McKenzie Funk

McKenzie Funk is the author of Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, which won a PEN Literary Award in 2015.

Smoked Out: Travels in the Apocalypse

McKenzie Funk, 7 February 2019

Wildland firefighters work to keep the flames away from people and property, hoping to hang on until environmental conditions change and the autumn rains finally arrive. Many wildfires are left to smoulder, and to smoke, for weeks or months on end, causing little newsworthy damage. Disasters like the conflagration that consumed Paradise, California, in November, killing 81 people – the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history – do happen. But the climate disaster facing millions of other residents of the American West is more insidious.

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