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Why don’t you just leave? It’s always an incendiary question.
When you ask it of people in bad romances or miserable careers, they can be forgiven for ghosting. The word “just” is the poison. As if leaving were simple. It is never simple. The reasons to stay in a job or a relationship – children, money, comfort, love – can be every bit as compelling as the reasons to hit the road.
The same is true in California. The annual wildfires moved fast this year, and they were relentless. In less than a week, the fires razed more than 12,300 buildings in and around Los Angeles. Twenty-five people were killed. Smoke and toxins choke the air. More than 80,000 evacuees are still shut out of their neighborhoods. The fires have only just stopped raging.
If you’re an out-of-towner, studying the cyclical droughts and fires and surveying images of charred neighborhoods, it’s tempting to urge Californians to get the hell out.
Hold off. Hold the hell off. This is an extremely fragile time in California. When people lose their homes, whether in fire or evacuation, they also lose clothes, family photos, a world of creature comforts and often, most heartbreakingly, pets.
In demanding that people leave their homes, we may be asking them to leave the most important thing of all: their communities and their loved ones. Is an actuary-calculated measure of safety from wildfires worth giving up intimacy and proximity to the people who make life worth living?
David Graeber and David Wengrow put this calculus succinctly in The Dawn of Everything. “There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow,” they wrote. “And then there’s the security of knowing that there are people who will care deeply if one is.”
Practically speaking, people who experience disruptions after a disaster deteriorate the fastest, says Karestan Koenen, an expert in trauma at Harvard, who investigated the psychological effects of the 2018 Paradise fire in California. “To prevent long-term mental health consequences is to address people’s basic needs for a safe place to live, for food, for work,” says Koenen.
And yet, the response to the California fires from some quarters has come dangerously close to impatience, even to I-told-you-so. “The biggest thing to note about these fires in LA” said one Oregon climate expert, “is that none of this is surprising.”
No doubt this kind of observation is well-intended. But it’s not the time, and it never will be. Unsurprising tragedies – an addict’s overdose, a cancer patient’s death – are still tragedies.
I lived in New York City on 9/11. As the two enormous holes were smoking, the air suffused with asbestos and death, people from out of town kept telling me the attacks were predictable to anyone who had followed developments in the Middle East. They said I should leave.
These people too were well-intentioned. And maybe they were right. But the bodies hadn’t even been counted. We New Yorkers hadn’t yet been able to confer with each other about the city’s present dangers and possible futures. We hadn’t grieved, we hadn’t taken inventories of our needs and our values, we hadn’t even started to plan.
Eventually, in public and private discussions among ourselves, New Yorkers, together, found clarity and confidence in our personal decision-making about whether to stay or leave. Some picked up stakes. Some stayed and took heavy precautions. Some kept calm and carried on. Some played it by ear.
I’d like to say, as I empty my pockets and submit my bag to security goons outside every comedy show and piano recital, that I never regretted my decision. But I rethought it constantly. Now, 24 years later, I still do.
Angelenos must be afforded the same agency, autonomy and space to make – and rethink – and qualify – and act on their own choices. All of us, no matter where we live during the climate crisis, deserve that.
“Hundreds of millions of Americans are about to have a collision with planetary reality,” wrote the climate futurist Alex Steffen recently. Steffen, who teaches a course on climate and personal ruggedization, emphasizes that there is no one-size-fits-all response to that reality. Instead he urges participants to “become native to now”, “develop a healthy relationship to discontinuity” and “move from climate isolation to community”.
Isolation – now that’s something we should all leave, along with know-it-all-ism and solitary bunker-building. As fires and floods increasingly define our world, we don’t need advice or loaded questions. We need solidarity, imagination and mutual respect.
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Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic
