The forerunner

There is something very Californian about believing it’s possible to survive anywhere.

Joan Didion knew this. In her 1968 collection of essays, Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Didion wrote of the desert metropolis’ clime, “Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability.”

The same could be said of the entire state. Where early white settlers found a floodplain, they built their capital city, Sacramento. And even amid the rubble of the city’s most destructive earthquake, San Franciscans nonetheless rebuilt.

Left: Dark smoke billows above a structure. Right: Light gray and reddish smoke rises above a home surrounded by trees. — Left: A column of smoke rises behind a house in Lake Wildwood, California, as Mark and Kathy Baldassari prepare to evacuate from the 49er Fire on Sept. 11, 1988. Right: Smoke from the 49er Fire rises behind homes in Lake Wildwood, a small community in Nevada County, on Sept. 11, 1988. The fire burned through nearly 36,000 acres and destroyed almost 150 homes, making it California’s third most destructive wildfire at the time. Now, it’s not even in the top 20. (Courtesy of Mark and Kathy Baldassari)

My own earliest memory, if an infant can be said to have one, is of a thick column of gray and black smoke rising behind my family’s house the day we evacuated from a wildfire.

It was Sept. 11, 1988. I was just over a year old. My dad would later describe the fire’s path: not a continuous wall, but jagged, like fingers on a hand, touching some homes, refusing others — sparing ours.

“And you kind of wonder why,” he mused, “why did it spare that house and burn that one?”

It was called the 49er Fire because it broke out near Highway 49 in Nevada County. It tore through nearly 36,000 acres of forest and grasslands and destroyed almost 150 homes. At the time, it was the state’s third-largest wildfire and is still the county’s most destructive.

Several houses beside fire-scorched terrain. — The 1988 49er Fire burned through nearly 36,000 acres in Nevada County and destroyed almost 150 homes. (Courtesy of Mark and Kathy Baldassari)

In a prediction that feels prescient today, Jerry Partain, then-director of California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, now called Cal Fire, told The Sacramento Bee, “This [fire] is the classic. This is what we’ve been preaching about for the past several years. This is just the forerunner.”

What Partain had been preaching about — fireproofing homes and managing the surrounding vegetation — is now a familiar sermon to anyone living in Northern California today, but one that was met with obstinance by the willful inhabitants of that era, a generally unyielding lot with a profound distrust of government matronism and a deep reverence for stick-to-itiveness, the miner’s luck and the sanctity of private property.

Speaking with The Sacramento Bee, Partain stood in front of a map detailing the fire’s course, acknowledging there was no way to save every home. “It will continue to happen in the future,” he said.

People sit on blankets and fold out chairs in a grassy space. — Attendees lounge on the grass during the dinner hour at the Sierra Storytelling Festival at the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center in North San Juan on July 8, 2023. (Photo by Erin Baldassari/KQED) (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

With the future came more residents, living with more risk. Between 1990 and 2010, the county’s population grew 26%, mirroring a trend seen across the country (PDF) as more people than ever flooded into wildland areas.

In California, nearly half of all homes built during that time period were constructed in areas designated at “high or extreme risk of wildfire,” according to the Center for Insurance Policy and Research. Nevada County was no exception, where more than nine out of every 10 residents live in “high or very high” fire hazard zones.

That wildfires have become more destructive over the past 40 years is simple math, UC Berkeley’s Gonzalez said. “The losses of homes and people, who sadly die in a wildfire, is a function of the number of people who live in fire-prone areas,” he said.

The smoldering remains of a fire near a house. — A controlled fire burns near a home on a private property in Penn Valley, a small, rural community in Nevada County, California, on June 22, 2023. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

He continued: “Climate change is exacerbating the risk. So, that makes it even more important [to limit] the number of people who move into or build new houses in fire-prone areas.”

Brute reckoning

The 49er Fire left its mark on my psyche, attuning me to dry, summer winds, focusing my attention on anything that could produce an errant spark, and heightening my awareness, early on, of my own precarity.

But for many in Nevada County, myself included, it was still only a glimpse into a distant future. Brute reckoning came much later, in 2018, with the Camp Fire in Paradise, California, which is one county away from Nevada County.

