As I write, Los Angeles is burning.
At this stage in the climate crisis, there is nothing new about hearing that fires, floods, storms, or other disasters clearly connected to the crisis are doing massive damage to people, places, ecosystems. The progression of such things is one terrible metric of how the crisis is getting worse, and often faster than the models are predicting – the number of events, number of people harmed, timing of events, location of events, or any number of other markers of novelty, expansion, and intensification. In this case, the timing is particularly unusual, and the fact that it is threatening such a large and culturally prominent city is drawing additional attention.
On a personal level, it’s also unusual because I used to live there. I’m not sure exactly how and where the fires have spread at this point, but when they first started to make big news, they were already only half an hour’s drive from the part of the city where I used to live. In saying that, I’m not claiming any particularly close connection to what’s happening – I haven’t actually lived in LA for about 20 years, and obviously millions of people are living the consequences of these fires right there, right now. Plus, I know people who live in places that face the risk and reality of wildfires pretty much every summer. So this is, in context, a small and distant thing. But, still, there’s a way in which it illustrates the broader reality that all of us are facing a sort of creeping encroachment, in which the impacts of the climate crisis are relentlessly impinging more and more on our lives – sometimes the increments are small, but sometimes they are very much not. I think that (unevenly) shared reality is worth noting and reflecting on.
There are two different things that this is making me think about.
The first is the question of proximity to harm and what it means for how we live in the world. On the one hand, it is obviously impossible for us to pay attention and respond with equal intensity to all of the many and varied harms socially produced by the longstanding, interlocking relations of oppression that define the modern world, or by their more recent intensification in what some have described as the “polycrisis” – I don’t actually like that term, but there’s a certain aptness to it – that we currently face. We just aren’t equipped to be able to know all that we would need to know, hear all that we would need to hear, feel all that we would need to feel. And even for those of us opposed in principal to approaches to the world that exhibit concern for other people’s wellbeing only very narrowly, I think we can’t completely avoid the fact that proximity still plays a role in shaping our visceral and affective reactions to things. I should and do care, for instance, when I hear about a bomb hitting homes in Palestine and killing people in those homes. And I should and would care if I heard about a bomb hitting homes on the next street over from me here in southern Ontario. But my deep-down, gut-level responses to those two things would not be identical, in a way very much related to proximity, and I think that’s completely understandable.
On the other hand, differentials in our responses to harm, in our levels and kinds of concern, in our often invisible-to-us invocation of different categories of people and places on the basis of proximity, are also how a lot of terrible stuff gets quietly legitimized. The only plausible explanation for differences in how white North Americans often respond to different horrific events or different struggles for justice and liberation is the way in which white supremacy and colonialism have conditioned us to understand proximity to ourselves – to the point, as many brilliant Black, Indigenous, and racialized authors have pointed out, of expelling many people from the category “human,” or admitting them in only the most tenuous and partial ways. This is horrible and needs to be something that we constantly push back against in all of the things that we do, both in ourselves and in the broader world.
I don’t know that I have anything very profound to add to this. It’s obviously an ongoing challenge to figure out what, in concrete terms, we need to do about this role that proximity inevitably plays in our response when it comes to the climate crisis, and all of the other intertwined crises as well. We need to both recognize that proximity matters, and that’s okay, but also push back against the socially produced unevenness that often stains our gut-level responses and therefore distorts our instincts for solidarity. So, yes, note when the climate crisis, or one of the other crises, takes a small, new step towards you – or a big one. Those increments matter, even when others have it worse. But let that move you to broad solidarity and vigorous action that centre those who are hit the hardest.
The other thing that I’m thinking in response to fires menacing a place I used to live is…well, about this writing practice, this series, and some of the questions that are underlying it but that I haven’t necessarily talked about explicitly yet. These fires are, after all, one manifestation of the crisis through which I and so many others are creating. But what does it mean to be a writer, particularly one with an understanding of the important role of social movements in making any kind of meaningful change, in a moment like this? What does writing do? What can it do? What does it mean to create through, in the face of, under the threat of, this crisis and all of the other crises that are closing in? What might it look like to create not just in a way that soothes one’s own soul, not just in a way that might grant solace to a handful of others, but in a way that contributes to the kinds of collective doing that are the only way we’re going to confront these crises?