Nimby

Not in my backyard, not in my neighborhood, don’t destroy my view, yes for us and no for everybody else. A gathering, a picking, a sifting, a rejecting, a defending, most of us know we’re experiencing climate violence and that we’re headed into a future we’re most likely unprepared for in its stripping away of our rich and posh lifestyles.

No, I probably don’t want one of those giant white windmills in my backyard—I hear the sound is enormous! I’m also not so sure I want to give up my car, though my decade younger neighbors have and seem to be glowing with health.

On the radio this morning I listened to the Bioneer’s and hear of Norway is storing carbon emissions under the North Sea and Austria’s careful studies of damage to the Alps, ski resorts in which one must arrive having abandoned their car.

And, what will happen to beer prices across the world with a shortage of barley? The German jokes the American will have twenty-percent less beer-pong games!

Seriously though, I drove a thousand miles this August to attend my son’s wedding in Utah and fires in the foothills were raging. The tall blonde, sprayed woman at the cowboy-boot store told me Sanpete County was burning at 1000 acres a minute!

Later the next evening as we sat around a glass table on my mom’s back patio, my youngest son pointed at the mountain and asked, “Is that a volcano?” Just another wildfire seemingly springing out of nowhere, giant plumes of gray smoke--my daughter experienced a nosebleed that night.

I won’t go into all of the details here, but Utah is looking much more like Mexico country as the years go on and Governor Gary Herbert declared, “this year will go down as one of the worst wildfire seasons on record.”

After the wedding I did look forward to our return to coastal cool and cleaner air, but Idaho was also on fire, asphalt through blackened sage, and near Hood River, Oregon we drove under and through raining, gray-white ash, we reached home in the middle of the night and straight to bed, but the air still seemed acrid?

The next morning we were surprised to see smoke so dense here on the coast and learned it was blowing in from the Canadian wildfires and so there was no relief. What a suffocating feeling to travel such a distance and to experience firsthand the extent of this summer’s fires and the realization that even being on the edge of the great filter we know as the Pacific Ocean wasn’t enough to offer fresh breathing air.

My point is we’re all in this together, fires and storms know no boundaries, and we all could benefit as individuals and a community by taking a closer look at our own nimby parts.

Photo Credit: Breno Assis/unsplash & Nico/unsplash & Matt Howard/unsplash