A PLAGUE ON ALL THEIR HOUSES

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHARAOH WAS A TOUGH SELL.

The infamous Egyptian needed a lot, and I mean a lot of convincing that things needed to change. A guy named Moses pitched him the idea of a new world order, a fresh model of the world in which one man simply didn’t enslave his brother. Simple. Still, Mo had to take several meetings with the sovereign to get the concept across.

Took some boils. Some frogs. Some locusts. And a few other subtle little warning signs that Pharoah’s worldview wasn’t… sustainable.

Then came the ultimate plague. Imminent destruction, after which the terrified tyrant finally, finally agreed to let Moses’ people go. And still he tried to change his mind. Humans seem, always, always, always, to choose negative feedback as their only means of improvement. We don’t even believe there even is crap until said crap hits the fan. Which brings us to this week, when I found myself looking across the street at this:

In California, the Santa Ana wind season is as predictable as spring rain. One day, you’re a cheeseburger in Paradise. Next day, you’re on Mother Nature’s s@*tlist. The cloud seen here appeared out our front window in Ventura as a result of the S.A.’s whipping through Camarillo, a town just twenty miles away. Within minutes of an ignition incident that, at this writing, still remains a mystery, the seasonal gusts transplanted flaming embers onto the rooves of dozens of mini-mansions, landing as well on vast swaths of crackling-dry brush and forests, spreading over 20,000 acres in less than a day, charring over 120 homes to ash and placing all surrounding towns on air-quality lockdown.

The usual platitudes about climate change were trotted out as vast teams of responders raced to outpace the blaze, which is, as I write this, is inching nearer containment. I certainly wasn’t the first to take a snap of Nature in the act of bucking us off her back, of returning the favor for our attempted murder of the planet by deciding to murder back a little. Hell, I’m sure that, had he an iPhone handy, Ramses himself might even have reacted to the horror unfolding before him by snapping a selfie of he and the wife posed before a sea of locusts. As photographers, we need to be constantly bearing witness to what’s already happening. And we have to stop thinking of climate change as something “out there, over there”. As the Monkees sang so long ago, “so you better get ready; we may be coming to your town..”