Images from Maui's fires tell a haunting story
The scene of devastation left by a wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii, Thursday. Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong
The images from Maui are harrowing, the devastation in Lahaina almost too utter to be real. The stories of personal loss — and for some, survival — from the wildfires that swept through the area are heartbreaking.
The rubble and charred hulks of metal and anguished expressions on the faces of the displaced people on our screens also serve a purpose. They underscore the immensity of the challenge of our warming climate — which can spawn disasters and make other events, like Maui, worse — in a way no study or chart or impassioned speech can.
This is what it means to say our world is on fire, they scream. This is the future that has come crashing into our present.
We have seen many Lahainans around the world this year. Canadians struggling with epic wildfires consuming vast swaths of land. Arizonans being brought to hospital emergency rooms with burns suffered after they simply fell to the ground. Stunned victims of record flooding in Vermont and Pennsylvania and upstate New York, another side of the climate coin.
And people like Ramona and Monway Ison, a retired couple in their early 70s living on a fixed income in Baytown, Texas. The Isons' air conditioner broke in June at the beginning of the Southwest's two-month heat wave, as related by Politico. With no money to fix it, Ramona got a loan from a credit union to hire a repairman. It took three days to secure the loan, by which point the Isons, both of whom had underlying health conditions, were dead, overcome by the relentless heat.
You want to think these are the stories and pictures that surely will move the needle, that will provoke more vigorous action from those who already see the danger, that will persuade those who are more complacent or uncertain to take the crisis more seriously, that will make even the disbelievers stop for a moment to consider. Nothing inspires like a personal story, after all. And tragedy is a great motivator.
And yet, you think of Parkland and the Pulse nightclub and the cherubic faces from Sandy Hook and Uvalde and remember that those massacres would surely be the precipitators of change in our long struggle with gun violence.
And you think of the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose little body washed up on the Turkish shoreline after a failed attempt by his family to cross the Mediterranean to escape the civil war in their country and reach Europe, and remember thinking that the heart-rending image would surely convey the horrors of the unfolding migrant crisis in that part of the world in a way that would move people and nations to act.
And yet, those needles never really moved.
Is that what awaits us with climate change? Will we be transfixed for a moment, glued to the ghastly scenes, perhaps even weep with the victims, and then go on with our lives?
Will we become desensitized to this, as we have with gun violence? Will we reach a point where we can only be moved by the horrors inflicted on people we know and regions where we live?
What happened in Maui already has been politicized like those other issues, with some Republicans swiftly complaining that President Joe Biden did not move quickly enough to announce a visit to the ravaged region — and Biden swiftly responding. The callousness replaces the sting of horror with the sling of mud and turns the tragedy into a tool.
It certainly is not healthy to wallow in grief for others. But neither is it wise to feel and forget. We can't afford to be calamity tourists. There's too much at stake.
We need to look hard at what happened in Maui and Canada and Vermont and Arizona and Baytown, Texas, and understand that those places could be here and those people could be us.
Columnist Michael Dobie's opinions are his own.
Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
