World A-Blaze
Tuesday Essay: Reflections on the Massive Forest Fires Around the Globe
I wrote this over the last week. The epigraph is from Gary Snyder’s Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems. It is a companion piece to another, unfinished essay that focuses more on my health struggles. Both are part of what I am calling “The Kerouac Project.”1
World A-Blaze
From Paradise Revisited: Rereading Jack Kerouac and The Beats
Morning after morning I don’t see the sun Year after year, not a sign of spring. -- Gary Snyder, "Cold Mountain Poems, no. 9 (trans. from Han Shan)"
1.
The sky is an irradiated blue. Dotted with gray clouds and an eerie stillness. We’re expecting a thunderstorm, so we have the local weather on repeat. Ninety degrees this afternoon. Flash floods possible.
Haze and smoke from western fires slowly track east from Washington, Oregon, and south from Toronto. A repeat of last year’s orange skies and poisonous air quality. A “blanket over parts of the U.S.” that “has created hazardous air for millions of people across multiple states,” the AP reports.2
Local weather man says thicker concentration of smoke coming, after the rain passes. Smoke-thick skies drive lightning, create its own weather as it spreads. If you have asthma, COPD, or another lung ailment, stay indoors.
I try. My breathing is better, but still compromised by bronchiectasis. I can walk the dog without getting winded. I couldn’t last year, but I can’t ignore the underlying condition, an autoimmmune syndrome that has damaged my lungs and requires me to get infusions of an immunosuppressant.
We treat both the symptoms (breathing difficulties) and the cause (antisynthetase syndrome). It is about understanding what we face, addrewssing what we can. Preventing futher damage. I feel like a walking metaphor, or a cautionary example. Forests burn around the globe. Politicians fail to respond. We can address teh crisis, but we have to be honest with ourselves.
2.
There are photos on the Web from across Spain. From France. Portugal and Greece. Soot-gray and orange skies. Flames stabbing at the landscape. Charred buildings and forests.
We were on Spain’s eastern coast in April. Barcelona. Alicante. Ibiza. Blue skies. A warm breeze off the Balearic adn Mediterranean seas. Standing atop the Castillo de Santa Barbara, we could see well into the distance.
I can’t imagine being there today.
“We in the village are completely surrounded by all the fires,” a Spanish resident says, “what we are seeing is devastation, fear, anguish.”3
Close to 400,000 have been forced to evacuate. “The largest evacuation in France’s history since World War II.” These are likely to get worse and repeat themselves, because of “human-induced climate change” that has resulted in “extreme heat, drought and marine heat waves this summer — driven by relentless heat domes“ that “have produced higher temperatures because of the planet’s background warming trend.”
France experienced the hottest June on record. Barcelona experienced its hotest day in 112 years. In New Jersey, 29 died. Hundreds were hospitalized in New York. There are new heat waves coming. Fires growing more common.
“Climate change’s fingerprints are all over the extreme fire weather that sparked this week’s devastating wildfires in Spain and France and has spiked Southern Europe’s burning the past eight years.”4 Fire in Spain and France increased by 40%, while “the number of days that Southern Europe’s weather reached extreme fire-prone levels has more than doubled compared to decades ago.”
The Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez calls for new policies to address both the threats from a warming planet and its causes: “what we have to do is reduce its causes, anticipate its effects, and, consequently, better prepare our country to protect people’s lives.”5
Spain’s conservatives dither. Accused Sanchez of “using the ‘mantra’ of climate crisis to mask its ‘poor management’ of natural disasters.”
“That the climate changes is something that has occurred throughout the history of humanity and the Earth – that’s obvious,” she said. “Now how do we humans act in the face of things that change?”
3.
“Smoke from these fires is forecast to spread across Western Europe in the days ahead,” writes The Washington Post, “with hazy skies potentially reaching Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, the Czech Republic and Poland through Friday.”
