The summer before I turned 17 was the worst fire season in Montana history. The Rice Ridge fire outside of Seeley Lake grew 60,000 acres in a single day, filling the beautiful Blackfoot Valley, where I’ve lived my entire life, with smoke and threatening evacuation for my family and many of our friends and neighbors. And we had it much better than most of the people living in the Seeley-Swan Valleys, who breathed air filled with the particulates of their burning forests for most of the dry summer and well into the fall, and continue to feel the effects on their respiratory systems. I’d never felt so terrified, so close to losing such an enormous part of myself and I never thought I would again.
Now I’m in Portland, Oregon for college, and the entire West Coast faces fires of similar size and unpredictability, while whacky weather events in other parts of the country and world endanger and hurt communities just as they did mine.
This time, the fear I feel isn’t just worrying about how we’ll make it through the next few weeks until the rains come. It’s worrying about what the rest of the fire seasons of my lifetime will look like. When I think about how I want to spend the next six decades or so of my life, it’s not inside with an air filter while an orange haze of smoke covers everything like a blanket. It’s not skiing in the mountains for a shorter and shorter time each year as the snowpack slowly shrinks, and it’s not watching the streams and rivers I’ve fished with my dad become slow and warm and empty of beautiful, healthy trout. But as I watch politicians continue to brush over the underlying cause of megafires and other climate catastrophes, that possibility seems to become more and more likely.
We’re past the point where merely preventing the climate change that is a main cause of these catastrophes is an option. Fixing an issue this huge, scary and complex will require public officials who are just as scared, angry, determined and organized as we are – so let’s make sure this and every election cycle that those are the people we put into office using our votes and our voices. Ballots are arriving at residences all across the state this week. If you have any questions about how to vote, visit voteinMT.org!
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