WILLIAM DEBUYS, wdebuys at earthlink.net
Author of A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest, deBuys recently wrote a piece titled “The Oxygen Planet Struts Its Stuff: Not a ‘Perfect Storm’ But the New Norm in the American West,” which states: “Dire fire conditions, like the inferno of heat, turbulence, and fuel that recently turned 346 homes in Colorado Springs to ash, are now common in the West. A lethal combination of drought, insect plagues, windstorms, and legions of dead, dying, or stressed-out trees constitute what some pundits are calling wildfire’s ‘perfect storm.’

“They are only half right.

“This summer’s conditions may indeed be perfect for fire in the Southwest and West, but if you think of it as a ‘storm,’ perfect or otherwise — that is, sudden, violent, and temporary — then you don’t understand what’s happening in this country or on this planet. Look at those 346 burnt homes again, or at the High Park fire that ate 87,284 acres and 259 homes west of Fort Collins, or at the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire in New Mexico that began in mid-May, consumed almost 300,000 acres, and is still smoldering, and what you have is evidence of the new normal in the American West.

“For some time, climatologists have been warning us that much of the West is on the verge of downshifting to a new, perilous level of aridity. Droughts like those that shaped the Dust Bowl in the 1930s and the even drier 1950s will soon be “the new climatology” of the region — not passing phenomena but terrifying business-as-usual weather. Western forests already show the effects of this transformation. …”