RED FLAG WARNING: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country, a very useful anthology of leaders-by-example

RED FLAG WARNING: Mutual Aid and Survival in California’s Fire Country
DANI BURLISON & MARGARET ELYSIA GARCIA (editors; introduction by Manjula Martin)
AK Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Two survivors of California fires compile a guide for living physically, mentally, and emotionally amid ecological destruction.

When warm temperatures, low humidity, and strong winds combine they produce an increased risk of fire danger called a "red flag warning"—a common event in Northern California. Through essays and interviews, Red Flag Warning sheds light on how wildfire impacts our communities and offers wisdom on living with fire from Indigenous Californians, community organizers, mental health care workers, environmentalists, fire analysts, sustainable loggers, parents, and more.

The collection explores the ways these fires take root and impact rural and urban Northern California, it examines our relationships to place and community and to understand the importance of mutual aid, organizing, community care, land stewardship, and resilience. Red Flag Warning covers the stories not frequently found in the often disaster-porn obsessed media and exposes what is lost in the news written by parachute journalists. Readers are invited to examine what fire can and does mean to them, what it means for us to reimagine the world, to prepare for the worst, and to examine flames through different lenses. Contributors include Manjula Martin, Hiya Swanhuyser, Zeke Lunder, Lasara Firefox Allen, Margo Robbins, Kailea Frederick, Redbird Willie, and more.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: "Victims of climate disaster" is a very effective distancing and Othering way to look at the results of humanity's unbridled greed. It puts the reader, or viewer, outside the horrors enacted for their titillated pity.

This anthology of essays is not about that. It is a series of accounts from the people in the (sometimes literal) trenches; these are the stories that your news source draws from to present its gods'-eye view and enable thereby your hunger for information without the emotional investment of intimacy.

Tear off the bandage, look at the real wound.

We're pretty complacent, us readers. We eagerly feed our heads information. It's the miracle, and I do not use the term lightly, of the internet age. We sit on an IMMENSE information structure, one designed ad hoc. We get to edit what from it we consume, how we consume it...we never need to examine the act of consumption itself. When one consumes a thing it must be processed, broken into needed and not-needed parts, then winnowed to remove the not-needed bits.

Our minds perform this function automatically (thanks to many thousands of hours' training), just like our guts do with sustenance. The main difference is we can train our brains to do different things more readily than our guts. What we put into them is in both cases the determining factor of what we get out.

Consuming more "disaster porn" reportage is not informing you of anything more than some selectively presented bits of fact in a heavy sauce of context, aka distortion. It's not usually done maliciously or with the intent to misinform you, but that is always, inevitably, the effect of choosing an "angle" to report.

This very short anthology, under two hundred pages, is an excellent way to jailbreak your information stream with stories of how people really there, with property at risk and friends/lovers/neighbors to care for, managed the balancing act of keeping themselves safe while taking needed action. What did they lose? Who did they lose? How does the world look to them now? What does taking personal action look like in an overwhelming, immense, uncontrollable apocalypse?

More news coverage will only create a seriously unhelpful sense of remove from what is happening to us. It is not just happening around us. In the voices of those who actually faced this unimaginable horror and still used their learned empathetic response to do something selfless, the essays here give us a gift of example to use and to praise. Not every essay is perfectly polished, or equally carefully thought out; but that's the nature of this format, and they all add their bit to the gestalt: Do something. Help. Serve a greater purpose.

Learn and take inspiration from these stories of what ordinary people, acting on their empathetic promptings, did (and can do) for themselves and each other.