John Bowman talks about the ongoing fight against pandemics on two fronts.
One of them is COVID-19, says Bowman, president of the St. Louis County branch of the NAACP, and the other is what he calls COVID-1619, a reference to the battle for racial equity that has been raging in the streets of every major city in America since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But look to the skies in the West and you’ll see the third pandemic: climate change.
One of my sons lives in California; another in Colorado, and both sent me pictures recently of ash from the massive forest fires in the distance, collecting on their decks or their cars in the driveway. The memory took me back to when they were children, and we lived in the foothills of the Colorado mountains. I was driving home from an end-of-the season youth soccer picnic when I saw the massive plume of smoke rising south of Conifer. It was the beginning stages of the Buffalo Creek Fire, and I stopped at the grocery store, loaded up on bottled water and film for my camera, and drove to the smoke to cover what, at the time, would become one of the largest forest fires in Colorado history.
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That was in 1996. I made it to base camp and was there for several days, as roads leading in and out were cut off. A Salvation Army food truck arrived to provide meals to the firefighters and the few reporters who made it there. Cell service was spotty and we had to stand on the roof of a car and hold our phones in the air to try to get reception.
More than two decades later, the Buffalo Creek fire doesn’t even register on a top 20 list in Colorado forest fire history. Every year, it seems, some new blaze, started by lightning, an unattended fire, or arson, adds to a growing list. So it is, also, in California, and in Oregon, where multiple blazes last week forced the evacuations of tens of thousands of people. The fires out West have led to more than a dozen deaths so far. More are on the way.
In California, the three pandemics have merged. Climate change fuels the record blazes, aided by drought and wind; COVID-19 makes the firefighting harder, as traditional base camps are spread out to avoid transmission of the deadly virus, and because traditionally the state draws from the prison population for firefighting labor. Many of the men who had been behind bars, who had trained to fight fires, have been released from prison to reduce the spread of the virus. But outside of prison, those men, many of whom are Black or Hispanic, haven’t been allowed into the traditional fire service, despite their training and experience, because of the nation’s third pandemic that fuels mass incarceration and limits opportunities for people with crimes on their records. This week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom making it easier for former prison detainees to have their records expunged so they can get jobs as firefighters.
There is a common thread in all three pandemics that the nation must come to terms with if it wants to win the battle against any of them: Dishonesty.
This week, closer to home, for instance, a group of political leaders and environmental activists urged Ameren Missouri to accelerate the retirement of its coal plants, which long have been identified as contributing to man-made climate change. For decades, even while it told its shareholders it was investing hundreds of millions of dollars to prepare for climate change, the investor-owned utility joined in with other big corporations in the coal and gas industries intended to diminish the reality of climate change.
The efforts were successful in slowing public policy that would have prepared the nation for what is already happening before our very eyes, with fires out West, floods in the Midwest, rolling blackouts becoming a norm, and not just in California.
Climate change is real and it’s deadly. Just like COVID-19, and, as Bowman calls it, COVID-1619. But in an era in which disinformation has become the norm, where Republicans actually send QAnon conspiracy theorists to Congress, there are those among us who still think one, or the other, or all three of the raging pandemics are a hoax.
Fires so massive that they spew ash hundreds or thousands of miles away, are not a hoax. A death toll that will soon top 200,000 is not a hoax. Black men dying with knees on their necks or bullets in their backs is not a hoax.
Three pandemics rage in America. Only honest reflection and a sense of shared purpose can limit their damage.