How Climate Change Skeptics Are Dealing With the California Wildfires – By Mary Harris (Slate) / Sept 22 2020
One longtime Republican rancher now understands climate change is happening. But her neighbors aren’t quite on board—yet.
Megan Brown is a rancher and blogger in Northern California who raises cattle and hogs at her family’s longtime property in Butte County. She grew up on this farm, on land her family has worked for 170 years. She knows the place so well that she can tell what season it is by smell. Right now, it’s fire season. Brown’s ranch is just a few miles from the North Complex Fires, which were touched off by a lightning storm back in August. Even though what’s happening now is scary, Brown knows the fires have always been there; it’s the scale that’s changed. Trying to understand this, and trying to save her ranch and her animals, has meant rethinking some pretty basic assumptions she’d made—about climate change, for one. Now she’s trying to convince her neighbors of the dangers in store. On Tuesday’s episode of What Next, I spoke with Brown about her experiences with the fires, her own reckoning on global warming, and how she’s trying to sound the alarms for her community. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mary Harris: It sounds like the first time you really evacuated was a couple of years ago. And I’m wondering, when was it that you realized, I’ve lived with fire for years now, but I think I have to leave?
Megan Brown: When the Camp Fire hit Paradise. When I was sitting here in my backyard looking at the smoke and it suddenly turned black, and I knew that was the town of Paradise and this was not normal, this is not how it’s supposed to be here. We don’t have fires that last for months and burn this much.
One thing that really, really freaks me are the grasshoppers—they’re like biblical grasshoppers. Over the past two years it’s been so bad that we’ve had to sell cattle that we’d normally keep. I usually keep about 60 head of heifers, cows that haven’t given birth yet. That’s how keep my herd growing and replace old cows. But because of the grasshoppers, I’ve had to sell them.
Continue to article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/09/california-wildfires-climate-change-skeptics-farmers-ranchers.html
