Finding Refuge on a Changed Earth
Kirkus Reviews Best Books of the Year
CHAPTER 1THE FIRE
home, n. the place where a person or animal dwells.… a collection of dwellings; a village, a town.
home truth, n. 1. an unpleasant fact that jars the sensibilities. 2. a statement of undisputed fact.
Susan Prichard grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in a green, placid place—on an island in the estuary that curlicues around Seattle and into Canada. She and her family were avid hikers. So as a kid, she spent a lot of time among trees, along the coast and in the mountains, and she loved especially the old-growth forests—the gnarled and mossy stands of centuries-old trees that inhabited the coastal Pacific Northwest.
But at a young age, she was also haunted by a pair of big-world worries. One was global, about the cold war. Nuclear holocaust was a really big topic when we were teenagers, she recalled later. And then the other one was much more local; clear-cut logging was everywhere. She worried as she watched the old trees fall.
Slim-framed with straight cedar-colored hair, Susan is levelheaded and also passionate about the things she cares most about. And at the age of thirteen—partly as an act of rebellion against her dad, who suggested once that she might not be cut out for it—she decided to become a scientist, so she could equip herself with hard evidence that would help people understand how to keep this place of forest and water and mountains safe and good and healthy.
Her college years coincided with the peak of the "Timber Wars," when environmentalists lashed themselves to trees to stop clear-cutting. But she found the activists' views strident and sometimes distorted, and devoted herself instead to science—searching for solutions in evidence gathered from the forests themselves.
Then, in graduate school at the University of Washington, in the early to mid-1990s, Susan realized that there were even larger forces of upheaval at work here than the logging crews. She began to immerse herself in what is called disturbance ecology—the study of volatility in nature. She learned how to extract buried lake sediments, which could collect and preserve bits of ash and pollen over millennia. Under a microscope, she could sift through the grains of plant matter and particles in order to reconstruct a picture of the forests. And she also studied climate change, poring over the predictions about temperature, rainfall, snow, fire, and tree habitat that climate scientists and ecologists had spun with computer models.
Much of the American public had first become aware of climate change in the 1980s, especially after NASA scientist James Hansen testified on the subject before Congress. (Scientists had predicted a possible crisis in the Earth's atmosphere from carbon dioxide emissions since at least the 1950s.)* By 1992, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had risen to nearly 360 parts per million—just above the level that Hansen and his colleagues would later identify as the crucial threshold for keeping the planet safe for humans, 350 parts per million. The planet had already warmed by less than half a degree Fahrenheit, though some places, like the Arctic, were feeling more heat. (Moreover, even a small uptick in temperature can alter or upend natural systems. Consider the difference between 32 and 33 degrees Fahrenheit: one is ice, and one water.)
But the impacts the world witnessed then were still relatively mild. In that moment, climate change was mostly a problem of the future, and scientists had already predicted, with a great deal of accuracy, what it would mean. In 1990 and 1992, the first reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the IPCC, the most authoritative international scientific body studying climate change—made it clear that global warming was already happening and that it could lead to drastic changes in the world as we know it. One of the many impacts these reports described was to forests worldwide: some tree species and forest ecosystems would "decline during a [hotter] climate in which they are increasingly more poorly adapted," read the report, and "losses from wildfire will be increasingly extensive." So scientists like Susan and her colleagues were trying to figure out with greater precision how such losses would actually play out: What would happen to the trees and the humans living in areas affected by wildfire?
There had always been, and there would always be, wildfires in the American West. In both the historic and the fossil record were major seasons of fire, sometimes burning millions of acres. Through her lake-sediment detective work, Susan's doctoral dissertation offered a sort of arboreal history: an account of how different tree species advanced and retreated as various blazes burned around a mountain lake. And fires were often ecologically good—wildflowers and vigorous tree seedlings springing up in their wake. Some plants crave fire almost as much as they need water and nutrients. Some trees, like lodgepole pines or the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada, even make cones that will only open and drop their seeds after they are heated and broken open by flames.
