Notes from an Environmentalist.
Forest Fires, yet another inconvenient truth.
Forest Fires
Yet Another Inconvenient Truth
I woke up coughing on November 18th. It was two in the morning and the acrid smell of smoke filled my bedroom. Twice I tried to get out of bed but thought better of it and fell back to sleep.
The situation was no better by the light of day. The entire house was surrounded by thick clouds of smoke that hung in the valleys, obscured the tops of hills and even seemed to be streaming in from the ocean.
I called the Ipswich fire department and the dispatcher was glad to have the information. They were also trying to determine exactly where the smoke was coming from. They knew of a forest fire in nearby Boxford and a massive nine alarm warehouse fire in Chelsea.
Similar fires were snarling traffic in Manhattan. The week before I had seen a flock of emerald green monk parakeets in Pelham screeching their dismay at being displaced from their roost in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
I had an appointment at the Addison Gilbert Hospital and the smoke was thick and acrid the whole way to Gloucester.
The smoke had even permeated into the normally sealed Cat-scan facility. The Cat-scan technician said there were also fires in Lanesville, Gloucester and the heavily wooded Dogtown area. That would account for our seeing smoke streaming across the bay from Gloucester to Ipswich.
In all there were twenty active fires on the North Shore of Massachusetts, down from a hundred a week before.
October had seen 600 fires a 1,200 percent increase over the usual 15 fires in Massachusetts, but the recent fires were more widespread, spreading through wooded areas like Great Barrington and Blue Hill in Milton.
Fire crews were stretched thin trying to contain the fires spreading through the parched woodlands replete with bone dry fuel.
The same was true throughout the rest of the country where every state in the nation except for Alaska and Kentucky were experiencing severe drought conditions after several months without rain.
Meanwhile the country was transfixed with a president and his cabinet convinced that such manifestations of climate change were simply part of an ignorable hoax that could be fixed by simply firing any scientist who had the temerity to point out such inconvenient truths.