Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

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June 16, 2011 Tomgram: Chip Ward, Fire's Manifest Destiny [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Last-chance reminder: the offer of a personalized, signed copy of the single must-read history book of the summer, Adam Hochschild’s bestselling To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918, in return for a $100 contribution to this website will end early next week.  It’s been the most successful book-linked fund-drive we’ve launched and I thank everyone who has contributed!  Book lovers who haven’t done so yet and don’t want to miss the chance should hustle to our donation page now by clicking here.  Tom] We’ve entered an era of environmental extremity.  Former governor of Arizona and Clinton-era Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt made the point bluntly in a recent speech: “I believe that this Congress, in its assaults on our environment, has embarked on the most radical course in our history... a pattern of a broad, sustained assault on nearly all our environmental laws.” But the full-scale extremity of the dismantling urge of climate-change-denying (or -ignoring) House Republicans is nothing compared to the increasing extremity of nature itself.  These days, you can’t miss it if you turn on the TV news where storms, fires, and floods dominate, or simply look out your window more or less anywhere in this country right now (as I can attest having just returned from a visit to sweltering, early-June, 100-degree Washington, DC).  If you live in western Kansas, for example, and open your shades, you’re probably facing extreme drought conditions, while in the eastern part of the same state, you may be worrying about a deluge at possibly historic levels, thanks to the rampaging Missouri River. If southeast Georgia is your habitat, then maybe you’ve noticed that, with drought conditions covering three-quarters of the state, the wildfire season that should have ended by now hasn’t, and that 300 square miles of the Okefenokee Swamp are ablaze for the sixth straight week, as new fires are reported all the time.  On the other hand, should you live anywhere downhill from the West’s high country, you’re probably worrying about whether, with summer coming on, that staggering snowpack will turn into a raging flood.  If you happen to be in Texas, facing the worst drought since the first weather records were kept, maybe you’re wondering where all the water went.  (If you’re in the Texas oil or natural gas business, reliant on large supplies of water to operate, you, too, may be wondering, and even the House Republicans can’t help you.) If you live in Arizona... but in a pall of smoke, let Chip Ward, westerner, environmental author, and TomDispatch regular who has long been writing about a West that's drying out, take up the story.  (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Ward discusses global “weirding,” click  here, or download it to your iPod  here.)  Tom How the West Was Lost The American West in Flames By Chip Ward Arizona is burning. Texas, too. New Mexico is next. If you need a grim reminder that an already arid West is burning up and blowing away, here it is.  As I write this, more than 700 square miles of Arizona and more than 4,300 square miles of Texas have been swept by monster wildfires. Consider those massive columns of acrid smoke drifting eastward as a kind of smoke signal warning us that a globally warming world is not a matter of some future worst-case scenario.  It’s happening right here, right now. Air tankers have been dropping fire retardant on what is being called the Wallow fire in Arizona and firefighting crews have been mobilized from across the West, but the fire remained “zero contained” for most of last week and only 18% so early in the new week, too big to touch with mere human tools like hoses, shovels, saws, and bulldozers.  Walls of flame 100 feet high rolled over the land like a tsunami from Hades. The heat from such a fire is so intense and immense that it can create small tornadoes of red embers that cannot be knocked down and smothered by water or chemicals. These are not your grandfather’s forest fires. Click here to read more of this dispatch.