The Creeping Smoke

I spent a weekend earlier this summer at Lake Tahoe, excited to swim in the electric blue water and explore the miles of pine trees that create this area’s iconic beauty. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was the ominous presence of wildfire smoke from the nearby Tamarack fire. It was kind of funny, actually. When I was in the water on the east side, facing the opposite shore, it appeared to be a perfect day. If I turned around, though, I faced a burnt orange curtain and a small torch of light trying to force its way through. There aren’t many sights more dystopian than the powerful summer sun struggling to shine. This contradictory landscape got me thinking about how the climate crisis is perceived by the general populace.

When we’re busy living our lives, falling into the hypnotic rhythm of the work week and our to-do lists, it’s easy to feel like the climate is not a big deal. We’re always facing forward and never notice the smoke creeping up behind us. Yeah, there have been some hot days, but it’s summertime! Sure, there are some wildfires out west, but isn’t that natural? We get so distracted by a pleasantly warm day in February that we don’t realize the flowers shouldn’t be blooming yet. They may be colorful and look full of life, but more realistically they feel trapped by the heat and open up early, against their better judgement.

These flowers, along with birds, trees, bears, and every species besides our own, must do what nature requires of them. They can’t escape their environments, at least not at a speed we can. If temperatures rise, they must sweat it out. If lands flood, they drown with it. If forests are ravaged by a wildfire, they burn alongside it. There’s no air-conditioned indoor space to lock yourself away from the problem.

Other skills we have compared to other species include digital communication and a level of consciousness that allows us to be self-aware. We’re smart enough to know the consequences of what we’re doing to the environment, even if we don’t understand how exactly these consequences happen. We see fires char thousands of acres of land in real time, and tsunamis or landslides absolutely crush coastal towns. Our brains are powerful enough to put the pieces of information together to recognize human culpability, but passive enough to ignore the alarm bells, allowing us to keep floating through our normal routine, straight into the storm.

One upbeat quote I think about nearly constantly is from author Douglas Preston, in which he says: “No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate”. Reassuring, no?

My concern is that we humans can see ourselves knocking down one domino at a time, but can’t see the bigger picture. We see ourselves using 100 billion gallons of gas in the US alone per year, and watch the subsequent domino fall. We recognize that creating a “throwaway” culture of single-use plastics and fast fashion knocks another domino down. The same goes for damming rivers and starting wildfires and building highways and neighborhoods through animal habitats. Clink, clink, clink. The dominoes fall. We flinch, but it’s not enough to keep us from pushing the next one. I think if we could see the dominos from above, we’d realize they’re not standing alone, but rather in a line that stretches into our future. An aerial view of the situation shows us that when we knock down one domino, it clips the next one and makes it start to wobble. At some point, we’ll knock down a domino and it will have enough force to send the rest of them toppling down after it, no matter what we do to try to stop it.

Climate change is tricky that way. It’s a situation we’ve never dealt with, but we know it has consequences that we have an opportunity to stop. The question is: will we decide to stop before it’s too late? My recent experience picking up trash on public lands makes me worried that we won’t. I see that our pollution and climate change problems are closely related: they’re direct consequences of our voluntary actions, and now that we know that, we can voluntarily choose to change it.

This is the trash I collected in one hour from around a campground I recently stayed in. It was the most trash I’d ever seen in a campground, and this isn’t even all of it! To make things worse, this camp was beside a body of water, which is naturally more sensitive to pollution and human impact. It’s always shocking to me to see trash in a public space, but this was egregious.

Sometimes the wind will grab a napkin or a chip bag, and small bottle caps or plastic cutlery are easy to drop. But when you find things like glass bottles, popped balloons, dirty diapers, or cigarettes, you know someone consciously left their crap on the ground rather than taking the initiative to throw it away. It is so easy for these physical things to be out of sight, and out of mind, so a (mostly) invisible problem like climate change is nearly impossible to keep in focus.

To be clear, I don’t think picking up trash will solve the world’s problems. The trash I picked up here, while it’s a big bag, fixes exactly 0.00000% of the trash problem we have. Even if we all agreed to stop dropping trash or teamed up to clean up our local parks, we’d still have the landfills, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and the endless consumption of plastic that already plagues us. Even if we all somehow managed to stop using plastic completely, starting today, we’d have literal mountains of garbage to deal with. One thought that always sticks with me is how every plastic toothbrush ever made, every ballpoint pen, every shirt hanger - still exists out there somewhere. They might be in different forms now - like as micro plastics in our soil or in the bellies of our fish - but they’re still out there.

The same goes for climate change. If we were to stop all extraction and use of coal and oil today, if all planes stopped flying, if we turned off all of our refrigerators and air conditioners, we would still have to face consequences of climate change. Knowing that, it’s obvious that changing some of our everyday actions won’t be enough. If we humans want to dig ourselves out of this hole, we’ll have to create a whole new way of life.

We can’t make anyone care about these issues. If you’re someone who is okay with drinking a beer in a campground or on the beach and then leaving the can on the ground when you’re done, there is nothing I can say that will make you stop that behavior. If you’re just an average American consumer who wants to care, chances are you’re still going to buy the Frapp in the plastic cup and sip from the infamous green straw. I think about this shit constantly and I still do it!! Our trash problem won’t be fixed until zero products are created for single-use or a short life anymore. Our climate crisis won’t even start trending towards improvement until we move away completely from extractive energy sources.

There are so many issues in the world to care about that it becomes difficult to fully commit our compassion and effort to any single one of them. This is the curse of being human - we’re self-aware enough to recognize all of these problems, but not capable of holding space for all of them, and that can easily feel overwhelming. We can be moved towards inaction by both that feeling of helplessness and the rhythm of the lives that we are currently persuaded to live. This won’t always be the case. The fires and smoke and hurricanes and freak snowstorms and floods and droughts will become harder to ignore. Of all the problems we can choose from to care about, I urge you to turn around and notice the smoke that’s creeping into this beautiful home we all share. We can’t solve any of our other problems if we don’t have a safe place to live.

Since I visited Tahoe earlier this summer, and even since I’ve been writing this piece, a new fire, the Caldor fire, has swept right up to the edge of the lake in one of my favorite towns: South Lake Tahoe. The landscape there will not be the same again in my lifetime. Gorgeous pines that started growing before our great-grandparents were born are toppling right now as you read this. You know what else has happened in that time? I’ve used the gas required to drive nearly 1,000 miles. I’ve booked a cross-country plane ticket. I’ve bought a plastic bottle of Gatorade at the gas station and I couldn’t even tell you how many plastic-packaged items I’ve picked up at the grocery store. We, as individuals, are not the ones to blame, and it’s not up to us personally to fix these crises. It will take a collective movement towards a new way of life if we hope to use our self-awareness to save our species. All that can be asked of you is that you recognize this and lean into the work it will require of you. The dominos haven’t fallen yet and neither have we. We can do this together.

For more information on the Caldor Fire, visit