Eulogy for the West

Prologue

I remember well the smoke rising off the mountain in the late afternoon summer. Silver surplus war bombers circling and banking against the rock of the mountain spewing long tails of gore, their dyed slurry of fire retardant. They remain in my mind small and insignificant against the plume of smoke, the mountain, the sky, and the landscape of my hometown. From our front deck we had the perfect view to watch the Mt Elden fire as it started as a small plume of smoke at the base and then watched in distress as it advanced up the dry rocky face of the mountain. By night fall it had covered most of the visible face of the mountain and Flagstaff was able to watch with uneasy fascination as old conifers a hundred feet or more tall burst into flame and flared like a struck match before dying out as quickly as they flared into the brief consumption of all that was green and needed for life. What we didn’t understand was the worse was out of sight north of the town and along the eastern face of the ridge that ran north. It would remain to this day over 40 year later this craggy moonscape, haired with blackened tree trunks, where conifers had carpeted the mountain. Indeed I never understood how rugged that ridge was until after the fire; I also didn’t understand how I wished now I had hiked or camped there. As the old song goes ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till its gone’. 

Radio Fire Mount Elden 1977 (more photos here…)
From the Platt Cline Library Northern Arizona University

Growing up in Flagstaff one had many atypical experiences and one of these was a slightly more tangible connection to the landscape and the climate. I recall some years when water was short. We would wear clothes a few times before washing them. Shower every other day and flush the toilet less frequently. 
Our water supply for the town was always tenuous. 

Sitting on a vast volcanic bulge there were no rivers or streams to speak of. The only area one might describe as riparian was the Rio de Flag which in my childhood escaped being ephemeral by the steady contribution of treated sewage along its lower reaches. Other-wise it was a gash in the dark basalt that flowed with snow runoff or flash flood in the summer ‘monsoons’. 

Flagstaff subsisted on a combination of lake eater from Lake Mary, wells near town and water pumped from the the Inner Basin, a wilderness caldera in the San Francisco Peaks. It was strange to hike that gorgeous bowl of pine, aspen, and rock to encounter a small shed and the sound of thrumming pumps. 

We would often drive past Lower and Upper Lake Mary and one could predict by the water levels the likelihood of water restrictions based on their levels. When the water was low enough it exposed the abandoned railway-bed of a an old logging railway. 

Every summer we watched as the fire danger meters put up by the Forest Service moved higher and higher to indicate increased fire danger until they reached extreme and then the forests might be closed. Flagstaff sits on a high plateau in arid Arizona at an altitude of 7000 feet. This helps make it home to the largest contiguous stand of Ponderosa pine in the United States. These great red-barked pines whose cracked bark smells of strawberry or vanilla ice cream were my constant companions in the woods where I grew up. 

My father spent a summer while at college as a park ranger in Rocky Mountain National Park. I believe because of that my brother and I were raised with an extraordinary awareness of fire and the forest. My dad insisted when we camped that the fire was drenched in water and was not out until we could safely pass our fingers through the wet mucky ash and charcoal. 

The summer fire season always for me held the anxiety of seeing smoke rising from the green carpet of trees around Flagstaff. Some slender wraith maybe caused by the lightning that preceded the summer rains. Some larger ones perhaps caused by a chainsaw or irresponsible camper. One learned in those hot dry late summer days to sense the tinder-dryness of the forest as one walked or drove through it. The smell of warm pitch the crunch of dry brown pine cones and needles underfoot. The lip-chapping dryness of the air under cloudless blue skies. 

Being at 7000 feet of altitude Flagstaff boasted a four season climate. The summers rarely got above 90 degrees (compared to the 100-120 degrees of the lower more southern parts of the state). Fall was cool and I remember very windy with a glorious show of color in aspen trees in on the slopes of the San Francisco Peaks. Winter averages 100 inches of snow but can easily see half of that or twice that in some years. Spring brought warmer temperatures and muddy roads in the forests. Summer returned with the rainy season in July as a steady build up of clouds that culminated in afternoon thunderstorms and dense downpours. This I found annoyingly referred to as the ‘Monsoons’ a term I thought invented and affected. 

And so I felt connected to the cycle of the climate and the seasons and the forest. I learned especially well the variability of the weather and the seasonal variations of snow and drought and fire. Later in life this informed a scepticism over claims of too much variation in places that saw more steady seasons and climate. Continental Flagstaff I suppose was whipsawed by the El Nino/La Nina weather cycles that the Pacific coast is accustomed to. (By the time I moved to England I remained steadfast for many years in my belief that weather everywhere was highly variable which was not true of Great Britain’s maritime climate.)  

The Elmo Fire
Flathead Indian Reservation Montana

The Present

I am now in the process of moving back to the US and intend to travel around my beloved Western United States. It is in a sense my home as I grew up in the West and travelled with my family throughout it as I grew up. It also became recreation and solace at different times of my life. It is, I think, uniquely beautiful, this amazing fore-thought of vast tracts of public land with a relatively unfettered ability to roam across it. The landscape is varied and spectacularly so. The history is tragic and at times heroic. It sits socially at the core of the unique American experience of reinvention and redemption. It is also I am finding radically changing. 

Droughts in the West have become deeper and longer. Fires are bigger and more damaging. Droughts that lasted 2 or three years are now a decade or two in length. Fires burn hotter, faster and over much larger areas.

