When the Almeda Fire started in the southern Oregon community of Ashland on Sept. 8, it quickly grew and spread up the Highway 99 corridor. After devastating the small towns of Talent and Phoenix in the Rogue River Valley, it eventually reached the larger city of Medford. By the time it was contained on Sept. 15, more than 2,300 homes were destroyed, 80,000 people had been evacuated and 3,200 acres had burned. At least three people died in the fire.
Many similarly destructive fires raged up and down the West Coast this month. Although the causes of the inferno are complex, the role of climate change stands out. “Scientists have been projecting increased wildfire intensity due to climate change for years,” said Allie Rosenbluth of Rogue Climate, a grassroots organization whose office in Phoenix, Oregon burned to the ground. “This year’s fires are a result of conscious decisions made by polluting industries and politicians to push continued reliance of fossil fuels.”
Damaging as it was, Almeda was far from the largest recent blaze. According to the Center for Disaster Philanthropy, over 150,000 acres have burned in Oregon in 2020. More than three million acres burned in California so far. Other large fires have swept through parts of Washington, Idaho, Colorado and Utah. Across the United States, approximately a million more acres have been consumed by wildfires this year than the 10-year average.
“We’re trying to connect the sense of urgency from the fires to actions people can take.”
In major West Coast urban areas thick clouds of smoke produced pollution levels normally associated with cities like Beijing and Delhi. On Sept. 14, Portland, Oregon registered the worst air quality anywhere in the world, reaching a particulate level of 516 on a pollution index that only goes up to 500. The fires provide a glimpse of life in a world altered by human-caused climate change.
However, even as communities begin picking themselves up after the devastation, West Coast climate activists are experimenting with what an effective response to such crises looks like. Some are fighting back against fossil fuel companies with a heightened sense of urgency. Others — especially in severely affected communities like Rogue Valley — quickly organized mutual aid for those displaced by the flames.
The politics of a climate crisis
“The day the Almeda Fire started was the windiest I’d ever seen in southern Oregon,” Rosenbluth said. “We were all on high alert,” due to a combination of high winds and abnormally hot, dry conditions. On Sept. 8, the worst happened: A fire sparked in north Ashland quickly grew and roared up Highway 99. While the Almeda Fire is being investigated as a possible case of arson (though there is no evidence it was politically motivated), those who blame this year’s blazes on human carelessness or malice miss the point. Were it not for extreme weather conditions like those in the Rogue Valley, recent fires like Almeda would never have achieved such size and destructiveness.
By mid-September, the region was blanketed in smoke. “The sky turned yellow,” said Seattle organizer Ivy Jaguzny of the youth-led climate activist group Zero Hour. “Even if you shut all the windows and doors, you could smell smoke from in the house. I couldn’t go outside for days.”
Zero Hour is channeling its energy into the upcoming election and getting out the youth vote. “We’re trying to connect the sense of urgency from the fires to actions people can take,” Jaguzny explained. “While our air is being polluted by smoke, the Trump administration is rolling back nearly 50 years of environmental regulations — and that’s in the middle of a respiratory pandemic. Now we’re dealing with terrible air quality, COVID-19 and industries getting the go ahead to pollute at unsafe levels.”
In response, Zero Hour is mobilizing young people around the election through its non-partisan #Vote4OurFuture project, run in partnership with the National Children’s Campaign. Zero Hour fellows are organizing on the ground in Pennsylvania and Michigan to turn out youth and marginalized groups at the polls.
Meanwhile, Sunrise Movement — the organization that helped popularize the idea of a Green New Deal — is also connecting the fires to grassroots organizing. On Sept. 12, with smoke-clouded skies in the background, a group of young people from Sunrise Movement Seattle unfurled a banner reading “Fight for the Air We Breathe” in the city’s iconic Gas Works Park. The image went viral on Instagram.
Sunrise Seattle recognizes the interconnectedness between climate change impacts, racial justice and other issues facing local communities. “We’ve done banner drops advocating for defunding police, as well as asking our elected officials to take action on climate change,” said Chloe Yeo, the hub’s outreach team leader. The fires — along with other recent crises like police shootings — have spurred more young people to get involved in politics.
