Post Carbon Fellow Richard Heinberg wrote this Open Mic column for the North Bay Bohemian.

From the article:

The immediate emergency may be over, but life in Sonoma County will never return to pre-fire “normal.” We are changed—certainly those who lost homes, but all of us to some degree. The question is, how shall we proceed?

Like it or not, we must anticipate more crises. Not just fires and climate-linked weather events, but earthquakes and human-caused disasters (failures of our energy and financial systems) as well. Overgrowth during the last century has set up human civilization as a whole, and Sonoma County in particular, for all kinds of “corrections,” as stock market analysts call them. Let’s rebuild our communities in ways that promote resilience.