Thinking of Orwell’s 1984, Australia’s 2019-2020 Fires That Killed or Destroyed Habitat for Nearly Three Billion Animals, Oregon’s 500,000 Citizens Widely-reported as Fleeing Fires, or Ordered to Prepare to Flee Yesterday, and California and Washington Fires, as Climate Crisis Morphs into Climate Tsunami

In George Orwell's novel 1984, he wrote “It is not merely that speeches, statistics, and records of every kind must be constantly brought up to date in order to show that the predictions of the Party were in all cases right. It is also that no change in doctrine or in political alignment can ever be admitted. [ . . . . ] And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts must be altered. Thus history is continuously rewritten. This day-to-day falsification of the past, carried out by the Ministry of Truth, is as necessary to the stability of the regime as the work of repression and espionage carried out by the Ministry of Love. [par break] The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.”

“Australia’s 2019-2020 Fires That Killed or Destroyed Habitat for Nearly Three Billion Animals” may be easier for readers to understand if they see just one rescued Koala.  The “Nearly Three Billion” number, from a July 28, 2020 bbc.com article citing the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), also noted an Australian “royal commission inquiry” “has heard overwhelming evidence from scientists who said the unprecedented frequency and severity of the blazes were a result of climate change.”

I know some people mistakenly think La Niña in the Pacific Ocean is the major reason for Oregon’s current historic fires that various media sources noted burned about a million acres.  The Los Angeles Times reported Sept. 10, 2020, “So far, this [La Niña] is fairly weak.”  In contrast, oregonlive.com’s Ted Sickenger noted Sept. 13, 2020, “ The [‘rare’ east] winds were the main culprit in making the catastrophic infernos as fast moving as they were.” and “there is broad consensus that climate change is driving higher temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns and drought cycles across the west and in Western Oregon. [ . . . . ] A 2019 report by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute found that fire risk due to climate change is projected to increase across the state by mid-century, with the largest increases in the Willamette Valley and Eastern Oregon.”

I could write many things about these fires in Oregon, California, and Washington, but instead I’ll repeat the end of my poem “Reframe, Redefine” from my book Hawk on Wire:

Reframe, Redefine

 

How many years

did the naming monkey

fool me?

 

As Earth warms,

soothing words attempt

to pacify

 

but the ancient voice,

old as missing rain,

says look, look, look.

 

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I recall in the film I Am, the Dalai Lama said the most important meditation of our time is critical thinking followed by action.