The Earth is Burning Again

From the water I can see fingers of muddy smoke peering over the mountains. A week of record heat and a day of freak lightning storms has set California ablaze. The thick haze that rests on the trees and in the streets smells of burnt dirt and creeps into everything. It is obvious that we are at the mercy of the wind and other natural forces now, as if we weren’t convinced of this before. All it took was a perfectly strange week preceded by a century of climate manipulation to leave the state choking. 

As I kick out over a treacherous closeout section and punch my way back out through the beachbreak slop, I momentarily forget about the burning planet and focus on following the setting sun through the surprisingly clear, backlit waves. The light onshore wind means that there is no smoke in the air here, and the world’s largest ocean has suddenly transformed into a tiny oasis in my life. Windswell over a sandbar tends to guide minds into a meditative state within an endless supply of consistent, uneventful waves. It’s a blessing to take these deep breaths and feel the icy water run through your hair. 

But even this oceanic escape is unreliable. Just 45 miles south, fire is pouring over valleys in the Big Basin mountains like an overfilled cup. The hills above Waddell Creek, which I first surfed a month ago, are scorched black. With my recent memories as a backdrop, I try to imagine the view from the water as the tree-lined cliffs are turned into monumental torches. It’s a painful thought but I let myself feel it. I let myself burn up in those imaginary flames because I’m tired of trying to separate myself from the natural world around me. 

For so long we’ve put up these barriers between human and non-human animals, urbanism and the environment. Even within the human species we work so hard to separate ourselves. By gender, race, sex, money, language, religion. These artificial barriers, used as stepping stones in white supremacy, break up our planet into tiny chunks to organize and categorize humans. These colonial ideologies extend past society and into our neighboring ecosystems with roads, private property lines, and state parks. 

We’ve forgotten the names of trees and the names of native species. We’ve forgotten how to grow our own food and how to steward the land. We’ve forgotten how to get lost and how to find our way back. By losing this connection with the earth, we’ve lost a huge part of ourselves. We’ve created a line in the sand between us and the planet that we live on, and have thus created a world separate from this physical world. 

These fires that scare us, and burn homes, and burn trees, and burn animals, and earth, these are as much our doing as the lightning’s. That’s not to say that these fires are not natural, but rather that our decisions– decisions to rely on fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial agriculture– have natural consequences. And just because you can smell the smoke now doesn’t mean that these embers are new. 

There is no line between us and the environment. There is no barrier between us and the rising sea. There is no wall between us and the burning mountains. There is no glass bubble between us and the heating planet. We are the product of this planet and our actions ripple across the globe just as a fire jumps from tree to tree. By consciously working to reconnect, both emotionally and physically, with the natural world, these invisible barriers will begin to drift away like smoke. 

Floating on my board, I watch pelicans ride the updraft of breaking waves as a quarter-sized crab floats up to the water’s surface on a cloud of foamy bubbles. We are all riding energy, in some way or another, out here. Back on land, green hills roll like a swell while fires burn in regions that I cannot see. My first thought is that the earth is obviously as alive as I, but after a moment’s thought, I realize that I am just as alive as the earth.