Imagine an August Sunday afternoon a decade from now. Maybe you’re reading in your backyard in Carbondale, Colorado, maybe you’re biking down the Boise River Greenbelt, maybe you’re stepping outside your front door in Tucson. And then the sky turns a flat and ominous shade of orange-gray, and your eyes begin to water from a familiar acrid scent — wildfire smoke.
Or maybe not. Perhaps the sky stays a perfect blue, and you can go about your day without thinking of blazes nearby or distant, all because of the choices people made a decade ago. Perhaps a controlled burn in the North Cascades the previous autumn prevented a single stray spark from turning into a catastrophic wildfire — but only because an increasingly engaged public demanded that policymakers ramp up such burning.
It can be hard to recognize a lack of something: less intense fires, smaller and not-so-deadly floods, summer nights that aren’t quite so hot. But these potential future scenarios are also marked by abundance: of cleaner air, healthy ecosystems, cooler temperatures and a more livable and just world. It’s that abundance that’s worth fighting for as the Western U.S. confronts the climate crisis.
This special issue of High Country News is devoted to stories of climate action and collective agency. It’s about the work people are doing now to decarbonize the West, mitigate the climate crisis’ worst impacts, and rethink the systems that caused the crisis in the first place. We were inspired in part by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua’s anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, in which Solnit writes, “We are deep in an emergency, and we need as many people as possible to do what they can to work toward the best-case scenarios and ward off the worst.”
The idea is not to dismiss climate despair, but rather to show that it’s possible to channel despair into action. Building a better future is a collective effort, and my hope is that no matter who you are, where you live, or what you’re motivated by, you’ll see some element of yourself in the people in this issue, whether they’re pushing their electrical utility to move to renewable energy in New Mexico, working to restore an estuary in California, or building a new, climate-resilient version of a very old food system in Alaska. Working together, we can make a difference. And in 10 years, under a clear August sky, we’ll have all of us to thank.
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This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Fighting for an abundant future.
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