Driest Fall on Record

Restarting the newsletter, brush fires, and election season

Hello, hello again…

After pausing for much of the year I’ve decided to restart this newsletter. Thank you to everyone who subscribed in the interim, many of whom probably signed up after a couple of pieces I wrote for CounterPunch. (Find those here, if you like, and consider making a donation to CounterPunch, an always-essential resource, fully reader-supported and now in its fall fund drive.)

The environmental situation around this presidential election is as bleak as ever, though somewhat obscured by the binary choice we have every four years in the United States. Regardless of the outcome, that situation shows little sign of improving anytime soon. Kamala Harris has barely mentioned climate in this election, and despite the myriad limitations of the actual policies enacted or proposed under Democrats, even the rhetorical acknowledgment of the severity of the situation has slipped away.

The fact is—as has been thematically stressed in this newsletter—that “climate” is only a piece of the environmental problem, which is writ large a problem of how we live on the planet. The problem is everywhere: in how we move around, in how we build our homes, in how we eat, and on and on. Absent a reckoning with these patterns—which is coming, one way or the other—things are not going to change, no matter how many solar panels go up.

So in that grim spirit I’m going to boot this up again (and I include a brief post below) with the goal of publishing at least monthly. I’m also going to reopen paid subscriptions. The newsletter will mostly remain unpaywalled, but please consider signing on for as little as $5 a month, which will allow me to spend a little more time on this and a little less on some of the other work that pays the bills. If paid subscriptions rise to an as yet–undetermined level, it’ll also allow me to solicit and pay for contributions, which I’d like to do.

Here in the Northeast, as with much of the continental United States, the theme this fall is drought. Parts of the region are seeing the driest fall in recorded history; places that aren’t are still universally on the very dry side. The most recent US Drought Monitor map, released on Halloween, shows virtually all of New England in some level of drought, with much of the Greater Boston area in severe drought.

This pattern extends throughout the continental US to produce the stark maps below, a striking shift from the flooding that hit parts of Appalachia and the Southeast a little over a month ago and indicative of the now-common swings between extremes.

Brush fires have become a big problem in New England in the last few weeks, with much of southern New England and areas south repeatedly under red flag warnings. Massachusetts alone saw a 1,200 percent increase in brush fires in October. From NYT:

In New Jersey, 377 wildfires have burned over 628 acres since Sept. 15, a jump from 26 wildfires with only about seven acres consumed over the same period last year. State authorities have not reported any injuries from the fires.

In Connecticut, where Gov. Ned Lamont has declared a state of emergency, there have been 84 wildfires since Oct. 21, an increase from five over the same period in 2023. The largest fire this fall, a 127-acre blaze about 15 miles south of Hartford, injured six people and killed one firefighter.

There is some precedent for this even if the problem is exacerbated by human impacts on the climate. As I wrote in the first issue of this newsletter, one of the worst historic New England wildfires occurred in Maine in October of 1947, burning 200,000 acres.

As of now, there doesn’t appear to be much rain on the way, particularly for southern New England. After the warmest Halloween on record, and with unseasonably high temps predicted this week—how bad could it get?

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For those new to the newsletter and for those getting reacquainted, I wanted to highlight two posts from the year-plus that Nor’easter has been running:

• First, if you haven’t, check out this interview I did with

  TheLastFarm
  . We discuss the ecological situation writ large, the myths around “growth” of all sorts, and the readily available alternatives to the current environmental paradigm found in the philosophies and practical approaches of degrowth and permaculture.

• Second, see this post on environmental denial I wrote after the extreme Vermont floods of July 2023 (which repeated, in some places, one year to the day this July). This was a short reflection on a psychological and spiritual topic that I think is essential to understanding the collective environmental disaster we’re living, particularly worth considering in light of the election.

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