Today on 'Today' - Memory Palaces on Fire

One of my favourite books in my ever increasing portfolio on climate change is 'Nomad Century - How Climate Migration Will Shape the World' by Gaia Vince, a book i recommend everyone should read.

However, its rare that a media interview cuts through as much as this one did this morning that it warrants sharing. Emma Barnett was interviewing John Valiant, a prize-winning author about the fires in Los Angeles on BBC Radio 4's Today programme and his observations just seemed to hit home.

Emma Barnett - "One man keenly observing what's happening is the author, John Valiant, who wrote the Bailey Gifford prize winning book, 'Fire Weather, a true story from a hotter world'. His book, which won that prestigious literary prize in 2023 tells a story of how wildfires overwhelmed a city in Canada. He's been following these fires happening in Los Angeles closely. I started by asking what he makes of them."

John Valiant?- "Well, it's tragically familiar, and I think when you look at the global sweep of these things, the steady heating of the planet and the intensification of fire in all kinds of places, from Southern Europe to northern Canada to California, you can see the pattern. And yet, for the people who are being driven out of their homes with nothing to come back to in Pasadena and Hollywood and Santa Monica. It's new and shocking. And you're seeing these quotes of people saying, I've never seen anything like this. I can't believe this. This has never happened here before. And so there's this strange disconnect between the individual surprise in the face of this larger trend of many previous occurrences of fires like this. And so I see a real dissonance as someone who studies this, but for people in this immediate community, even though they're really from the capital of disastrous fire, which is California, I'm surprised that they're surprised.

EB - "I suppose you only know what you know in the sense of and what you've experienced. You don't always zoom out even just a little bit."

JV - You know what? I think, what we do, Emma, is we build bubbles around ourselves, and we have this uncanny I think it's how we survive psychically. You know, under stressful circumstances is we see these things happening to other people, and yet we put ourselves in somehow a separate enclosure that's happening to them, but that won't happen to me. These are people living in Southern California, one of the most flammable regions, really on the continent, and yet they've still kind of manufactured this kind of artificial space for themselves, and that, I don't think that's climate denial. I think that is a technique that Homo sapiens have have employed to to keep their psyches safe.

EB - "And you also live in a similar part of the world, is that right?"

JV - "I do. I'm up in Vancouver, British Columbia, which is technically the rain forest, but has found itself burning much like Southern California, just in the past 10 years. And so I'm very familiar with this self protective technique, and I was happy in Canada thinking, well, that's a California problem. We don't need to worry about that here, and we've had disastrous fires in British Columbia over the past five or 10 years, epic fires. And now, you know, we're all really sobered and chastened and realizing we're part of it.

EB - "When you're not in it at all, and you're far from it, you can think, why do people live there? And why do they go back. I mean, they might have to go back logistically, certainly at first. But what has your research and writing told you about life after fires?"

JV - "Well, it's life changing for one thing, and if you saw these regions that burned over the past 24 hours, Palisades, Santa Monica, Pasadena, Hollywood, these are enchanting, storied, stunningly beautiful parts of the country, and they're rich historically. They're rich culturally. And one of the reasons they have this charisma is because they are so physically beautiful. And you know, it's earthquake prone, it's fire prone, and yet it draws charismatic, creative people by the 1000s. And so, you know, that's a tension that I think you know, West Coast Americans are comfortable with. But this reckoning with the destruction and seeing that it really can go, that it really can be taken from you is profound. And the people I've interviewed, especially up in Canada and northern California, where I did most of my interviewing a few years ago, it's really like a death in the family, and it comes so suddenly. It's very psychically disorienting, because your home, especially if you've lived there for a while, especially if you've raised children there. That's where all your memories are. That's your memory palace. And when that is gone, when it's a pile of ash, you realize then how much our psyches and memories are attached to objects and place. And when that place is as altered as these neighborhoods and Palisades are, they're unrecognizable. They look like scenes from eastern Ukraine. And it's so shocking to the heart and so shocking to the mind. And then there's the physical problem of, where do you go? And so suddenly, you know you were, you know, a millionaire homeowner, 36 hours ago, and now you are literally a refugee in your own country, and you have the added uncertainty of the insurance industry, which its replacement of your property is now no longer a given. The insurance industry, as you may know, is in real disarray right now, especially in North America."

EB - "Do people leave?"

JV - "Yes, they do, absolutely. There are climate refugees all over the US now, and some of them, in fact, moved to the mountains of North Carolina because they thought that would be a climate stable place. And then hurricane Helen came along a couple of months ago and wiped it out. And you know what? When people ask me, I'm touring around talking about 'Fire weather', they say, where should we go? And I say, There's nowhere to go. You need to stay in the place that means the most to you and figure out how to harden it against the plausible threats to it."

EB - "And is that the only answer? Do you think in a hotter world?"

JV - Well, there's a multi pronged approach. And you know, the larger societal, cultural move is to decarbonize as rapidly as possible. In the meantime, this is a stern invitation to reacquaint ourselves with nature and to be reminded that whatever business we're in, whatever venture we're engaged with, nature owns 51% of it at least. And if we're going to get anywhere, if we're going to find any peace or stability, we have to renegotiate our relationship to nature, and that's a profound cultural and psychic and physical change that we need to go through as as individuals and communities."

EB - " John Valiant there, the author of 'Fire Weather, a true story from a hotter world'. Really fascinating insights into that, that dissonance that people can have when they live somewhere where there is this sort of risk."