“We’re seeing a massive surge in youth engagement right now,” said Seattle high school student Emma Coopersmith. She and other local high schoolers, most of whom are too young to cast ballots, are organizing virtual phone banks to get out the vote locally and in presidential swing states. “Our generation knows that just because the smoke is now mostly gone or because the latest act of police violence wasn’t caught on camera this time, doesn’t mean we can let up.”
Mobilizing mutual aid
When the Almeda Fire died down, communities in Rogue Valley assessed the damage. Along with thousands of homes and many businesses in downtown Talent and Phoenix, the office shared by Rogue Climate and the grassroots advocacy group Rogue Action Center was destroyed. “That office was a hub for organizing in our community,” Rosenbluth said. “It’s really sad to see it gone, but now the community is rallying to make sure we show up for the folks who need help most after the fire.”
The morning after the fire was put out, activists from diverse local environmental and social justice groups were on the phones discussing how to respond. “By that afternoon there were donation sites for supplies set up and people on the ground getting a sense of who had been affected, where they were and what kind of help was needed,” said Siskiyou Rising Tide member Holly Mills.
In addition to Rising Tide and Rogue Climate, the long list of organizations involved in relief efforts includes Rogue Action Center, Southern Oregon Coalition for Racial Equity, Beyond Toxics and the farmworker justice group UNETE. That such a large coalition could mobilize quickly was thanks to years of solidarity work between groups working on multiple issues. “From the beginning, Rising Tide has known our climate work needed to be part of local struggles led by people who are most affected by injustice,” Mills said.
The fire crisis has underscored how people displaced by extreme weather often find themselves with nowhere to go.
Founded in 2015, Siskiyou Rising Tide’s top priority has long been stopping the Jordan Cove LNG export terminal on Coos Bay and its associated Pacific Connector fracked gas pipeline. Work on this campaign led the organization to partner with leaders from the nearby Klamath Tribes, who oppose the project because it threatens water and cultural sites in their traditional territory. More recently, Rising Tide activists began organizing alongside the local houseless community that is disproportionately affected by extreme weather.
“For years we’ve been building relationships with frontline communities and other climate and social justice organizations,” Mills said. “When the fires came through, all these groups were the same people who mobilized from day one to coordinate mutual aid.”
Of the thousands affected by Almeda and other fires, those hit hardest include low-income, predominantly Latinx neighborhoods in places like Talent, Phoenix and the houseless community. These marginalized groups were a major priority for mutual aid from the beginning. However, as larger organizations like the Red Cross moved in after the fire, local grassroots groups shifted their work to focus even more specifically on people who are often left out of mainstream aid efforts.
In Medford, the Bear Creek Greenway — where houseless community members pitch their tents — was destroyed by the fire. About 100 affected people moved the camp to Hawthorne Park, about five miles away and closer to the center of town. Local organizers began serving daily meals in the park, while other groups distributed supplies.
“A non-hierarchical camp sprang up, co-organized by houseless people living in the park out of necessity, and housed folks working with them in solidarity,” Mills said. “Some people stayed overnight. Others came during the day for supplies.” The decentralized organization of the encampment meant people could come and go as they pleased without the bureaucratic restrictions that prevent some from accessing official shelters and relief centers. But it soon attracted the ire of some Medford residents and law enforcement.
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DonateOn Sept. 22, police began leveling the tents in Hawthorne Park after serving a 24-hour eviction notice. Eleven houseless individuals and mutual aid volunteers were arrested for refusing to leave. While such sweeps had been conducted in Medford’s Greenway before, the fire crisis has underscored how people displaced by extreme weather often find themselves with nowhere to go.
Despite such challenges, Rogue Valley’s mutual aid network hasn’t given up on working to assist those most affected by the fires. “We’re focused on people who don’t have access to things like homeowner’s insurance,” Mills said. “That tends to be Native, Latinx, BIPOC and houseless folks.”