Snowpacks are shrinking and with them the rivers and streams that sustain life in the Intermountain West. Trees becomes subject to more disease, cannot propagate in the dry soil or seedlings cannot thrive and grow in the dry months. John Wesley Powell the great explorer of the Grand Canyon posited while working as the Director of the United States Geological Survey that the West have such unequal distribution of water that it should set the political boundaries on the basis of watersheds. His wisdom almost two hundred years old may be sorely tested by the states that today depend on the Colorado River watershed. 

And so I have begun to think that my anticipated reunion with the West will only lead me to experience its long death and bear witness for it, a kind of eulogy to its wonder. And it seem that this death will not be brought by encroaching humans, poor forestry practices, the killing of wild rivers, mining, or cattle ranching. These have all taken a measurable and growing toll on our wild lands; but not these traditional destroyers of the wildness of earth but instead something more prosaic. Our own existence. For only in this way can our activities reach comprehensively across the vastness of the West and its small remaining wildernesses, its parks and forests, deserts, mountains, rivers and lakes. Indeed we fling our impact to all parts of the globe though I will witness most acutely the impact on the West.

There are those that argue against what seems now inevitable. That the warming is not human caused, that resources are best spent on mitigation and not prevention, that the world, mankind, and nature will adapt. 

The first argument is popular amongst those who do not wish to bear the burden of change and by those who think they have calculated the cost and think they can personally afford it. They also seem to ignore the fact that if I may place this in religious terms, god made the planet liveable for humans by spending millions of years creating vast forests and jungles that could absorb what we know to have been an atmosphere where carbon dioxide dominated with a an insignificant oxygen content. The Creator made vast seas and populated them with tiny creatures that did their part in removing carbon dioxide. Then set about burying the dead. The dead plants became great compressed beds of coal, vast underground reservoirs of oil, gas was trapped under and within this rock. Some of the rock were great slabs of limestone from those small sea creatures whose calcium carbonate skeletons bound the carbon from the air. All of this was cleverly hidden from us for hundreds of thousands of years. This transformation changed the atmosphere radically and created for the first time a substantial quantity of oxygen in the atmosphere whose first appearance is marked by the emergence of red and orange rocks and clays as iron long distributed in the mineral body of the earth oxidized. 

Into this careful crafted world emerged oxygen breathing mammals, reptiles, birds, insects and fishes. And we also benefitted as a species from this miraculous transformation. But what do people do but dig all this up and release it again as if we want to recreate that hostile world dominated by plants, hot weather, and carbon dioxide. This is why it doesn’t really matter that the forests of the world burn. They would burn but one generation of forests and the carbon they contain. We are unearthing millions of years of forests and releasing them into our atmosphere again.

We know with as much certainty as we can what the world was like then before the climate was transformed. I don’t think anyone who understood what it was like could rationally propose we return there.  

The second excuse for inaction, mitigation, while exhibiting a certain practical ring to it is rooted in absurdities. The first of which is ‘who wants to live in a warmer world?’ A world where summers in the temperate latitudes will make outdoor activity impossible throughout much of the summer. Who wants to live in these paces without trees and forests and rivers and streams. Most of absurd of all how does one pay to mitigate keeping the vast coastal cities from flooding? How to you replace an entire river’s flow for agriculture, consumption, recreation and yes fishes and wildlife and plants and trees.  This ‘mitigation’ option was dreamed up by economists who seem to be unable to calculate the costs of the mitigations they propose. They, and I think even the most ardent climate scientists, fail to have sufficient imagination about what a collapse of global weather patterns could mean. 

And finally the question of adaptation. It is almost certainly true that life will not be extinguished. That mankind does not face an existential threat, that is it will continue even as many individuals will likely face extinction. The cost will be great and the world will not be at all what many of us enjoy today. It will be a massive reversal of the advance of civilization.

And as I write this in the week following my first foray; my reunion with the West. I hear of salmons stocks crashing in Alaska rivers where the indigenous people are catching no fish. The Po in Italy is nearly dry and rice crops are threatened with failure. In the US the Colorado River is at record low levels. In Las Vegas owning a grass lawn is now illegal and the city has mandated desert landscaping. In the Central Valley of California one of the richest agricultural areas in the world farmers are cutting down fruit and nut trees as they can no longer irrigate them. The once permanent snowpacks of the Sierra Nevada mountains have melted. People in Los Angeles are tearing up their turf lawns as water runs short and prices rise. (Strangely or not so golf courses are immune to these restrictions.) In Northern China factories are forced to shut for three weeks at a time so that people can run their air conditioners. Back in my hometown of Flagstaff two more fires have burnt the Tunnel and Pipeline fires this year. (The Radio fire I wrote about at the beginning was 5000 acres. The Tunnel fire is over 26,000 acres. The Pipeline fire was comparable in size both burned in 2022. These are by no means large fires the largest in the US the Dixie fire in California was over 460,000 acres while 2020 burned 4.1 million acres in California alone.)

This past week as I drove through Idaho and Montana I hiked some forests and felt that same dry crack of wood and pine needles I recalled from my boyhood, the smell of hot pines and pitch. The impossible task of hiking over talus mountain slopes in 96 degree heat. And two large fires one near Salmon Idaho the Moose fire and in Montana the Elmo fire. I returned to find Sandpoint hot and engulfed in the orange haze of the Elmo fire that beat me home over the same terrain. It casts a dystopian light where the sunlight is orange and the shadows take on an accentuated blue of the sky. Almost like an alien world and I felt in some way a precursor to or a welcome from that new world that awaits us all.

And so I wonder if I will experience this dying on the waning decade or decades of my life and if I will find myself writing my own Eulogy for the American West and with it the rest of the world.