A “boffin” is a pejorative term for the cliché absent-minded professor or scientist.

We are still in summer.

Yesterday, as a result of strong winds beginning the evening before, the power was out here and everything with it. Our flip phone had only two bars and we expected it to run down any second. Even so, Gary was on that phone first thing yesterday morning and found an electrician to have a look at the downed mast that serves our duplex and the power company to disconnect that mast until it can be repaired. The repairs are happening now.

So, more than a day without power, expensive repairs, and so much continued wind and smoke from fires around the state that it remains unsafe to go outdoors for our walk.

And it’s summer.

I spent much of yesterday knitting and plan to do that again today while I watch No Highway in the Sky (1951) on DVD. Jimmy Stewart plays the boffin, a Rhodes scholar who never went home but has continued his scientific research in England at an aircraft company. The film has its roots in Nevil Schute’s novel No Highway with an epigraph from “The Wanderer” by John Masefield:

Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find
No Highway more, no track, all being blind,
The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.

Theodore Honey (Stewart) has a theory about vibration causing metal fatigue. As a result the metal in tailpiece of a passenger plane will fail and the tail itself fall off after a measured number of hours of service. Honey is interested in theory alone, not the realities of planes carrying passengers and crew crashing in the wilderness. And that has already happened: a plane has crashed killing all passengers and crew. The tailpiece is missing from the crash. A new administrator at the aircraft company places great faith in Honey, in science over convenience, but others think the boffin is simply crazy.

So here we are. We dismiss the warnings of science at our peril.

Global warming, or “climate change” if you prefer, has been predicted and tracked for decades by scientists. It was controversial at one time, say sixty years ago—that is, there was a time when thinking people disagreed. Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring (1962), accurately predicted the devastating results of use of DDT. When the poison was outlawed bird species began recovering. In the forty-one years we have lived here, we have seen the return of eagles and pelicans (both endangered in the 60s), as well as two species of jay, ravens, and others. Carson believed in the 1950s that climate change was not human-caused but the result of natural shifts in weather.

Carson died as a result of complications from breast cancer in 1964 before she could see what she started. Despite her background as a marine biologist, she wrote Silent Spring to warn of the dangers of 20th century pesticides, herbicides, and other poisons because no one else would. In the end, people listened to Carson’s warnings and outlawed some of the poisons. She was right about that but she was wrong about global warming.

More than fifty years later, there is no real controversy among scientists about global warming. The cause of climate change is human activity destroying forests, burning fossil fuels, and so on. Human activity will destroy human populations just as DDT destroyed bird populations. It is happening now and has been happening for a very long time in human years; it’s just that we have been hundreds of years noticing. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution. The world is warmer than it would have been without our greed for energy. Temperatures rise of even a few degrees is enough to alter weather patterns that cause drought, melt glaciers, raise sea level, generate more hurricanes and other storms, and other aberrations. Human behavior is the cause, just as we were the cause of near extinction of eagles and brown pelicans.

Technically this is just the beginning of fire season in the western United States, and already millions of acres are burning, records are being set for high temperatures, and firefighters choke on smoke.

And it is still summer. We saved some of the birds. I would like to think we could save us all.

“In southern Oregon, people in parts of Medford, Talent and nearby communities were ordered to evacuate the area immediately on Tuesday, with officials citing the imminent threat of fast-moving fires. The entire town of Phoenix [Oregon] — which has several thousand people — was told to leave. …

“Deputies in Clackamas County, southeast of Portland, spent the night going door to door to make sure residents knew they had to get out, the county sheriff’s office said. …

” ‘We’re in an unprecedented fire event,’ Oregon Gov. Kate Brown said, urging people to follow evacuation orders, ‘try to reduce your smoke exposure – and take care of each other.’ …

“Across the region, 15 new large wildfires were reported on Monday alone, the National Interagency Fire Center said. That makes at least 87 large fires, which have burned more than 2.7 million acres. Even in places where flames haven’t reached, massive amounts smoke have filled the sky, making it difficult to breathe.”—NPR

Yesterday evening we could not breathe the air that came through an open window. Before summer ends, no rain predicted.

The tail is falling from our plane, and the boffin is still shouting to be heard.

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Do I need to note that there is a burn ban in effect? Perhaps I should. Yet tourists and less reputable locals have burned cordwood and drift on the beach each evening . . .

“DEQ, in conjunction with the Oregon Department of Forestry, Oregon State Fire Marshal’s Office, Oregon Department of Agriculture and Oregon Health Authority, is asking people to refrain from all outdoor burning activities until further notice.   

“For more details, please visit the “DEQ response to COVID-19” web page.

“As of April 3, 2020, DEQ, along with its partners Oregon Department of Forestry, Office of the State Fire Marshal, Oregon Department of Agriculture  and Oregon Health Authority, is asking people to refrain from all outdoor burning activities until further notice.”

Updated 9/8/2020: The fire restrictions maps below are having technical issues. Please no burning or campfires while a red flag fire weather warning is in effect until further notice.    

State of Oregon: DEQ

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