The Fire This Time: How Climate Change Shifts Our Understanding of Suffering

Transcribed highlights of the show can be found in our episode summaries.

Unless you’ve actually been in an area where you can look out your window and see the view with your own eyes, by now you’ve caught images of an orange sky coming from West Coast. For the past week, hundreds of miles of California, Oregon, Washington, and neighboring states have been covered in smokey air as forest fires rage, driving thousands of people from their homes. More than a dozen people have died in these historically catastrophic fires.

As climate change has increasingly worsened fire season, it’s changed how Paige Parry, associate professor of Biology at George Fox University, makes sense of these disasters. 

“We know that humans are what’s contributing to the fires,” said Parry. “So in my head, that makes my response and the questions that I ask very different than maybe a disaster that's truly natural and not influenced at all by human action.”

Parry, a quantitative forest ecologist, has spent most of her life and research in the West. 

“Within this context of feeling like we have so little control over the situations that are unfolding here on the West Coast and feeling like we're just victims of these fires ravaging, there's a part of me that also recognizes that our collective actions and choices have in some ways likely contributed to the situation that we've found ourselves in, which I think leaves us to wrestle with it in a very different way,” she said. 

Parry joined global media manager Morgan Lee and editorial director Ted Olsen to discuss why these fires have grown increasingly worse, what types of consequences the fires have even after they’ve been extinguished, and how a Christian response to fires may look different in the wake of climate change. 

What is Quick to Listen? Read more

Rate Quick to Listen on Apple Podcasts

Follow the podcast on Twitter

Follow our hosts on Twitter: Morgan Lee and Ted Olsen

Learn more about our guest: Paige Parry

Visit our guest’s website: The Parry Lab

Music by Sweeps

Quick to Listen is produced by Morgan Lee and Matt Linder

The transcript is edited by Bunmi Ishola

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices