The specter of wildfire haunts the West. Though they’ve been around as long as forests, the way we see wildfire— how we interpret them as symbols and understand them as indicators of greater climate trends—has shifted over time.
In art, in song, in literature, a fire is rarely just a fire. There is the physical fire (what it does, tearing through and down towns and forests) and then there is the metaphoric fire (what it means, its symbolic weight carrying God’s punishment and the fires of hell).
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2007. Sometime after leaving the Grammys, lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie, Ben Gibbard was picnicking with some friends outside of L.A. Meanwhile, fires raged around “The Grapevine,” the term used for a segment of Southern California’s freeway system.
A year later, Death Cab released “Grapevine Fires.” In the song, Gibbard remembers watching his friend’s daughter play in a cemetery, unaware of the close-by wildfire and the danger it represented. Gibbard summed up the scene in an interview saying:
“We were having some wine and having a picnic on top of this big cascading hill with the ocean off in the distance, and at the time there were a lot of fears about these fires creeping down from the grapevine. This was a very real moment, just seeing her daughter, playing in this cemetery. It struck me as this really powerful image of a child playing in a cemetery, not having any understanding of what this area means. It was a really interesting example of youth having a way with death.”
The song plays with this juxtaposition: the picnic and the girl, embodiments of ease and naivety, the fire and the smoke, symbols of death and apocalypse.
The song doesn’t have a proper chorus, but the lyrical structure has a sort of symmetry. The first verse describes the fire spreading: “the northern sky looked like the end of days.” It moves into the first hook, which reflects a catastrophic view of the events: “A wake up call/to a rented room/sounded like an alarm of impending doom/to warn us it’s only a matter of time/before we all burn/before we all burn/before we all burn…”
Then Gibbard orchestrates a huge tonal shift, describing a young girl beneath a smoky sky: “And she laughed and danced through the field of graves/there I knew it would be alright/That everything would be alright/Would be alright/Would be alright…”
Though the wildfire Gibbard references in his work is real, the fire in the song is less a force of nature than a tool to explore themes of death, doom, and hope.
This is not to say Gibbard wasn’t considering wildfire’s connection to climate change. I’ve never had the chance to ask him what his thoughts are on the matter. But that isn’t what the song is about. It centers around fire as a symbol of mortality — individual human mortality, not the life and death issues of ecosystems on a global scale.
But this was 2007. Climate change was, in some ways, just beginning to enter the American public imagination. The documentary An Inconvenient Truth had only been released in 2006. This isn’t to say people weren’t aware of climate change, but the issue wasn’t as pervasive in political and cultural discourse as it is today.
Still, it is difficult to pinpoint when climate change became a widely discussed issue. Though many people cite Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) as the start of the modern American environmental movement, there are others who disagree, going earlier or further in history. And even so, Carson’s work was focused on ecological concerns of pollution, not carbon emissions and global climate change.
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2020. Evan Stephens Hall, lead singer of Pinegrove saw images of Oregon’s sky during one of the most destructive wildfire seasons the state has seen in recorded history. In 2021, Pinegrove published a video of the acoustic version of the song “Orange” which would later be released on their album, 11:11 (2.)
Hall released the video as a fundraiser for the Sunrise Movement. The caption accompanying the Youtube video features the following statement:
“orange, a waltz about the climate crisis, was written on the day in 2020 that the photos of oregon's eery, bloodshot sky circulated the internet. the song tries to balance outrage at those preventing progress—politicians elected in good faith to protect us who instead believe themselves celebrities—with the etherial, almost dissociative feeling of being alive at the end of history. the mirage on offer by today's political theater does nothing to assuage our concerns as we watch where the money actually goes: the american military, one of the single greatest global sources of fossil fuel emissions. so for all who have on one hand heard the desperate scientific prognosis, & on the other seen the already-weak promises on the campaign trail traded in for endless wars—it's tough not to lose heart. this isn't a song trying to convince anyone that climate change is real. it's for people horrified at the government's inaction to what we can all see with our own eyes. as this summer progresses, breaking all sorts of records across the northern hemisphere, & the conclusion sinks further into our collective gut, it's essential for people with a microphone to start shouting, & in whatever way we can to affirm community, to step in & help one another cope in the absence of our government, & take seriously the need to organize for a better world.”
Like his statement, Hall’s lyrics don’t shy away from the political dimension of climate change.
The video features Hall dressed in all green, playing his guitar and singing in a canoe as it slowly moves through a river surrounded by thick woods. The spectrum of emotion is huge as Hall sings the waltz of his climate grief. There is overwhelm (“I try to wrap my head around(…)/I try to remember the history of time”); depression and avoidance (“I try to laugh or sleep it off/That awful feeling something’s off”, “I try to down the bluest pill”); and finally, and dominantly, anger and frustration.
The beauty of the acoustic video lies in it’s simplicity. The camera is right on Hall as he strums, soft at first, but harder as he sings about political inaction and climate denial. You can’t avoid the pain he is singing. And in the song, Hall invites you, the listener, to feel that pain too. “Today the sky is orange/and you and I know why,” Hall sings, even using the communal pronoun “we” in his last verse “They’re trying to ignore it/We always knew they’d try.”
Did you catch that? Here it is again with emphasis.
“They’re trying to ignore it/We always knew they’d try.”
An us and them. Them ignoring the issue, us screaming at them to do something.
Unlike Death Cab, Hall sees wildfire as deeply connected to climate change. But further, Hall’s song, released thirteen years after “Grapevine Fires,” shows very clearly the politicization of the issue.
This too is hard to trace. When did climate change become partisan? And why?
In the future I’ll have a blog post about “Kiss Mother Nature Goodbye,” a song by Hank William Jr. It will (I hope) dive into the history of the politics of climate change, country music, and Hank Williams Jr. himself (the man, the myth, the legend).
Endnotes:
Much of Pinegrove’s album, 11:11, focuses on the natural world and the climate crisis. I’ll have to write a whole other essay about it if I get around to it.
A fun bit of trivia: Pinegrove had Chris Walla do the mixing for this album. Walla is known for his work with Death Cab.