These are some beautiful night sky photos, showing the Milky Way and a gorgeous collection of stars, but if you look into the yellow bands of light pollution, you will see a vivid orange glow and a clump of smoke. Those aren’t sunsets, they’re forest fires.
Y’all, my backyard is on fire. I grew up used to yearly wildfires in the inland northwest, but this isn’t supposed to happen in a temperate rainforest. It’s suspected that most of these are arson, but this wouldn’t be as devastating if it weren’t for the fact that we haven’t had rain in three months. Places that usually receive 60-80 inches of rain a year are experiencing a drought right now, to the point where washing the ash off your car is too frivolous to justify. The arsonist(s) is why we’re all breathing in bullshit, but they alone did not create this drought. We did this, and our predecessors did this, and our grandchildren will be the ones suffering for it.
I won’t pretend like I’m not sharing these beautiful night-sky photos as a vehicle for my environmental rants, but y’all, this isn’t normal and it isn’t okay. Don’t let anyone tell you that the Forer effect is just making you notice more crazy weather – if we continue on this path the Earth will shrug us off like ticks, one natural disaster at a time, and it’s happening now.
Chances are, if you’re reading this, you aren’t a fucking billionaire, so don’t count on Elon Musk raining Mars tickets on us all to avoid this ugly fate. We are barreling toward the destruction of our planet at an alarming rate and if you’re not freaking out about it, you’re missing the razed Amazonian forest for the raw materials (or as the hippies call them, “trees”).
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