But as climate change grew into a more significant crisis, the future would bring worse fires than anyone had experienced in living memory. The new age of fire would be amplified by the carbon the world was emitting from burning even more ancient forests—the forests that had rotted and become compressed into coal, oil, and natural gas. Fires would become more massive, more destructive, and more difficult to control—"megafires," as they would later be called.† Susan could envision this happening in a theoretical way—but the idea belonged to a set of abstract trend lines running into the murk of the future. A great distance away, glaciers and sea ice were already shrinking in the Arctic. But in that moment, climate change—the gorgon of fires and hurricanes and droughts—wasn't yet looming over her roof, wasn't yet menacing the lives of anyone Susan knew. It was a thing of decades to come. In that moment, Susan was stalwart and optimistic. She believed that good information would persuade people to take steps to fix the problem. So she set to work studying wildfires with the hope that she could help people prepare.
She couldn't then imagine how soon that hotter, fierier future would arrive.
In her early thirties Susan took a research job working with both the University of Washington and a federally funded laboratory focused specifically on wildfires. Her employers agreed to let her telecommute, and she moved with her wife, Julie, from Seattle to the Methow Valley, a river basin on the east side of the Cascade Mountain Range that enfolds a collection of tiny rural communities. Their new house was nestled against pines, aspens, and cottonwoods just south of the Pasayten Wilderness that stretches northward to Canada—just the sort of forest Susan wanted to study. It was several miles outside Winthrop—a town of a few hundred whose city planning decisions are governed by a "Westernization ordinance" that requires storefronts and signs to appear as if part of a Clint Eastwood movie set, wood siding in rustic frontier colors, for the purposes of attracting tourists.
By this time, Susan was pregnant with the couple's second child, and they wanted to raise their family in a place close to nature. The pair wondered how the conservative community would regard them. We definitely worried a little bit about being two women and having kids in the valley; that was very uncommon. But when their daughter was born, neighbors brought them casserole dinners and stews for two weeks thereafter. The valley community turned out to be more accepting than dogmatic. People were just used to taking care of one another.
The Methow Valley had witnessed plenty of fires. Many were kept under control and quickly snuffed. But some had been deadly: in 2001, four firefighters died trying to put out a more-than-nine-thousand-acre blaze called the Thirtymile, and many in the valley were still mourning their loss.
In 2006, a heat wave radiated across the United States, sometimes called the "Great Heat Wave," described as "epic" and "epochal" by the San Francisco Chronicle, though others would turn out to be grander and deadlier in years to come. Record-breaking temperatures struck California, and sweltering weather caused heat-related deaths from the West Coast to Missouri, all the way to New York City. In late July in the Methow, after the temperature broke a hundred for three straight days, a towering, toadstool-shaped column of smoke rose from the darkly forested mountains above Susan's house. A wildfire had lit the wilderness.
She hoped it could be a beneficial fire, the kind that birthed seedlings and regrowth. And she and her wife collected their son, then age four, and their eighteen-month-old daughter and drove down the road to watch the red glow in the distance, as if it were a performance. And the fire at first was really exciting. I remember, we just watched it and were just stunned by the smoke plume. But the power of the fire was also ominous. The smoke plume resembled the aftermath of a bomb explosion, Susan wrote later in an article about living with wildfire.
On the mountainside, the blazes leaped into the crowns of lodgepole pines and mountain spruce—each becoming a roaring torch, spraying embers onto the next. Two fires merged to become the Tripod Complex, named for a nearby peak. The Tripod burned east and crossed the divide between two rivers, then fanned out and merged with a second wildfire. The flames tore rapaciously through the trees between the valley and the Canadian border, less than twenty-five miles from where the fire started—through stands of pines already weakened by infestations of beetles—and eventually grew to more than 175,000 acres, one of the largest fires in the state in more than half a century (and bigger in land area than the 150,000-acre Camp Fire that would destroy Paradise, California, in 2018). Finally, the smoke became so suffocating and dense that it drove Susan and her family out of their home; they evacuated to her parents' house on the west side of the mountains. A combination of luck and firefighting confined the fire's physical impact to unpopulated parts of the forest. The Tripod smoldered in the wilderness for the rest of the season. More than $82 million was spent on efforts to contain the fire. In October, snowfall finally quenched the last of it.
A year later, Susan and some of her colleagues in the Forest Service began searching the burned forest for clues to help them interpret what the fire meant for the forest ecosystem. Over the next three summers, she devoted several weeks to wrapping her arms around burned trees in the wilderness, winding a measuring tape around their trunks to record their diameter (sometimes a proxy for tree age), and she developed a fondness for the charcoal scent of charred trees postfire.