Trucks with piles of logs in the truck beds form a line in a lot near a wooded area. — Vehicles filled with green waste wait in line during a free residential disposal hosted by the Fire Safe Council of Nevada County in Grass Valley on June 26, 2023. Residents can bring all tree and plant trimmings, weeds, leaves, branches, and pine needles, except for some plants like scotch broom and poison oak, in an effort to create defensible space on their properties. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

YubaNet’s Fusshoeller held a town hall event a week after the fire began. Minutes after the doors opened, the seats had filled to capacity, followed by the building’s overflow rooms.

“And then there were still people outside,” Fusshoeller recalled. “It was the whole community. They were scared.”

The fire became a wake-up call — and a rallying cry.

“We regularly hear that this is the next Camp Fire,” said Jamie Jones, the executive director of the Fire Safe Council of Nevada County, a nonprofit formed in the wake of the 49er Fire.

A group of people wearing hard hats walk along a roadway beside a stretch of burnt forest. — Crew members from the Fire Safe Council of Nevada County walk to the site where they were performing a ‘mop up’ following a prescribed burn in Nevada County on June 21, 2023. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

“We have watersheds that if a fire starts on the wrong day and the wrong conditions — or you could call it the right conditions — we could have a potential catastrophic loss like Paradise did,” she said.

Spurred by that rallying cry, Jones’ organization ballooned from three employees to more than 50, with its own land management crew, free advisory visits for homeowners, a roving wood-chipper, and a robust grant-writing department, among other initiatives.

“It became a huge priority to fund [wildfire] mitigation work,” Jones said. “We just kind of grabbed the bull by the horns and said, ‘We’ll do it. We’ll be that large nonprofit to work in this space.’”

Two people use a rake-like device to remove all of the dried green waste from the bed of a truck. — Employees help people unload green waste during a free residential disposal hosted by the Fire Safe Council of Nevada County in Grass Valley on June 26, 2023. Residents can bring all tree and plant trimmings, weeds, leaves, branches, and pine needles, except for some plants like scotch broom and poison oak, in an effort to create defensible space on their properties. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

But the Camp Fire also incited residents to act. Today, Nevada County, with a population of just over 100,000 people, boasts the highest number of Firewise Communities in the country — a program run by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) that encourages neighborhoods to organize and collectively complete fire safety projects, such as thinning trees along evacuation routes and clearing excess brush on individual properties.

Before the Camp Fire, Jones said there were 22 Firewise Communities in the county. As of October, there were 94, according to the NFPA.

“I think it speaks volumes to how committed our community is to protecting their families, their loved ones, their neighbors, and the community that we live in,” Jones said.

Still, she said progress remains stilted in other ways. For instance, Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019 fast-tracked 35 wildfire defense projects across the state, including one in Nevada County, the Ponderosa West Grass Valley Defense Zone shaded fuel break.

The project provided free brush clearing on residents’ properties to allow firefighters to more easily defend the town of Grass Valley. But four years after the first phase began, many of the property owners have failed to maintain their land.

One hand holds up a paper map while the other hand points to an area on the map. — Jim Mathias, the wildfire prevention and safety manager of the Fire Safe Council of Nevada County, holds a map of a plan for a shaded fuel break in southern Nevada County on June 26, 2023. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

On a recent tour, Jones pointed to a property where the homeowner had positioned himself as a poster child of compliance. Crispy brush and small trees, perfect kindling for a big wildfire, now crowded beneath towering oak and manzanita trees.

“He sold two years into the project,” she lamented. The new property owner never picked up the work. Continued compliance requires constant care — and a long memory.

Our place on the planet

As the spokesperson for the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, Shelly Covert carries with her a cultural memory that spans centuries. What it takes to live in wildland areas today, she said, is in some ways not so different from when her relatives lived freely off the land — and that is constant tending.

For her relatives, that meant cutting trees, harvesting smaller branches, and collecting reeds — work now done with chainsaws and machines.

