On January 7th, 2025, multiple fires began in Los Angeles, California due to the extreme climate conditions of dry earth and air, hurricane force winds, inefficient irrigation and water catchment, and dense human population. By January 8th, these fires had burned as many homes, businesses, and cars by volume equivalent to six World Trade Center Towers, or roughly 360 million cubic feet. Hundreds of thousands of citizens were displaced, a growing number of people perished in their homes, unknown scores of wild animals died, millions of people were exposed to toxic smoke, ash, and soot, and local law enforcement compared the destruction of the fires to that of an atomic bomb. It is estimated that thousands of people will lose their lives in the coming years from exposure to hazardous air caused by the fires as happened after 9/11. These January fires occurred in what is supposed to be the wet season for Los Angeles, but instead of receiving rain to restore local aquifers and groundwater, the area saw devastating fires in the preceding months.

Courageous first responders from across California and from other nations, local leaders, and civilians battled the expanding infernos to protect life, property, culture, and community. Their efforts saved many lives, limited the impact on fragile ecosystems, and narrowed already incalculable economic losses. As a means of suppressing the fires’ expansion with no other options, aerial strike forces used a crimson pink colored fire suppressant which was dropped around the blazes' consuming edge. The environmental impact of this ammonium phosphate substance on humans, plants, and other animals carries known chemically induced health risks and many potential unintended ecological consequences.

We are grieving and we are righteously angry for the vital life being stolen from current and future generations. On a continent developed by mercantile settlers, society at large has lost its sacred belonging to a greater environment - and instead has sought to render that environment a belonging of its own. Since industrialism, humans have thrown the rhythms of our planet out of balance and we are experiencing the consequences of societal dissociation as we face weather patterns so severe that we have faltered in understanding their origins and adapting to their destructive indifference. We can repair this relationship with ourselves as a collective or we can become displaced nomads, wandering what would otherwise be a fertile Earth, drenched in toxicity, wishing we had realized the obvious; that ecological rights are human rights.

This image was rendered below sea level at California's inland Salton Sea in the week following our evacuation from Los Angeles during the January 2025 fires - and a week before Trump’s return to the White House. During this time, many right wing American politicians have emphasized a vision of policies supporting the traditional “Nuclear Family” as a societal model. As two married women, one cis and one trans with a child and a dog looking for clean air, low fire risk, and available housing, we found ourselves evacuated near The Salton Sea. It's an uncanny place created as a result of an environmental accident in irrigating the local area in the early 1900’s. An attempt to use the sea for recreation ended in the 70s when the inland phenomena, nearly the size of Los Angeles, reached toxic levels of pollution from regional pesticide runoff. It was here we confronted our own nomadic odyssey, to find a place to raise our child Nova with a sense of ecological, existential, and political stability with high levels of equality across gender, nationality, and accessibility. In our exhaustion we asked ourselves, what brutal reality are the model cities and imaginary families of our society actually bringing us to, and in which ways will we profusely refuse to be separated from the divine wonder of our Earth, the sacred home of all known life.