It’s bad all the way down into the mountains here.
I’m disappointed. I was hoping I would get some pro insight on the why’s and how’s of this from some folks in the industry up there. Having some box fan hack is handy but it’s just making your seat on the life raft more comfortable. Why did the titanic sink?
We are talking trees, we are talking forests. Do we really know nothing about what is making this so particularly bad right now?
I’m not about to normalize not being able to go outside. Wtf. The rainwater on the entire globe is now poisoned with plastic too.
We have been very lucky so far this year. Im not saying this as a smartass, but I'm glad the rest of the country is getting a taste of what we have been dealing with for the past 5 years or so. It's time to adapt, this is getting worse and not better.
I hit a wall a few years ago. Up in a tree on the top of a 300' cliff, choking on smoke doing some view pruning... Only the mountains were not out that day due to the sea of yellow brown smoke thick as a dense fog. I wanted to disconnect and swan out of the tree and down to the rocks below.
We need to adapt, there is no going backwards and this IS the new normal. The question is do we allow it to get worse? This is why I'm happy the rest of the country is experiencing what has become normal here.
The first time I stood up to my Dad, was when he offered to let me light off the trash fire. Old carpet, foam, plastic bags full of packing peanuts... He proudly handed me the tin can of diesel and the box of matches. I refused them, and said something like "Do you want me to have to wear a gas mask by the time I'm your age?"..... He got PISSED, and I could see the internal struggle of trying not to smack me. A instant later, he softened. Told me I was right and we loaded up the shit into the truck to haul it to the dump... Look at us now, when covid hit we already had a leftover stash of N95's from the previous summer, and I was already getting use to working while wearing a mask.
We are being Gaslit on the blame, not that we don't have blood on our hands. But the only thing we can do is change what we do personally. I've taken to shifting my business to climate mitigation work, using arboriculture as a tool. There is now no such thing as a natural environment, we have the choice of blundering along as a industry capitalizing, or make thoughtful changes to our environments to make them more resilient.
We have started planting with a tactical specie assisted migration plan. Installing passive rainwater systems, culling and fire mitigation work... I need to do more, much more but its the begging of what I'm shifting into.