I’m listening to Democracy Now. The recurring fires around the globe, says a guest, “are so intense that they create their own weather systems” that make “them virtually impossible to extinguish until the weather ceases.” New forms of clouds, pyrocumulonimbus, create “fire-generated thunderstorms (that) can puncture the stratosphere,” says another. Like hurricanes. Black hail. Storms that are “45,000 feet tall.” That “generate their own lightning.”
“Essentially a self-perpetuation machine of fire that is literally unstoppable,” he says.
I think of Kerouac on Washington’s Desolation Peak, watching for fires in the distance, sitting in a chair “facing Void Hozomeen”6 in a broad silence living simply and romancing poverty. “(T)here’s nothing for me to do but wait—and breathe (and breathing is difficult in the thin high air, with West Coast sinus wheezings)—wait, breathe, eat, sleep, cook, wash, pace, watch, never any forest fires—and daydream.”
Kerouac saw his foray at the top of the mountain as a chance to break from society, though his job as fire lookout was intemately tied to the social contract, to a connection with others, a product of his friendship with the anarchist poet Gary Snyder.
That was 1956. Today, fires burn north and east of Desolation Peak, just west of Hozomeen, straddling the Candian border. Smoke clouding the skies in Eastern Washington, across Idaho, into Montana.
Fires had been rare, in the 70 years since, fire lookout Jim Henterly told the Seattle Times in 2025. That’s no longer the case, as “High-profile wildfires in recent years warn of future blazes west of the Cascade crest.”7
From dwindling mountain snowpack and desiccated blueberry patches to disappearing critters, colleagues and resources. Henterly, 71, has not only watched these changes unfold, he’s felt them. For decades, this lone lookout has spent his summers in a sort of Thoreauvian dream, hooked on the lifestyle, the camaraderie, the sense of purpose. For even longer, people across the American West shared another dream, in which they thought it possible to stave off the threat of wildfires indefinitely. But both dreams must eventually end.
4.
Smokey skies. Heat waves and droughts. The frequency and strength of hurricanes. Contagious and insect-born diseases. “(C)limate change is exacerbating all of these public health threats in one way or another, and experiencing multiple, overlapping climate-related health hazards is likely to become more common,” Caroline Lewis writes.
A hotter planet means hotter weather. More extreme weather. Flooding. Drought. Starvation. In Uganda, 1.5 million face food shortages. “Crops have failed due to inadequate rain,” across Africa. Britain is bracing for empty supermarket shelves. Three quarters of a million forced to flee to relief camps in Assam, India.
What we are witnessing is unprecedented. Man-made. An intersection of human-induced climate change and capotalism’s distorted profit logic. We strip resources from the public, privatize all gains and socialize the costs. The values assigned are based on return to investers, a practice that only enriches the few, but that is directly responsible for environmental collapse and the refugee crises (plural, because the crises present themselves as both corss-border migration and as domestic homelessness). War. Disease. Economic disparity. Homelessness. Street violence. Deforestation. Hunger. Rising health costs and diminishing access. All of this can be traced back to the deprivations of capitalism and the neoliberal dogma that has led to neutered public services.8
This is not theoretical. Not just polemic. Not when the memory of mask and ventilator shortages during Covid still lingers. Not when Federal agents gun down immigrants and citizens in American streets or refugees flee hot zones in Africa, South American and the Middle East.
“(D)ecades of neoliberal policies that have diminished public services in the region of Madrid, especially and in all the regions all around Spain,” says Ángel Luis Lara, sociologist and associate professor of Ibero-American Cultural Studies at SUNY Old Westbury. He could be talking about Washington. About U.S. state capitals. About England, France, the Eurozone, and elsewhere. We pay lipservice to change, to addressing the warming climate, to the cause even as we slash mitigation budgets in the name of austerity.
The fires around the globe are not separate from the other crises we face, whether in France, Spain, or across teh Pacific Northwest where three hundred acres burn “in remote, steep and densely forested terrain along the U.S./Canadian border, about 1.5 miles east of Hozomeen Mountain.” This is the American wilderness, the remains of a continent remade by chain stores and commerce.