A woman's face is reflected in a mirror with brown writing. — Shelly Covert, spokesperson for the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, in Nevada City, on June 6, 2022. (Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

The difference, she said, is that the Nisenan used these materials in their homes, acorn granaries, tools and baskets. That these same actions also made the forests more resilient to — and protected the Nisenan from — catastrophic wildfires was secondary. Today, the accumulation of these same plant materials is a burden.

“Nobody wants it,” she said. “So, how are forests ever going to be tended in that way again when we don’t need the freaking stuff that’s all over the ground?”

Nevada County’s Fire Safe Council is trying to help relieve that burden with a free green waste disposal site in Grass Valley. This past June, on the last day it was open for the season, crews heaped logs into towering piles, mounded branches atop each other, and stacked firewood for the taking.

A person wearing a large wicker hat and sunglasses stands in front of piles of wood and speaks to the driver of a vehicle. — Jonny Sjobeck (left) talks with Roland Harrison during a free green waste residential disposal hosted by the Fire Safe Council of Nevada County in Grass Valley on June 26, 2023. Residents can bring all tree and plant trimmings, weeds, leaves, branches, and pine needles, except for some plants like scotch broom and poison oak, in an effort to create defensible space on their properties. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Suzi and Doug Clipperton waited in line for their turn to unload the towering pile of branches in the back of their truck. They had moved to the county from Palm Springs two years ago, and though their property is relatively small, at one acre, it still produces an abundance of vegetation.

Without the green waste disposal site, Suzi Clipperton said she would be forced to pay to get rid of the materials at the dump.

“It’s so expensive, even the green waste,” she said. “Over $25 a truckload, over and over several times a month.”

Getting to a truly sustainable lifestyle in the forested foothills is still a long way off, Covert said.

“It’s just the way we’ve built our built lives,” she said.

But that’s not what people, myself included, want to talk to her about these days. All we want to talk to her about is how to use fire to fight fire.

A person holds a device to dried grass to start a fire. — Dylan Drummond wields a drip torch, which he uses to ignite grasses during a prescribed burn on a private property in Penn Valley, a small, rural community in Nevada County on June 22, 2023. The burn aims to reduce the brush and grasses that fuel megafires while also helping to restore native plants to the region. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

The practice, called controlled or prescribed burns, has gained momentum in recent years as a way to clear the brush and grasses that fuel megafires. But Covert’s relatives also burned the land to remove bug infestations from trees, clear land for hunting and travel and promote certain kinds of plants. Public officials have been increasingly turning to her to tap into the tribe’s cultural knowledge.

On one hand, Covert said she appreciates having a seat at the table, an opportunity her grandparents were never afforded. On the other, she said it’s hard for her not to roll her eyes during those same meetings.

“Don’t tell me those old people didn’t sit there and say, ‘You can’t not burn the land.’ It was unfathomable to them,” she said. “We have to burn the land, and we have to burn our dead.”

Green plants sprout from a burned land. — This yampa root survives a prescribed burn on a private property in Penn Valley, a small, rural community in Nevada County, California, on June 22, 2023. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

When white settlers arrived during the Gold Rush, they not only outlawed the practice of burning the land but also the Nisenan practice of cremating their dead. And, while government officials now recognize fire as essential to maintaining forest health, Nisenan cremations are still outlawed.

During those ceremonies, the nearest female relatives of the deceased would mix pine pitch with ash to blacken their heads and shoulders, washing their faces only after the mixture had worn off, thus defining the period of mourning. Other relatives and friends gathered around to sing and cry. Every year, an annual mourning ceremony, or “Second Burning,” was held for everyone who died that year.

“My grandma said that the old ladies used to wipe each other’s tears and hold each other up because they were so fraught with sadness,” Covert said.

To Covert, burning the land and burning the dead are not two practices with distinct purposes and outcomes. They are the same practice for the same purpose of binding humanity to all other life and to the land.

A fire burns dried grasses around the truck of a tree. — Workers perform a prescribed burn on a private property in Penn Valley, a small, rural community in Nevada County on June 22, 2023. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

She said the cremation ceremony is at the core: “It is the kickstarter of all these other protocols that come into play that are respect for the land, respect for the animals, respect for the spirit, respect for one another. And that’s it.”

