Reflections On Climate Change, From Someone Who Lost Her Home In A Forest Fire

As I arrived home late on October 23, I had no idea that it would never look the same again. I received a text that a fire had started near my family's ranch and was quickly moving in our direction. With no time to grab any personal belongings, I drove to my mother's house to wake her up, and we evacuated.

I watched in my car from a distance as Kincade Fire roared to life, taking my home with it. The Kincade Fire destroyed over 75,000 acres.

I am very thankful that my family and I are safe, and I know that not everyone in California can say the same. Further south, the legendary Santa Ana winds fueled two other massive flares, the Getty and Easy Fires, both in densely populated areas. In at least two of these cases, power lines along arid terrain were involved in igniting the fires, aided by a growing trend in California's weather: hurricane-force winds paired with low humidity and precipitation.

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, a global scientific powerhouse commissioned by the United Nations, shared a report urging humanity to halve global emissions by 2030 in order to avoid catastrophic climate fallout. The report gave us a choice; we can continue to be reactive and adapt in small and insufficient ways, or we can be sweepingly proactive and turn a dire situation into an opportunity for innovation, global stability, and growth.

We need to look past our most immediate needs and accept that this is a global crisis. That is the only way that we will solve this problem. Currently, we are living in a moment of pseudo-optimism, as though there is one yet-to-be identified technological solution that will suddenly reverse the impacts of the climate crisis. There is no silver bullet, but we do have real and tangible solutions already at our disposal. We have to demand action from our world leaders to take these solutions seriously and implement them before it's too late. We must work together across industries and specialties to demand action from those in power to make the climate emergency our global priority.