Pushing for a just recovery
While local activists mobilize in places like Rogue Valley, climate organizers less directly affected by the fires have been working to get help to the frontlines. Revolution Coalition Network, a college student-led group that focuses on intersectional climate work, ran a successful fundraising drive earlier this month to purchase 600 bags of personal hygiene equipment to send to people displaced by the fires.
“We’re a small organization led by students in college, and there’s only so much we can do,” said Revolution Coalition Network’s Executive Director Lena Rodriguez, who is based in Las Vegas. “But we’re going to keep fundraising and continue sending even more supplies.”
“We need state-level policy changes like an Oregon Green New Deal that includes a shift to sustainable forestry and clean energy technologies.”
Bianca Ballará and her partner, who live 45 minutes outside Medford, welcomed fire evacuees from Rogue Valley — as well as people from as far away as Oakland, California — to the 23-acre property where they live. Ballará hopes to transform the land, which has served as a rural refuge for lesbian women since the 1970s, into a center of community called Nativewomanshare, where Indigenous women will reclaim traditional land practices. “Being queer, Indigenous Latinx women ourselves, we wanted to create a space for displaced queer and BIPOC folks when the fires hit,” Ballará said.
Initially, seven evacuees stayed on the land as Ballará and her partner helped coordinate the distribution of food donated by local businesses to hundreds of evacuees and volunteer firefighters. Later, two more evacuee families joined them. All have recently found longer term living situations, but Ballará anticipates offering her home up again. “These fires happen every year now,” she said. “We plan to continue serving as a resource for the community, while returning to traditional land practices that retain water to help end years of drought.”
As rebuilding begins, activists are pushing for a just recovery. “Our number one priority is to ensure everyone who was displaced can come back to their communities,” Rosenbluth said. “In the Rogue Valley we’re already facing a severe housing shortage with less than 1 percent vacancy rates, and that’s been exacerbated by the Almeda Fire. If we don’t make a conscious decision to rebuild with low-income housing, people are going to be pushed out of our communities.”
Climate groups will also continue higher-level policy work that addresses the root causes of the fires. “We need state-level policy changes like an Oregon Green New Deal that includes a shift to sustainable forestry and clean energy technologies,” Ballará said. In the community networks that sprang up to coordinate relief from the fires — as well as other crises like COVID-19 and racial injustice — she sees hope for a long-term movement that can create such a future.
“We need people to continue awakening to the reality that it’s our Black, Indigenous, and Latinx people who are hit hardest by these types of disasters and need the most relief,” Ballará said. “That means supporting communities on the ground and organizers of color who are stepping up to lead.”
The work described here is excellent. Nothing can take that from the dedicated people in this story, people who learned to work from systems thinking, connecting one version of social violence to the rest. That they’ve left the silo (reductionist) concept of social activism thrills me. The community built in these efforts also thrills me. I went to Ashland for Shakespeare Festival events and it was a beautiful place, and may still be.
Dr. King knew, and spoke to it toward the end, that capitalism was the problem. Saying so got him killed. It also burned up the western US this year, and there will be more before rainy season, if it rains this time. Capitalism put that CO2 in the atmosphere, and it continues because it’s an externalization of capital growth. The problem isn’t CO2. It’s capitalism.
Hope is necessary while we haven’t yet achieved objectives we set for our work. Hope is good until it influences us to take our eyes off the prize. Optimism is good till, in order to maintain legitimacy, it shifts to an objective that doesn’t liberate anyone. We can’t be optimistic about something that preserves a system of domination like capitalism.
Capitalism devotes a lot of attention to keeping power over the only legitimate source of political power, the consent of the governed. Capitalism hasn’t asked for our consent in its sordid history. It is imposed, as it was with enclosing and burning peasants off the Commons (that made the peasants landed people able to ‘just say no’ to capitalism’s need to force them to become Labor (this is “The Great Transformation,” by Karl Polanyi) captives because, without their land, the alternative to Labor was Poor Houses, worse than death.
We can’t clean up capitalism’s mess and call it success. Surely we can’t call it liberation.