It is the foundation that allows them to see themselves as both indebted to a place and responsible for it.

“We have thumbs. We can light fire. We can pull and tend the rubbish in the forests,” Covert said. “That is our place on this planet.”

Good fire

In a small community on the western flank of Nevada County, atop a ridge overlooking Lake Wildwood, where the 49er Fire raged 35 years ago, three young men holding drip torches set fire to the land.

It was an abnormally cool June day. The crew of roughly a dozen, dressed in flannel shirts, blue jeans and boots, worked methodically downhill. Some held water bladders to douse fires burning into tree roots. Others were posted at control lines to ensure the fire stayed within its boundaries. One roamed the perimeter on a motorcycle to watch for spotfires.

A man holds a water hose near a smoked filled forest area. — Kevin Bratton uses a hose to douse the roots of a pine tree during a prescribed burn on a private property in Penn Valley, a small, rural community in Nevada County on June 22, 2023. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

They were lighting a controlled burn on the roughly 80-acre property, with the twin goals of reducing the wildfire risk and promoting native plants, which often need the low-intensity fires to drop seeds or sprout from dormancy.

“When you see the effects of fire, it all makes sense,” said Tim Van Wagner, an organic farmer in Nevada County and broadcast burn practitioner, who led the burn that day. “All of a sudden, you actually realize the insanity of how we have been able to suppress fire and the damage it’s done.”

The more fuel there is to burn, the hotter the fire becomes, and the more likely they are to permanently incinerate even the most fire-adapted forests.

A person in a baseball cap walks through a smokey open space. — Tim Van Wagner, a broadcast burn practitioner, oversees a prescribed burn on a private property in Penn Valley, a small, rural community in Nevada County on June 22, 2023. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

But bringing “good fire” back hasn’t been easy, said fire historian and author Stephen Pyne.

“We spent 50 years trying to take all fire out of the landscape,” he said, “and we’ve spent 50 years trying to put good fire back in.”

Federal regulators restricted broadcast burns beginning in 1910, following a particularly fearsome spate of fires known as the “Big Blowup,” when some 3 million acres of forestland in Idaho and Montana burned over the course of two short days (PDF), killing 86 people — the most in US history, until this year’s fires in Maui. By the time the National Parks Service changed its policy in 1968, areas that had been accustomed to periodic fires were overloaded with fuels.

Combine that excess vegetation with rising temperatures, and Pyne said existing models of fire behavior no longer hold.

“They are being overwhelmed,” he said. “We’re seeing it in Canada now and parts of the Mediterranean, as well as parts of the U.S., and we’re creating a new world out of this.”

Humans once controlled fire. Now, Pyne said fire is controlling us.

“We’ve taken what had always been our best friend, and we’re making it our worst enemy,” he said. “Even if we tame the climate, we remove the fossil fuel part of it, we still have a relentless obligation to work with fire in the lands that remain.”

A man looks up and away from the camera while holding his arm out while brush burns nearby. — Tim Van Wagner, a broadcast burn practitioner, oversees a prescribed burn on private property in Penn Valley, a small, rural community in Nevada County, on June 22, 2023. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

In California, policy leaders from Gov. Newsom down to local leaders are encouraging controlled burns. But the process has been hampered, in part, by the slow rollout of its certification program for burn bosses. The designation is crucial for people like Van Wagner because it would allow them to tap into a $20 million pool of insurance to cover damages from fires set under prescribed conditions. But, as of August, there were only two dozen state-certified burn bosses in the state.

“It hasn’t been a smooth process,” said Van Wagner, who is in the process of obtaining the certification. Without access to insurance, “it can be a basic game-over,” he said.

Left: A man walks through dry yellow grasses while using a torch to light the grass on fire. — Dylan Drummond wields a drip torch, which he uses to ignite grasses during a prescribed burn on private property in Penn Valley, a small, rural community in Nevada County, on June 22, 2023. The burn aims to reduce the brush and grasses that fuel mega-fires while also helping to restore native plants to the region. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

According to the U.S. Forest Service, fewer than 1% of controlled burns get out of control, but they still make neighbors nervous.

