America is at a crossroads. Can we find a common ground?

An eclectic anthology of passionate letters to America during a time when politics and perspectives collide

Since the 2106 presidential election, America has been barrelling headfirst toward a crossroads. Conflicting political and social perspectives reflect a need to collectively define our moral imperatives, clarify cultural values, and inspire meaningful change. In that patriotic spirit, hundreds of writers, poets, artists, scientists, and political and community leaders have come together sharing their impassioned letters to America in a project envisioned and published by the online journal Terrain.org—the “Letters to America” series.

More than 130 works, all calls to action for common ground and conflict resolution with a focus on the environment and social justice, are collected in Dear America. Taken as a whole, the work is a diverse clarion call of literary reactions to the nation’s challenges as we approach future political elections (especially the one coming this November).

The book includes impassioned letters from experts, artists, and leaders such as Seth Abramson, Ellen Bass, Jericho Brown, Francisco Cantú, Kurt Caswell, Victoria Chang, Camille T. Dungy, Tarfia Faizullah, Blas Falconer, Attorney General Bob Ferguson, David Gessner, Katrina Goldsaito, Kimiko Hahn, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirschfield, Linda Hogan, Pam Houston, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Karen An-hwei Lee, Christopher Merrill, Kathryn Miles, Kathleen Dean Moore, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Naomi Shihab Nye, Elena Passarello, Dean Rader, Scott Russell Sanders, Lauret Savoy, Gary Soto, Pete Souza, Kim Stafford, Sandra Steingraber, Arthur Sze, Scott Warren, Debbie Weingarten, Christian Wiman, Robert Wrigley, and others.

“The voices in this essential anthology are anything but silent. Indeed, they are voices of hope, habitat, defiance, and, most importantly, democracy. Lend your ears, and then your own voice.” — Simmons Buntin, editor

Dear America encourages readers to come to a common resolution about the environment and social injustice going on in America through words of literature and art.

Excerpt

California wildfires, climate change

Science Under Fire

Anita Desikan

Dear America,

Long before I became a scientist, I worked behind the counter of a pharmacy in San Diego. It was fall 2007, and the Witch Creek Fire had erupted across the region. Fanned by the powerful Santa Ana winds, the fire forced hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate their homes. I worked close to one of the affected regions, and on the day after the city ordered mass evacuations, one of the first customers I served told me their house had burned down—and their medications with it. Another told me they had evacuated and could not return home—they only had the clothes on their backs. Over and over I heard similar stories. I nearly broke into tears. But I took comfort helping fill their prescriptions, providing them with a needed service.

In San Diego, it is not earthquakes that we fear but fires. It was once a well-established fact that fire season occurred only in late summer or fall. But climate change has shifted that. Wildfires are now a yearlong potential horror, and they grow increasingly destructive. Every year, more people lose their homes; more people breathe in that terrible concoction of soot that leaves you gasping, wheezing, out of breath. The higher frequency of catastrophic wildfires in California has certainly been noticed by insurance companies, which are starting to hike prices or cancel homeowners insurance outright.

As a public health researcher with a keen interest in air pollution, science policy, and environmental justice, one of the most impactful lessons I have learned is that science has the power to improve both public health and the environment. When the best available science is incorporated into policymaking, it can deliver powerful benefits to the health and safety of our people and environment. So it was with a certain amount of horror that I witnessed the Trump administration turn its antiscience political machinations toward California’s incessant wildfire threat.

At first, the administration only wanted to spin wildfire tragedies as a way to bolster Trump’s own agenda. In August 2018 the Carr and Mendocino fires raged across Northern California—some of the worst wildfires ever experienced by the state. In the middle of this crisis, rath-er than speaking words of condolence, President Trump tweeted a message of hate toward environmental safeguards, blaming them for the severity of the fire by allegedly restricting access to water for firefighting purposes. And in this “tweet-to-policy” administration, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross decided to take the president up on his words. Ross ordered the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (noaa) to sideline water-management procedures supported by the best available science. Specifically, NOAA’s Fisheries division was ordered to go against its own mission statement of regulating activities that might harm threatened or endangered aquatic species like salmon and instead divert water for firefighting efforts. Reality was thrown asunder—firefighters and state officials kept declaring in no uncertain terms that the state of California has enough water to fight these fires and the pain and suffering of my fellow Californians were milked in orderto declare war on endangered fish species like the Chinook salmon. In November 2018 the Camp Fire struck, ravaging the town of Paradise and causing over a thousand people to go missing. This time Trump placed the blame solely on California’s poor forest management (in actuality, the U.S. government owns and manages a majority of California’s forests) and threatened to cut off federal funding for firefighting efforts altogether.

