Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Author: CHIP WARD
Source: Mother Jones
Publication Date: Thu Jun. 16, 2011 4:50 PM PDT
Link: How the West Was Lost
Stephan: If you have friends in the West, as I do, you have probably been hearing for some time about the drought and, now, the fires. I believe there is going to be a migration out of the Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico because of heat, fires, and a lack of water. Years ago I did a remote viewing project in the Egyptian desert -- go to my personal website and download the Marea paper you will find there -- and learned a powerful lesson about heat. At 114° the Bedouin lay down their tools. People who have lived in the desert for millennia go inside.
And that's just part of it. By the time water and electric bills get to $1,000 a month each I think you will be seeing a significant number of people moving out of those states.
There is a kind of weird reality going on. Human mediated climate change is occurring and there is a collective expression of denial that it is not happening.
A former grassroots organizer and librarian, Chip Ward, TomDispatch regular, writes from Torrey, Utah. He is the author of two books, Canaries on the Rim: Living Downwind in the West and Hope's Horizon: Three Visions for Healing the American Land. His essays can be found by clicking here. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview in which Ward discusses global 'weirding,' click here, or download it to your iPod here. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.
Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is. As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario. It’s happening right here, right now.
Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained ‘zero contained’ for most of last week and only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers. Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not […]