“It’s foreign to most people,” Van Wagner said. “So, there’s more of a fear response than understanding.”

For Fancy Fechser, who owns the Nevada County property where Van Wagner was burning, learning to live with fire is part of what it means to live in the foothills. She and her husband moved there with their family from Los Angeles in 2021.

“It’s the luck of the draw here, and that’s something you have to live with,” she said. “But the control you can have — I mean, I feel so much better now that we did this.”

Two people stand on the side of a hill with a forest behind them. — Fancy Fechser (right) talks with prescribed burn practitioner Tim Van Wagner following a prescribed burn on her property in Penn Valley on June 16, 2023. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

Fechser hopes that in the long run, the work done here will make both her property and the surrounding community safer from megafires and that it’ll be more resilient for the climate changes to come.

“I don’t love looking at a charred backyard, but I know the point,” she said. “We have to look in the future here.”

Grieving the future

For Oakland-based journalist Erica Hellerstein, part of looking into California’s future means grieving — not a lost past, but a future that may never come to be.

Reflecting on this idea in a 2022 Coda Story essay, she wrote, “A building that burns can be rebuilt. But if fire incinerates a state of mind, can that be put back together?”

A person with long hairs sits in front of a bookshelf indoors. — Oakland-based journalist Erica Hellerstein poses for a portrait in her apartment overlooking Lake Merritt on June 30, 2023. In her Coda Story essay, Grieving California, she explored feelings of climate anxiety associated with grief — specifically, ‘grieving a future that may never come to pass’ as a result of warming global temperatures. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

Hellerstein remembers the rupture when her memories of the past severed from her expectations of the future. It was September 2020, and smoke from fires burning across the state had smothered the sky. She watched, with jarring dissonance, as partygoers in hazmat masks waited outside a nightclub in San Francisco.

“They were just pretending everything was normal,” she said. “That was another turning point for me, just cognitively of being like, ‘OK, yeah, things are really not what I remember from my childhood growing up here.’”

For me, it was visiting Paradise this summer five years after the Camp Fire ravaged the area, and seeing its pine trees replaced with shrubby manzanita and sprouting oaks. As fires and drought kill the mixed conifer trees that give the Sierra foothills their signature beauty, other plants more accustomed to Southern California’s clime are slowly replacing them.

A house sits on a hillside dotted with green shrubs and dry grasses in the foreground. — Empty lots dot the side of a residential area of Paradise on Aug. 9, 2023. The Camp Fire, a deadly fire that destroyed much of the towns of Paradise and Concow, swept through the area in 2018. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

These pine trees — whose smell, earthy and fresh after the first fall rain, is permanently imprinted in my olfactory memory — are some of the most threatened. Of all the impacts climate change may bring, their prospective loss is one I haven’t quite reconciled.

“There’s so much grief there because we’ve had it so good in our life,” said Sam Hinrichs, a resident of Nevada County for 35 years. “We’ve had it so good, and we didn’t pay attention to that.”

Hinrichs was once a volunteer firefighter and used to do wildfire mitigation work. Now, she sits on the board of the North San Juan Fire Protection District in Nevada County. She’s keenly aware of her own risk of living three miles down a gravel road, surrounded by forest.

“I do look at those climate maps, and I see where the danger zones are,” she said. “I think about fire every day, all the time.”

A dead tree is surrounded by green trees. — A dead tree stands in the Inimim Forest on Aug. 9, 2023. A prolonged drought in California that began in 2000 and has been the most extreme since the 1500s has resulted in significant tree mortality. The mixed conifer trees of the mid-elevation Sierra Nevada Foothills are particularly threatened. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

She’s watched the pine trees around her house turn brown from bark beetles that thrive in hotter weather and overproduce, killing the trees they feed on. It’s something she wants her son, Stanley, to see, so he can learn what to do about it.

Though he’s only 6 years old, she’s already gotten him involved in tending their land, identifying which pine and cedar trees to fell, their seedlings replanted upslope, where it’s cooler, and which Black Oaks that can tolerate warmer weather, to leave in place.

“I’m not feeling precious about [the pines] anymore,” she said. “I just want to give him skills for resilience and noticing what needs to happen.”

