Fires across the West are raging, driven by wind on a landscape shaped for blazes by climate change. “This could be the greatest loss of human lives and property due to wildfire in our state’s history," said Gov. Kate Brown of Oregon. https://t.co/VL9NCLt1vI— NYT Climate (@nytclimate) September 9, 2020
I started this year blogging about Fire and Water to mark that climate change is real and disastrous, and its effects were manifest around the world. These days the fires are close to home on the West Coast, and it's a terrible time to be made aware that not only does our current administration care little about it but they have tried to politicize federal aid in the case of west coast wildfires, and in the case of hurricane-related damages. (People are still looking into the exact death toll of Hurricane Maria, which still may not be wholly known. The power has never been fully on in Puerto Rico since then.) The images from California and Oregon are eerie, like something from some future dystopia we are living right now.
People are displaced and rendered homeless by such events, and by now, one can almost speculate that Trump does not care about this, because does he even seem to care about the folks rendered homeless and displaced by the economy that exists in the wake of his COVID-19 response? Don't displaced people lose the address from which they once could vote, for example?
Even Trump's neglect can be construed as purposeful, once you've fathomed how shitty a soul can actually be.
