During the summer fires of 2020, a lot of us had a sense that the world was burning in unprecedented ways.
Most of us living in the Western United States saw smoke, at least, for weeks and weeks. A lot of us saw flames. I have a distinct memory from September of 2020 of driving on a busy freeway, along the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California, and watching orange fire race up the mountainside beneath a mid-afternoon sky literally as dark as night. I was listening to news of the pandemic, and of the coming presidential elections, and trying to think of movie scenes that were quite so stereotypically apocalyptic, as a tactical aircraft released a stream of scarlet chemical retardant across my field of vision.
Fires burned more than 10.2 million acres in the Western U.S. during the 2020 fire season, and caused nearly 20 billion dollars in damages. Smoke darkened the sky as far east as New York; and the media made much of this, for it felt like everywhere we looked, the climate crisis was manifest. Many people lost their homes, and some of these people tragically remain unhoused in 2023. The extremity of the situation was increased by the public health and economic crises brought on by Covid-19—and by social divisions, in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020, and leading up to November’s election.
Rumors flew on social media that members of “Antifa” had left Portland to start fires in rural eastern Oregon. The news reported on militia-men, guarding their burning towns with trucks and guns, prepared to fight off all outsiders and confused by the acronym BLM—which is shared, of course, by the Black Lives Matter movement and another of their longtime enemies, The Bureau of Land Management.
It was easy to feel like the situation was unprecedented, even traumatic. In some ways it was; a certain portion of humanity has changed the climate. Now we’re learning about the consequences. And yet, you could also say that history is full of examples of similarly apocalyptic times—some, as we’ll soon see, involving fire. History also explains exactly why we are now living in a fire age. And though it is inextricably linked to climate change, our current fire story has at least as much to do with the history of colonization.