A clearing in a wooded area. — A significantly thinned area of the Inimim Forest on the San Juan Ridge in Nevada County on Aug. 9, 2023, co-managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the Yuba Watershed Institute, a local nonprofit that got its start in the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. The management plan has thinned the forest, allowing light to filter through the trees and keeping brush close to the ground, making the area more likely to survive a wildfire. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

Noticing, and knowing, what needs to happen is not an innate skill. It’s one Hinrichs developed from growing up in the area and from hand-clearing most of her 17-acre property. Using chainsaws and pole saws, she’s worked acre-by-acre, determining which plants hold birds’ nests or provide cover for nursing deers and which can be removed. It’s a labor-intensive process, but it also gives her unique insight into the forest’s health.

“The quail have come back since we’ve done this clearing,” she said. “I had only 12 quail, and now we’re up to like, 40, which is really cool.”

Hinrichs cannot know whether these efforts will be enough to save her home from a wildfire. Like many in this more remote part of the county, she lives without an insurer willing to cover her losses, relying instead on her own prevention efforts of hand-clearing the land and using prescribed fire to reduce her risk.

“I married this land. I’ve made this my project,” she said. “If my house burns down, I’ll build another one. Probably. I’m trying to make it so my house doesn’t burn down, but fire is also just part of this place.”

Taking care

In her book, Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire, Berkeley author Colleen Morton Busch describes how a group of Buddhist monks at the Tassajara Zen Center in California’s Carmel Valley prepared for a wildfire bearing down on them.

It was 2008, during the Basin Complex Fire, and there was a debate among the monks and their students about the Zen Buddhist idea of non-attachment. Some argued to let the monastery burn.

A person with glasses sits at a table in an indoor setting. — Berkeley author Colleen Morton Busch poses for a portrait at her home on Sept. 19, 2023. Morton Busch is the author of ‘Fire Monks: Zen Mind Meets Wildfire,’ which describes the ways a group of monks at the Tassajara Zen Center in California’s Carmel Valley prepared and then defended against a wildfire bearing down on them. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

In the end, a group of five decided to stay and defend it. Morton-Busch wrote:

A clever Zen teacher might say that standing back and letting the monastery burn belies a kind of attachment to the idea of non-attachment. That trying to save it when it could all burn anyway is true non-attachment. In trying to save Tassajara from the fire, or your own life from disaster, you can’t be sure you will. In fact, you can lose everything you love in a moment. And that’s not a reason to give up. If anything, it’s a reason to turn toward the fire, recognizing it as a force of both creation and destruction and to take care of what’s right in front of you because that’s all you actually have.

In some ways, the fire bearing down on Tassajara is a lot like climate change — a planetary fire bearing down on all of us.

In other ways, it is very different. The monks had one fire to contend with, but across the globe, we all face a different climate. It may be a hurricane in one area, record-breaking temperatures in another, deadly wildfires one year, heavy rains the next.

Then, there are the ways these changes quietly manifest, and are mourned or endured, in each heart and mind.

When Barbara was alive, and in the years since she passed away, most of our monthly trips up there were, and still are, spent tending the land.

A river and bank with trees. — The Yuba River winds through the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Hoyt’s Crossing in August 2023. The river is one of many world-class amenities that lure people to the area. (Erin Baldassari/KQED)

In a continuous cycle of labor defined by the seasons, we begin after the first fall rain, limbing trees and pulling the flammable and invasive scotch broom. In the spring, we mow down annual grasses to preemptively rob the summer’s fires of their fuel. This year, I’ll bring my now four-year-old along with me. Together, we’ll gather branches from the ground to stack for kindling. And hopefully one day, we’ll both learn how to put good fire on the ground.

There is something liberating about this labor, which is itself a daily act of defiance.

It is here, in Nevada County and places like it, where no veneer of denialism can cover the stark realities already underway and where there is little time to brood over what is to come because there is too much work to be done now.

In these places, precariously poised on the knife’s edge of a shifting climate, the choice is clear: leave or turn toward the fire.

SOLD OUTSOLD OUT

Facing the Fire: California's Sierra Foothills Residents Race to Adapt