—but I try as best I can not to suffer more from such East Coast bias
than is inevitable for someone who has pretty much only ever lived along the
I-95 corridor, and from a national perspective there’s no doubt that these
catastrophic wildfires were one of the biggest stories (if not indeed the
single biggest story) of last year—and that they’re shaping up to be just as
big of a story
here in 2021.
And that very
ubiquity illustrates a complicated but crucial fact: the long history of
environmental disasters can’t quite capture the realities of our present,
climate change-driven moment. Indeed, I think it’s no longer accurate to think
about such things through the lens of individual disasters—the globe as of October
2021 is one overarching environmental disaster, reflected through so many
different trends from wildfires to the constant “worst
hurricanes ever” to tornadoes (more
complicatedly, although debatable causes doesn’t change their destructive
effects) to so, so much more. When I want to get really depressed, particularly
about the world into which my sons are growing up, I read the stories about how
we’re already past
the point of no return when it comes to global
climate change. But when I want to counter that feeling, I think about
my sons and their generation, about for example my older son’s
proposal-in-progress for a climate change-battling project for part of his high
school’s community service requirement (more on that in this space as the
contours develop!). Both depression and inspiration seem important emotional
states when it comes to wildfires and climate change here in late 2021.
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fires or other historic disasters you’d analyze?
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