Wild fires are raging in California currently engulfing the Palisades area, destroying homes of many famous Hollywood notables. It has displaced over 100,000 people, and perhaps even more wildlife. The images are distressing, but not out of the ordinary right now. Disasters are devastating communities world wide. Floods, fires, winter storms in places that never get winter storms. The climate is changing, and as I've pointed out before, when you stretch the bell curve in one direction, you get more frequent extremes on both sides of the curve. 

Just because some places are getting record cold doesn't mean climate change is a hoax.

But the climate deniers... they're morons. I can't worry about them. The excuse that it is too expensive to deal with solutions to climate change, yet we seem to have money to deal with the results, to me is hypocrisy rooted in lunacy. But these are the same people who think it would be too expensive to have single-payer healthcare when we currently have the largest per capita healthcare costs in the world. When it comes to the conservatives, the Republicans, the MAGA cult, the religious right, the Evangelicals, and the Christian Nationalists, logic isn't their strong suit; greed is. It always has been. The violence, the thievery, the destruction, the oppression, the greed - all of it has been a constant feature of religions and other sources fascism throughout history. Those who support it are complicit with it, even if they're in denial about the means to their ends.

What is on my mind is actually more about how we respond to it. We as in the regular people impacted by these climate borne disasters that we're facing seemingly every day. My partner was doom scrolling last night over the media being created online around these wildfires in California. The scenes of destruction, and desperation. She was sad, and she was asking me, how do you survive this? Not just escaping it with your life, but how to do you go on afterwards? Where do you go? What can you take with you? People are being evacuated on foot because vehicles are too cumbersome and get in the way of responders. What do you do?

My immediate thought was, you take what you can, and you try to get somewhere far enough away that you can get to someone who can help you, who isn't impacted. I know that's a challenge, but I figure that would be my plan in such a situation.

But the question had me considering the situation in the bigger picture. Starting with the basics: how did humans rise to prominence as a dominant species? Mainly through social cooperation. The roots of our civilizations grew branches through altruistic, and mutually beneficial cooperation. We're told the Earth is hospitable to life. As that may be, it's a very limited, and conditional hospitality. Every turn of life potentially brings you face to face with something that wants to end your life. A disaster, a predator, a parasite, other opposing humans, elements that you are not adapted to deal with, or the worst of it, microbes and viruses that are lethal as their only purpose. We survived the centuries as a species through learning how to avoid, or deal with these threats, through developing remedies through scientific exploration, developing survival techniques through the growth of agriculture, the invention of tools, and weapons for hunting, and defense.

Working together to get through it.

And that is how - that is the only way - we will survive the disasters to come.

Find someone you can help, and help. Because you know someone will help you.

That is the only way we, as a species, can survive our own world.

That's just not something those bent on greed at any and all costs understand.