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Welcome to Your Daily Dot where Dot will share tips, advice, and stories on how we can make our world better. |
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Dear Reader,
Dot’s friend, who lives on a peninsula off the coast of British Columbia, felt rattled last summer after attending a talk by Pulitzer Prize-winner John Vaillant about his book Fire Weather (on Amazon). My friend hadn’t paid a lot of attention to news of climate change and so Vaillant’s warnings about our changing planet — that we have created “a fire planet … with an atmosphere more conducive to combustion than at any time in the past three million years” — seemed shocking.
I suspect we’re all somewhat stunned, if not surprised, by California’s most recent wildfires. A while back, the region experienced significant downpours, which prompted lots of growth. More recently, there’s been extreme drought, turning that growth into kindling. Add the fierce Santa Ana winds and you’ve got conditions, even in January, conducive to a “fire planet,” where none of us are exempt from the impacts. It’s devastating to so many, including to a handful of Bluedotters who live or lived in and around Los Angeles and feel helpless as news filters in of friends fleeing or losing their homes.
Another Bluedotter, Lily Olsen, a California-born editor, brought us a story about the incredible work the firefighters do to battle these blazes. And California native and Bluedot reporter Jasper Cerone shared a story about the work his best friend has been doing harnessing AI to help predict where wildfires might erupt, after a summer spent fighting fires.
Bluedot’s founder Vicki Riskin grew up in the Pacific Palisades, (you likely read her post in Saturday’s Daily Dot). As she put it, “This is climate change.” As John Vaillant put it in his book, referring to a previous fire (but just as true today), “Through the fire’s countless acts of transformative violation, the ordinary was made grotesque; neighborhoods once distinguished by tidy uniformity now looked like suburban Hells rendered by Salvador DalĂ.”
Our hearts ache for everyone affected. Please help where you can.
Sadly,
Dot
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