Last week I drove from Seattle to Spokane and back for work. The east side of the state is really hell right now. Hot and smoky! Driving back Thursday, visibility was like a light foggy day. I drove past an area of a roadside brush fire; the red white and blue "East Interstate 90" sign was lying on the scorched grass, the post burned off at ground level.

Same pattern has happened in Colorado a couple of years ago.

Extreme heat, followed by pine trees burning, massive smoke (I was visiting Fort Collins around that time).

But after that, rains and cooling.

Your fires' smoke is making it all the way here to SW Ohio. I'm sorry. How awful for the firefighters who lost their lives.

@4
SW Ohio?!?
You have any dirt on what The Breeders are up to??

And the dust! I was driving through the farmlands of central Oregon last week and was amazed to see rising billowing curtains of topsoil rising in giant plumes from all of the dry fields. Dustbowl revisited!

They shut off the power from the Skagit dams, evacuated the City Light town of Diablo, and may evacuate Newhalem next. Highway 20 is closed at Newhalem, and Winthrop/Twisp are being evacuated. It's a pretty bad situation.

"...end of the anthropocene"

Bwahahahah...suuuuure it's over...the anthropocene is only just beginning. Also: wildfires raged due to lightning strikes long before humans were shaping things. In fairness, the fires weren't often as bad because conservationist era humans didn't step in and stop periodic burns altogether. Lightning strikes - and native americans - stepped in to conduct burnings more frequently in order to keep the fuel load down.

While you are falling all over yourself, in your pursuit of a more pure hunter-gatherer-status-quo-ante, to find examples of the carbon energy based world run amok, you might stop to think about those native peoples and other pre-industrial forms of anthropocene. There are examples of ecological engineering predating 'civilization' on every continent.

The wildfires and firefighter deaths are a tragedy, and I hope things are brought under control quickly.

the fire on the side of the road did not will itself into being. it was most likely a cigarette butt thrown by a dirtbag.

@5: http://pitchfork.com/news/55844-the-bree…

don't ask someone in Cincinnati what goes on in Dayton. No one gives a fuck.

@11: dnt feed the troll.