Later, in the reports and images of blackened acres that she spread across her desk, the theoretical and the immediate seemed to merge. The Tripod Complex was a megafire, and it had happened next to her home. Climate change was arriving in her valley, and there would be more fires like this.
But Susan was an optimist—she studied images from before and after the fire, captured by satellites, and found therein a story about hope. And her optimism would never really waver, not even after the much larger catastrophes that would come.
I lived in Seattle for nearly a decade before I understood that it was not just a place of rain—but also surrounded by forests that could go up in flames.
Older locals who had grown up here mostly boasted about the dampness—don't expect a real summer like in other parts of the world, they would tell you. Keep your rain jacket on for Memorial Day. And some scientists and public figures predicted that the Pacific Northwest, its western edges buffered by the Pacific Ocean and shrouded for eight or nine months in rain and cloud, wouldn't feel climate change as quickly as other parts of the country. This region would be a refuge, they said, and millions would come here to escape the hotter conditions elsewhere.
But the Pacific Northwest is cleaved into two halves by the Cascades, the jagged volcanic peaks that slice north to south through the region. To the west is the rainy, green coast, and to the east, the rain shadow, the arid zone that forms on the leeward side of mountains—making the region where Susan Prichard lives a not-so-mild place of searing, dry summers and deeply snowy winters. The two halves of the Northwest are knit together by the forests that stretch from one set of mountain flanks onto the other, transitioning across the miles from stands of dark-barked Douglas firs and redolent cedars into rust-colored ponderosa pines, lodgepole pines, and larches. Large fires are far more common on the eastern side, but all of these forests can and sometimes will burn.
In recent years, Pacific Northwest summers have often arrived early and sprawled languidly across the long days of June well into September. A too-hot summer sun seems sometimes to glare down on the mountain peaks—which are no longer capped with as much snow as in years past. The Seattle of the past rarely sweltered, but now hot weather is becoming more routine. And on the eastern, rural side, the heat waves grow ever longer, more extreme, and more savage.
In July 2014, when the high temperatures rose into the mere 80s and low 90s Fahrenheit—which used to be considered sweltering for Seattle—several days in a row the Stranger, the city's famously snarky alternative newspaper, named it "HOTPOCALYPSE 2014" and offered a "survival guide," including a list of the rare establishments with air-conditioning. But though parts of the region burned fiercely that summer, the characteristic dampness of the western wet side spared it from major fire, and wind patterns kept most of the smoke from eastern wildfires out of the city.
The following summer, however, was not as lucky for Western Washington. The smoke arrived abruptly, blowing south from wildfires in Canada. Fourth of July weekend, 2015, as I boarded a ferry and crossed between two of the San Juan Islands off the coast, I stared into a mustard-colored, acrid sky. The air clung oppressively to my skin like an itchy blanket, so that by the end of a daylong excursion riding the seaside hills on my bicycle, I felt like I had a fever, like my body itself was ablaze. That year, the Seattle Times posted a series of images of smoky sunsets—the sun an orange bulb behind a curtain of ash.
When the smoke came again in late summer 2017, I felt with a stomach-clenched certainty that this was a sign of climate change—the crisis I had written about for years—showing up to leer at me from above. The sky dropped ash, which clung to garden spiderwebs and the leaves of plants. It clotted onto the surface of my fresh cup of tea. The whole experience felt eerily like being cupped inside a terrarium, like there was no way to step outside and breathe freely. "The fires' impact—the claustrophobia, the tension, the suffocating, ugly air—feels like a preview (and a mild one) of what's to come if we don't take immediate and drastic steps to halt and mitigate climate change," wrote Seattle-based columnist and author Lindy West.
July and August 2018 were even more oppressive. Rivers of smoke gushed from both the interior of British Columbia and the center of Washington state across hundreds of miles to merge in the skies above my house. Seattle's air quality was suddenly among the worst in the world, worse than smog-choked Beijing's, and drifted into the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's "very unhealthy" range, vicious enough to threaten the well-being of anyone who was breathing. The city skyline appeared as a smudged pencil etching through the ash. When I walked the streets, I wore an N95 respirator mask purchased from the hardware store—similar to the kind that healthcare workers would later use as protection from the spread of coronavirus. But my throat stung anyway.