Liberation is “The Prize” Dr. King told those of us conscious of being oppressed to keep our eye on. White, and privileged – the police would let my dad come to the jail and take me home, but the Black guys didn’t have that privilege. They were charged with crimes and had to make bail to go home. Knowing that is one of the things that changed my life. I caught chickens with those guys, but I was white, and not yet legal age. Me hanging with them after dark in 1968 got them in trouble. I was totally mystified until I saw the toxic social pattern and sought a new model of US society, while I was in Vietnam hanging with Black Panthers who were safer in Vietnam than at home. Talk about moral injury.
At no point in human history has violence liberated we, the people. It’s liberated capitalism, though, because it captured our government. We need to get it back to work at the scale required now to produce an ecologically and socially sound future.
To de-fund the police does not solve the problem capitalists use the police for: social control. The effort, originally, to protect slave owners from their slaves, now protects capitalists from its debt slaves, protects the unconscious from the conscious, protects the illiterate from the literate, and protects ecocide from nature protectors.
The fires out west this year weren’t caused by climate change, a symptom of capitalism. They were caused by capitalism. CO2 isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom of capitalism. Injustice isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom of capitalism. Everyplace there is a life and death problem on Earth, it’s a symptom of capitalism, if you get beneath the facade. The system of life destruction is capitalism, its elements are the problems, the messes we, the people, resolve, to keep us out of trouble. By the time we do, there’s another problem to resolve. So we resolve elements of the system without resolving capitalism, the system of ecocide and injustice of all forms that keeps capitalism in the predator role in predator/prey relations.
An ecological critique sees the application of predator/prey relations to humans as not only a source of oppression but also ecological nonsense. That’s why everyone can’t be ecologically literate. Ecological literacy endangers capitalism.
Capitalism, not people, commits ecocide. Those fires were ecocide.
The social control systems (Old South “policing”) now served up by police departments are paid for by public funding in order to protect the “rights” of capitalists to pursue unfettered capital growth – ecocide.
Old South plantation owners were capitalists with investments of their wealth in slaves who produced cotton that made owners rich and kept Black people surveilled and captive. That Old South policing is today a source of massive capital growth.
If not for Old South policing, Dr. King and the Kennedys would have completed the work of liberating “prey” from “predator” and we wouldn’t worry (if we’re ecologically literate) about our children and grandchildren having lives worth living after 2040 or so, at the current rate of ecocidal social pathology.
The Black men killed on the street on camera are the poster guys for social control. This could happen to you, too, if you don’t behave yourself, it says when the video is run on media outlets. Poverty is social control. Ignorance is social control. California used to pay for a person to go as far as they would to educate themselves. Reagan came in and turned that picture upside down trading education – and an awful lot of people who got it about capitalism – for prisons. Later, he did the same thing for this country. Social control.
Republicans yank the ignorant by the chains of the hatred true victims have for those who have even less than them so they’ll vote Republican. Social control.
There’s no way to face this problem with violence. This is the British in India. Sacrificial humans serve social control. Don’t go there.
The Prize is liberation. Who has been liberated?
Is anyone working directly on capitalism? It seems to me that a lot of the work being done today addresses elements of the system of social control rather than the system itself.
I don’t see liberation arising from cleaning up after capitalism-caused global warming that dried out forests so they don’t just burn – they literally explode. In a world without capitalism, the forests would not be dried out, but I see “battle hardened” activists who might take on capitalism. Oregon is a fiefdom.
It’s heartbreaking to read of so many people losing their homes in an area where so many people already had no homes. I’m in Northern California and we’re experiencing the same fires in the midst of a tight and expensive housing situation.
On the other hand, it’s heartwarming to read of so many people in these communities coming together to help. And again, that’s happening here. But–it won’t be easy and it will take time. In the long run, we have to work to change the unjust political and economic structure of our country. I read recently that every one of the thousands of homeless people in our country could have a home of their own for the cost of one of those huge and useless aircraft carriers our government easily finds the money to build!! Let’s turn this country around!! NOW!! Lilith