5.
Trump threatens Canada over fires there, attacks the National Academy of Sciences. Calls climate change a hoax. This has long been Republican orthodoxy. An American conservative “mantra” designed to protect the status quo and teh elites who make their living plundering the planet.
“For decades,” writes Andrew Freedman, “scientists have been warning us about the calamitous consequences of climate change.”9
The disasters of late are what global warming looks like: One piled on top of another, all occurring at about the same time.
These are the alarms, “the costs of humanity’s addiction to burning coal, oil and gas,” says UN Climate Change executive secretary Simon Stiell.
“These spiralling disasters are now the lived reality for billions in a world getting rapidly hotter, as humanity moves too slowly from fossil fuels to clean energy and to protect forests,” Stiell commented.
Forests and people. The same people victimized by runaway capitalism.
The camera captures ash and rubble, the remains of a community near Spokane. “Record-breaking wildfire conditions driven by drought conditions.” Open gas mains spit flames. Plumes of black smoke roll into the sky.
Fires. Flash floods. Hurricanes. Mother Nature unleashing her wrath, the warmer planet growing hotter, the heat driving more extreme weather. More fire. More flooding. Nastier storms.
The stories have become commonplace. The images cliche. The effects of climate-induced fire becoming almost normalized, stretching to the limits our sympathies and our will to fight back.
But we have to continue to fight, to reverse planetary warming, to rein in the rapacity of big business, even as we harden our defenses and safeguard the world’s citizenry from the worst impacts of corporate captialism.
Snyder, Gary. “Cold Mountin Poems no. 9 (trans. From Han Shan).” Riprap, & Cold Mountain Poems, The Writing Series/Four Seasons Foundation, ed. by Donald Allen, 1969, p. 45.
Shastri, Devi. “How to keep the air inside your home clean during wildfires.” Associeated Press, 18 July 2026, https://apnews.com/article/wildfires-smoke-filters-e39f285bec1eccfdb0fbc33b753a987a. Accessed 31 July 2026
Democracy Now!, 27 July 2026, https://www.democracynow.org/2026/7/27/fires_europe_heat?jwsource=cl
Borenstein, Seth. “Human-caused climate change made Spanish, French fires much more likely, scientists calculate.” 30 July 2026, https://apnews.com/article/global-warming-wildfires-spain-france-climate-change-8077d4611308af593805a3d54321ea59. Accessed 31 July 2026
Jones, Sam. “‘Climate change kills’: Pedro Sánchez speaks plain truth to Spain’s deniers.” The Guardian, 2 August. 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/aug/02/climate-change-kills-pedro-sanchez-speaks-plain-truth-to-spains-deniers. Accessed 3 August. 2026
Kerouac, Jack. Desolation Angels, Pedigree Books, 1980, p. 6.
Swanson, Conrad. “WA’s wildfire future: More volatile forests amid slashed budgets.” Seattle Times, 12 October 2025, https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/climate-lab/on-a-wa-mountain-peak-a-wildfire-lookout-spots-an-uneasy-future/. Accessed 3 August. 2026
I am defining socialism broadly as a system that prioritizes a sustainable and healthy life nad environment over the needs of capital and profit. This kind of socialism, I think, is at the center of the Democratic Socialist mission and is not something that “socialist governments” — i.e., the USSR and Eastern Europe — have worked toward. I would argue that “actualy existing socialism” has never realy existed, that the governments we point to as socialist were really about control and power, and grew from previous governments that were about control and power (monarchies, theocracies, autocracies). Essentially, they were replicating what existed but with different rules. I’m neither historian nor political scientist, so take my definition as you will.
Freedman, Andrew. “Fires, floods and record heat: This is the summer of compounding disasters.” CNN, 20 July 2026, https://www.cnn.com/2026/07/20/climate/climate-compounding-disasters-summer. Accessed 3 August 2026