A year later in August, I drove over the mountains and visited the North Cascades Smokejumper Base in the Methow Valley, run by the Forest Service. The valley is also the "birthplace of smokejumping," which is something like the firefighters' equivalent of the Army Rangers, an elite style of firefighting that involves parachuting into the wilderness. The campus—which included a runway; a brown house that functioned as an office; a metal-sided warehouse; and what looked like a barn but was labeled the "Lufkin Parachute Loft"—lay halfway down the valley between Winthrop and Twisp, an unpretentious town with a family-run lumber store on one end and on the other, the old Idle-A-While Motel, in a set of cabins originally built by the U.S. Forest Service. In the summer and early fall, the base offered free tours to any curious person who might stop in, and I had long wanted to get a better handle on the reality of fire.
A fire called the Williams Flats was burning about seventy-five miles to the southeast, and there had been seven thousand lightning strikes in Washington and Oregon that weekend, though any flames they'd ignited hadn't yet grown into big fires in this part of the region. The firefighter who led me through the base had his eye on some more thunderheads brewing above us. He was wiry, with sturdy arms like tree limbs, in a red T-shirt, talking in a low voice, monitoring my face to make sure I was catching on.
"Storm chasers," he said, referring to himself and his colleagues. "We're going to monitor anywhere there's lightning." He pointed to the sky. It was full of scraps of cloud, like torn fabric, blue gaping between them. "Look right here. See the little bumps, the swirls? We're right on the edge of that thunder cell." He pointed again, drawing my attention to pebbly and divoted surfaces in the matrix of clouds. "If you look just under there, where the blue meets that wisp, that's part of that cell that's trying to push up. You can see how it's kind of cauliflower-looking." There were generally only two proximate causes of fire: lightning and humans.
He led me to a small but muscular airplane, white with a maroon stripe, a military craft built in the 1980s. "She's a savage," he said, giving the plane an admiring look. "It's not uncommon to see this in Afghanistan flying for our troops." But this aircraft's intended purpose here was to allow up to eight people to parachute to a location near the edge of a fire, hike in, and try to get the flames under control. It was a hazardous job, more so in this region of the world, where the weather could swing suddenly. The topography is also tricky to navigate and could trap a firefighter in dangerous, even lethal conditions. "In the fire world, there's a lot of us that call this R5 times two, as kind of a slang," explained the firefighter to me. The Forest Service had defined nine regions, and California, a place of extreme wildfires, was number five or "R5." But this part of eastern Washington had similarities to that more southerly location. "A lot of guys will not come up here. It's a very extreme place."
The parallels to the military were not coincidental. The U.S. Forest Service had battled against wildfires from the early twentieth century until now, in order to allow people like me to live in a tamer West. Beginning in 1921, U.S. Army planes were used to patrol for wildfires. The history of smokejumping was closely entwined with World War II paratrooping, and the only all-Black airborne unit in military history had been tasked first with responding to the threat of Japanese "fire balloon bombs" and then with fighting actual wildfires via smokejumping. By 1935, the Forest Service's official policy was that every wildfire should be extinguished by 10:00 A.M. on the day after it was first reported. (The policy was reconsidered and changed in 1978. But in the last decade, the Forest Service has invested more than a trillion dollars every year in fire suppression and still describes itself as "the world's premier firefighting agency.") Engineers eventually developed specialized firefighting airplanes—such as air tankers, which can drop flame retardant on a blaze; water scoopers, which can pull freshwater from a nearby water body and drop it on a fire; and smokejumper aircraft like the one I was now looking at. But the Forest Service still sometimes uses military planes during the height of fire season.
Places like the North Cascades Smokejumper Base had waged a war against wildfire for decades so that western communities could be safe. Home here had developed almost an adversarial quality—the presumption was that you had to fight fire to live here.
But now climate change had arrived, and fire couldn't be held back any longer. The flames would come again and again, and in some battles with even the best-trained firefighters, the fire would win.
In the years after the Tripod Complex Fire, Susan Prichard became more vocal about both climate change and wildfires.
In 2006, in response to a community member who had expressed denial, she wrote a defiant though polite letter to the editor of the local paper explaining the science of climate change. A few days later, when she stopped to pick up some cuts of meat from a local lamb farm, the farmer—a tall man in suspenders, quizzical—asked her to explain further. I didn't feel like he necessarily completely believed me, she thought later. I knew he was probably pretty conservative. But the conversation was respectful, and she began to have more of them, tentative but factual and levelheaded.
