Fire season arrived early, and northern California is losing graceful vineyards, ancient redwoods, oaks on their golden rolling hills (sing it, Kate), and other parts of its graceful ecology. Reacting in this month’s Atlantic magazine, Leah Stokes expands upon the melancholy thinking we’ve all been doing about trees around here.

Many people have been grieving from the news that we may have lost some of the most majestic coastal redwoods to these latest fires. These giants have stood for more than a thousand years. […] For my generation, and the ones coming up behind us, the simple act of planting trees now requires a leap of faith. I worry about how long they will last before they are taken by drought or fire. And if we can’t plan for our trees’ future, how are we supposed to plan for our children’s?

Her dystopian portrait of our current moment includes power blackouts, hellish electrical storms, lethal 130-degree days in Death Valley, a looming hurricane season in the east, and misinformation from the Wall Street Journal that blamed sustainable energy for the blackouts.

Stokes doesn’t intend to scare the reader into socially-distanced bomb shelters. Instead she shows the way forward:

The CEO of California’s grid operator put it simply: Renewables “are not a factor” in the blackouts. My electric utility echoed this view in an email that urged people with solar power at home to help out. Despite electric utilities attacking rooftop-solar policy for the past decade, homes that produce extra power deliver excess energy to the grid, helping neighbors in need. More clean energy is a good thing. California must continue on the path it has been on for years: leading the world in building the clean economy. In 1978, the state set its first goal for clean energy, aiming for 1 percent of power from wind energy. Forty years later, we now have a goal of 100 percent clean energy by 2045 in state law. If anything, California must move faster. And we must get states from the Midwest to the South to do the same. The Biden campaign’s pledge to reach 100 percent clean power by 2035 exemplifies the kind of leadership we need in this time of crisis. Cleaning up our electricity system will allow us to eliminate about 80 percent of our carbon emissions, because we can use this clean power to fuel our cars, our homes, and some of our industries.

It’s pretty simple, folks: Get everything on the grid and clean the grid — and where possible replace the grid with local power generation.

And, do it right now, while we can still plan for our children’s future.

And for the future of the trees.

We lost two California sycamores here this month. It wasn’t fire this time and it wasn’t the historic drought they just survived, but was likely the two new swimming pools installed by developers within the trees’ root systems. Above ground, below ground, humans encroach. It’s what we do.