Get Out. There's Still Time.

Smoke fills the sky in Topanga Canyon at sunrise. 2017.

When I was a kid, I had a recurring nightmare.

My house was burning down with me inside it. I could smell the smoke, hear the crackling, and see the flames. As the house burned, I casually walked around and found what I wanted to take with me. Coloring books. Stuffed animals. Some food. My little brother.

Despite the very real and close danger of being engulfed, the dream wasn’t ever focused on total destruction or inescapable danger.

The dream was about time.

I’ve interpreted this dream in so many different ways over the years, but regardless of the context of interpretation, the underlying message is always the same. Yes, this is bad. Yes, you don’t have control. Yes, this house will burn to the ground.

But you still have time.

I’ve been thinking about this dream a lot over the past week while I watch Los Angeles burn.

In 2017-2019, I lived in Topanga, which sits between Pacific Palisades and Malibu in the Santa Monica Mountains. As I write this, wildfire is encroaching on all sides.

In 2018, I was evacuated from Topanga for nine days due to the Woolsey fire, which burned through most of Malibu. The experience of being evacuated and not knowing whether or not my house was still standing was profound. I grieved the loss of everything I owned, and expected the worst. This seemed like the only responsible thing to do.

I recorded one of my favorite episodes of MGSW while evacuated, and shared some lessons the experience was teaching me.

The loudest, most unavoidable message I received during those nine days was about how delusional we are to trust infrastructure that is ultimately at the mercy of a rapidly-changing, unpredictable environmental landscape.

I’ve been hearing a lot of commentary about how climate change is helping to fuel the severity of the current LA fires, and of course, that’s true. But there is something upstream from climate change that’s getting a lot less attention.

Humanity has built an entire way of being that is out of accordance with a planet that’s only constant is change. Yes, the environmental changes we’re seeing now are unprecedented in our lifetime, but they pale in comparison to the change that’s occurred over the earth’s 4.5 billion-year history. As paleontologist Thomas Halliday explains in Otherlands, “Gatherings of species in time and space may give the illusion of stability, but these communities can only last as long as the conditions that help to create them persist.”

We see the environmental changes being provoked by ice melting away from the earth’s poles, and we act as if these changes are novel, but they’re not. The earth has endured and survived many cycles of ice melting away from the poles.

The problem isn’t the melting ice. The problem isn’t climate change. The problem is humanity’s inability to accept that we are not in control, we never have been, and we never will be.

Maybe you’re thinking “Okay, climate change is inevitable, but it’s been made worse by our dependence upon fossil fuels and our addiction to consumerism and industrial farming and food production.” Sure, I don’t disagree. But those things are still a result of a much larger, overarching problem.

The problem isn’t climate change, the problem is humanity’s hubristic assumption that we can live the way we’re living without suffering any consequences.

Whether climate change is provoked by human activity or occurs naturally is irrelevant. What’s relevant is whether or not we are living with reverence and respect for the land we live on.

Our delusional expectation that the LA Fire Department should be able to overpower a fire of this magnitude and ferocity is similar to our delusional expectation that we can avoid prescribed burns in landscapes that rely on fire for regeneration, or build home after home after home with flammable materials and non-native vegetation to house 23,000 people in the 23-square miles that make up the Pacific Palisades without suffering consequences.

Of course there isn’t enough water. Of course we weren’t prepared. Of course humans can’t manage the unpredictability and magnitude of the environmental changes happening on earth.

Yes, this is bad. Yes, you don’t have control. Yes, the house will burn down.

But you still have time.

I understand that individual humans are at the mercy of broader human-made phenomena that may very well feel or be inescapable. It’s very difficult to live in the world without relying on utility infrastructure or industrial food production and distribution. I get it.

But I still believe that if we want humanity to survive, we will need to stop trusting that the systems responsible for our destruction will be the same systems that save us. There is no plausible way for humanity to survive if we continue to believe the egregious lie that we can continue to live like this.

It may not be possible to opt out completely, but we can still opt out of a lot. We may not survive as a species, but we can still choose to live a life of reverence and respect.

There’s still time to surrender to our lack of control.

There’s still time to acknowledge that we are all participants in our own destruction until we relinquish our delusional and hubristic belief that we can overcome nature itself.

My most toxic trait is that I sometimes want it all to burn so that we all can be given the gift of looking our delusions in the eye.

I want us all to wake up before the fire consumes what little truth we have left to salvage.