She, Julie, and the kids moved closer to the center of Winthrop—to a barn-red house surrounded by an ample lawn of green grass and beyond it, patches of wild grasses and bitterbrush, a spiky shrub with flowers like tiny wild yellow roses, and a scattering of ponderosa pines.
From her new home office, Susan continued to study the behavior of the Tripod Fire. Parts of the forest that had burned in 2006 were old-growth. Parts hadn't seen another fire in decades. But some others had previously been clear-cut, some just cleared of small trees and brush and then selectively logged, and some charred by past wildfires. And some had been deliberately burned in a management practice known as "prescribed fire," in which low ground fires are lit, usually during mild weather, in order to consume "fuel"—the brush, grass, little trees, and understory that might feed a hotter wildfire. She searched for answers in this landscape: What could the Tripod and the experiences of this forest tell us about the more severe fires that would come in the years ahead?
In the distant past, before European Americans inhabited the area, there had been much more fire in this place, which had generally been a good thing, ecologically speaking. She knew this partly from her studies of ancient pollen. Those past fires had been on average smaller, more frequent, and less severe than the Tripod. They would have turned the landscape into a collage or a mosaic of little patches—different burn ages, different mixes of trees, diverse habitats for many kinds of animals and plants, including those that preferred deep tree cover and those that sought open spaces. Each of these little fires would also have consumed some fuel and helped keep the next wildfire from spreading as quickly or growing as hot. But Susan's sense of how and why past fires had happened also changed over time. She used to think a few were set by humans, but most were the product of nature and randomness—which is to say, they were ignited by lightning.
Then came a paradigm shift in how Susan and many other scholars understood the history and ecology of North America. When early anthropologists and historians tried to estimate the population of the continent at the time that Christopher Columbus arrived, they had often turned to incomplete colonial census data gathered much later by Europeans, and they had failed to account for the scale of the devastation that occurred when Old World diseases, combined with colonial violence, wreaked havoc on Indigenous communities. These omissions produced lowball calculations of the pre-Columbian Indigenous population. Some evidence of this distortion lay in plain sight—in Indigenous oral histories and records that had never been given their due by most academics. But the dubious assumption that Indigenous societies were tiny and American landscapes largely untouched has lingered in many fields, including ecology. In the 1990s, the scientists who became Susan's mentors were still sometimes leaning on these assumptions to try to understand the historical forces that had shaped the Pacific Northwest.
But over at least the past couple of decades, some historians, geographers, Indigenous scholars, and other researchers have called for a reckoning with evidence that had been ignored. Before Europeans arrived in North America, Indigenous communities were not "living with minimal impact on unspoiled nature," wrote Indigenous scientists Robin Wall Kimmerer and Frank Kanawha Lake in a 2001 paper, but strongly influencing North American landscapes. Advances in fields like molecular anthropology, which uses genetics to answer historical questions, allowed for new reassessments of the past. In 2011, for instance, researchers from the University of Washington and Yale analyzed ancient and modern DNA and surmised that the number of people living in the Americas had dropped by more than half around the time European diseases were introduced.
Copyright © 2022 by Madeline Ostrander
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This program is read by the author.
From rural Alaska to coastal Florida, a vivid account of Americans working to protect the places they call home in an era of climate crisis
How do we find a sense of home and rootedness in a time of unprecedented upheaval? What happens when the seasons and rhythms in which we have built our lives go off-kilter?
Once a distant forecast, climate change is now reaching into the familiar, threatening our basic safety and forcing us to reexamine who we are and how we live. In At Home on an Unruly Planet, science journalist Madeline Ostrander reflects on this crisis not as an abstract scientific or political problem but as a palpable force that is now affecting all of us at home. She offers vivid accounts of people fighting to protect places they love from increasingly dangerous circumstances. A firefighter works to rebuild her town after catastrophic western wildfires. A Florida preservationist strives to protect one of North America's most historic cities from rising seas. An urban farmer struggles to transform a California city plagued by fossil fuel disasters. An Alaskan community heads for higher ground as its land erodes.
Ostrander pairs deeply reported stories of hard-won optimism with lyrical essays on the strengths we need in an era of crisis. This audiobook is required listening for anyone who wants to make a home in the twenty-first century.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company.