But here’s a part of the story you may not know: in December of that year, Trump quietly issued an executive order that once again challenged the science underlying the wildfire threat. Apparently, the Trump administration believes that the best way to fix California’s wildfire problem is through logging. No joke. The executive order declared that, in order to prevent future wildfires like those that had struck California, the Department of Interior and the Department of Agriculture must harvest more than four billion board feet of timber that will then be put up for sale—an increase of 31 percent from 2017. While it is true that

increased logging may help quell a small percentage of the fires that occur near homes, it can do little to halt large-scale wildfires or stop thefires that are fueled by nonloggable but flammable plants, like chaparralshrub brush. It is hard to foresee with certainty the ecological impacts of the increase in logging, as it is dependent on how federal agencies implement the executive order. However, since market conditions of timber sales are required to be considered during the process, the most robust scientific evidence on how to safely and sustainably reduce trees that pose a fire hazard risk has the real possibility of being sidelined in favor of timber sales.

These actions by the Trump administration are downright dangerous because they mask the real problem at hand: climate change. Scientific research tells us that climate change acts as a threat multiplier by decreasing rainfall and increasing the temperature in the western United States (i.e., it can make California into a tinderbox). Since 1972, wildfires in California have grown 500 percent larger thanks mostly to climate change. In essence, global warming acts like a dose response curve—for every degree of warming, larger and more frequent fires will result. Scientists and political officials from across the West have urged federal officials to adopt evidence-based measures to reduce the threat of wildfires, including cutting greenhouse gas emissions linked to climate change. But the Trump administration pursues few if any actions to prevent climate change, and the Union of Concerned Scientists, where I work now, has documented numerous cases in which federal scientists were directly censored or felt no choice but to censor themselves on the topic of climate change.

I became a public health researcher to use science to find evidence-based ways to improve the lives of others. I can’t help but think back to that day at the pharmacy when I listened to my neighbors’ stories about the wildfire that had threatened or consumed their homes. I believe that they, like all Americans, would have wanted proven, science-based policies in place that could have reduced the threat of fires.I doubt they would have supported policies that take away water from endangered fish or cut down large swaths of the forest as distractions from the very real existence of climate change. This is why I find the administration’s denials—and silencing—of the science so unsettling. We rely on science because it is the best method we have available to protect the health and safety of people, and of this land we call our home.

Sincerely,

Anita Desikan

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About the Editors

Terrain.org is a nonprofit literary magazine published online since 1997 that searches for the interface—the integration—among the built and natural environments that might be called the soul of place. The works published by Terrain.org ultimately examine the physical realm around us, and how those environments influence us and each other physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Simmons Buntin, is editor-in-chief of Terrain.org He has authored 2 books of poetry, Riverfall,and Bloom, and also Unsprawl: Remixing Spaces as Places (co-authored with Ken Pirie). He has published poetry, essays, and technical articles in publications as varied as Edible Baja Arizona, North American Review, Kyoto Journal, and Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society. He has a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Colorado, Denver, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona. Simmons lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Elizabeth Dodd is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her newest book, Horizon’s Lens: My Time on the Turning World, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2012. For over two decades she has lived in eastern Kansas in the Flint Hills region, where she is an award-winning professor of creative writing and literature at Kansas State University.

Derek Sheffield has presented widely at conferences around the West on the interaction between science and poetry. His own work often explores this topic and has appeared in Orion, Wilderness, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Southern Humanities Review, and several anthologies, including New Poets of the American West, The Ecopoetry Anthology, Nature and Environmental Writing: A Guide and Anthology, and The World Is Charged: Poetic Engagements with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Since 2003, he has been a professor of English at Wenatchee Valley College in central Washington.