Editor’s Note: All images were provided by the author.
Jonathan Ling (University of Pennsylvania)
Dear ten-year-old Jonathan,
California always has a way of surprising you. I’ll tell you right now that you have it really good in California, and I know it doesn’t seem like it at times, but just believe me. I say that, but I’m sure you’ve noticed that for a few days (or weeks) every year, the sky is orange-red, and the air smells like smoke.
To you, it may seem like some minor, annual inconvenience. You’ll see the news clippings of the people whose homes had burned down and countless people sleeping in their cars while their house was next. Just know it’s not just TV, and you’ll live it not just once, but twice.
In 2020, I got woken up in the middle of the night to flashing police lights right outside. When I went to bed the night before, the Glass Fire was miles away. You know that hill with the cross above Skyhawk? Well, as I left, I saw flames leap over that hill.
I fell asleep again on the floor of the restaurant as our emergency refuge. I woke up the next morning and thought the house and our entire neighborhood had been leveled to the ground. Thirteen years vanished into ash.
But it wasn’t. Just three houses on the outskirts of Skyhawk were charred—unlucky, but the overwhelming majority of it was safe.
The first time, in 2017, I woke up one day to find that Vivian was gone to comfort her friends whose homes had burned down just that night.
Fountaingrove (aerial view below: before and after) basically wasn’t a place anymore, they all said. Every house within a mile radius was gone. Eventually, Skyhawk was under threat, but it never made it so close like it did in 2020.
Years later, today, I still look up at that hill with the cross. I still see those charred trees, never regrowing, scarred from a fire six years ago. Driving through Fountaingrove, you can still see who’s rebuilt their homes and who’s rebuilt their lives someplace else.
You are too young to understand what made these fires so enormous, but I’ll try my best to explain it to you. Years of drought compound into stronger-than-usual Santa Ana winds (those dry windstorms around October-ish), and with the right dash of heat waves, it creates the perfect storm for wildfire to explode. You know these fires were unusual, yet they became usual.
California’s 2018 fire season turned the town of Paradise into a heap of ash. California’s 2025 winter fire season brought fire out of the mountains into the heart of Los Angeles. Sonoma County bore the brunt of California’s wildfire season in 2017 and 2020.
Going down the list of deadliest, largest, and most destructive wildfires in California history, hardly any year within the last decade is skipped. Three of the ten most destructive wildfires in California history leveled swathes of Sonoma County to the ground in the last ten years. In Sonoma County, the average daily maximum temperature is projected to rise by up to 11.7°F. Extreme weather doesn’t sound so extreme anymore.
It’s not just about the heat, either. When it rains, it pours. Driving up Highway 1 on the California coast, sections repeatedly close after collapsing into the ocean. Flooding on the Russian River makes Highway 116 impassable, stranding thousands at home. Rising sea levels and a dramatic increase in runoff will exacerbate flooding, erosion, and landslides everywhere.
By 2050, I don’t know if I can still call Sonoma County home anymore. The place I love as the epitome of perfect California weather will be unrecognizable. Wet gets wetter. Dry gets drier. Hot gets hotter.
Who knows where and when the next extreme weather event will hit? Bodega Bay, the place we went to escape summer heat waves? Fort Ross, where we had the history day in 4th grade? I’m worried that in fifty years, all these places will be unrecognizable.
Our parents say that the problem is too big for people like us. It’s more for the people on TV who hold the real power. And that makes me sad to think that I’m complacent and at the mercy of bureaucrats in Washington, three thousand miles away from home. Twiddling my thumbs until they swoop in to save us from being baked alive.
If everyone thought like that, we would be literally nowhere.
In human history, the power of the individual is strikingly admirable. Civil rights and women’s suffrage seemed too big to tackle individually, but that’s what made them so transformative. So what makes environmentalism different?
With years of education in hand, I want you to know that understanding climate change is not just about the numbers and local events, but about how us humans and the planet shape each other on a macro scale and how the individual is affected. In the aggregate, every little step has an astronomically magnified impact on a global scale. We recognize that the Earth has been here long before us and will be here long after we are gone, but we certainly don’t act like it.
I’m sure, as you’re reading this, you’ll ask, “Where does that leave us?” And the scary thing is, I don’t know, and no one else does either, but we’ll learn together along the way. Just know that we don’t get to choose the world we inherit, but we can choose where it goes, and we’ll do it with a collective memory and responsibility to protect Sonoma County as one special corner of the world.
Best,
Jonathan
