Staying with the Trouble in Burning Times
Like many of you, I have been closely watching the progression of the Los Angeles fires in disbelief and horror. At the time of writing, nearly 40,000 acres have burned, killing at least 16 people and displacing over 100,000 others. Many thousands of homes, schools, businesses, and other structures have been reduced to ash, with many more threatened as the blazes remain largely uncontrolled and powerful winds continue to tear through the region.
This disaster is admittedly hitting quite close to home. While I live in the UK (and have for the past six years), my last home in the United States was in Topanga, at a beautiful Tibetan Medicine centre in the hills at the northern end of the canyon. When I moved overseas, I took only a small suitcase and backpack full of essentials, leaving the remainder of my possessions in boxes at the centre—where they remain to this day, about half a kilometre from the current fire boundary. While the stakes are far lower for me than they are for those who actually live in LA, I am struck by the realisation that nearly every object I bothered holding onto for the first 28 years of my life may soon go up in flames. This threat pales in comparison to the horrors faced by those who risk losing their homes, livelihoods, companion animals, and even human friends and family in the blaze, but as I watch the fire inch closer and closer to my old residence, I can’t help but feel the existential reality of impermanence closing in.
It has been interesting to watch the responses to this crisis. Many are, rather understandably, searching for someone to blame. From the Republicans (erroneously) blaming left-wing politicians and DEI initiatives at local fire brigades, to the well-meaning leftists (also erroneously) blaming AI-users for supposedly using up all of the water in LA to cool ChatGPT’s computers, everyone is seeking an external target onto whom they can offload their feelings of fear, pain, and helplessness.
In reality, disasters like these have many causes (precisely none of which have anything to do with DEI initiatives or non-white/non-male firefighters): poor land and water management, short-sighted building regulations, urban congestion, natural weather cycles, and man-made climate change all have important roles to play. This last one is particularly significant, as shifting climatic conditions have put many places in the world—including Southern California—at dramatically increased risk of such disasters. And while it is true that corporations and the billionaire class bear a disproportionate amount of responsibility for our environmental and climatic crises, few among us are wholly absolved of partial responsibility for the dynamics that have built and perpetuated our human-dominated world.
As a scholar of religion, I have been particularly interested to see the responses emerging from religious and spiritual communities in the wake of this disaster. Many Christian Nationalists and ‘New Apostilic’ dominionists have taken to blaming the fires on Los Angeles’s progressive cultural atmosphere, positioning them as Yahweh’s punishment for what they see as LA’s embrace of ‘sinful’ lifestyles—particularly the social acceptance of LGBTQ+ individuals. As a member of the queer community, I am in no way surprised by this: right-wing Christians have blamed queer people for all manner of disasters over the years, including (but not limited to) hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, fires, economic crises, and even Covid-19. In years past, such claims were usually laughed off as the delusions of fringe lunatics and extremists, but in today’s cultural and political atmosphere, it seems that conspiracy theories like these are being taken much more seriously. This is a concerning development, particularly as we prepare for the return of you-know-who to the White House and the pending commencement of Project 2025. But that’s a discussion for another day.
On the other hand, ‘non-traditional’ religious responses to the crisis also seem to be largely missing the mark. With my background in Tibetan Buddhism, I have been particularly attuned to discussions in those circles. Some figureheads have recommended traditional rituals and prayers meant to quell natural disasters, which are innocuous enough—although they necessarily demand either cognitive dissonance or blame when they inevitably fail. One must conclude that, if such prayers fail to achieve their desired result, then those who tried to help simply didn’t pray hard enough, or that the victims of disaster were karmically destined to experience the sufferings that befell them (presumably due to their past sinful actions). Others have taken less supernaturalist—but equally problematic—approaches, highlighting natural disasters as an opportunity to relinquish attachment to material things. Everything is impermanent, after all, so ‘good Buddhists’ should embrace the loss of their homes (potentially including loved ones, both human and nonhuman) as a blessing which pushes them towards liberation from the ‘base’ material plane of existence. Naturally, and for good reason, such tone-deaf advice has not gone over well in the public square.
In all such cases, ‘spiritual’ approaches to the fires in LA seem to have focused on applying blame, inspiring supernatural intervention, or sanctioning spiritual bypassing—all of which have long been a classic part of the playbook of religion. Christians may take a very odd kind of comfort in constructing a story in which the fires verify their basic assumptions about the universe—namely that we are governed by an angry and punitive god who hates gays and liberalism, positioning the disaster as a divine mandate to double down on their pursuit of dominion in the United States (and abroad). This is, undoubtedly, one of the most terrifying responses that one could take to such a disaster. But we should be equally concerned about the ‘spiritual’ tendency to bypass the experience of grief and suffering as a kind of existential shortcoming rooted in materialistic attachment. Importantly, neither approach is rooted in compassion, nor in the stark realities of being human in the world.
Instead, all of these approaches can be viewed as methods of bypassing the ‘troubles’ of the present moment - a problem written about at length by philosopher Donna Haraway. She writes:
We—all of us on Terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious kinds, of response. […] The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in a thick present. Our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places. In urgent times, many of us are tempted to address trouble in terms of making an imagined future safe, of stopping something from happening that looms in the future, of clearing away the present and the past in order to make futures for coming generations. Staying with the trouble does not require such a relationship to times called the future. In fact, staying with the trouble requires learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as moral critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings.”
(Haraway 2016, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene, p. 1)
Disasters like the one we are facing are powerful opportunities—not to exercise detachment or invoke supernatural forces, but to sit in the potency of suffering and allow ourselves to feel. Those who have lost their homes are neither weak nor spiritually ‘unevolved’—they are humans in a moment of crisis. The ‘opportunities’ offered by such situations are not opportunities to detach and disengage, but rather to be present with their (and our own) pain, to share love, and to offer assistance in whatever ways we can. In stark contrast to judgment and supernatural interventionism, these are authentic ‘spiritual’ responses to crisis. To that end, it is notable that, between the shallow aphorisms and magical remedies offered by spiritual thought-leaders on social media, many of the most compassionate and caring messages have come from ordinary folk—not ‘enlightened’ or ‘divine’, just human.
Importantly, Haraway’s sentiments are not only applicable in specific crises like the LA fires—they are important and perennial considerations for living through the so-called ‘Anthropocene’. It is all-too tempting to approach this pivotal moment in our planet’s history as an opportunity for the securement of greater human control: a time for the Musks of the world to produce novel technofixes that will protect us from the inevitable consequences of our exploitative behaviours; or an opportunity to disengage and detach, allowing the daunting enormity of our task push us towards apathy and transcendentalist fantasies which can allow us to escape the Earthly bonds of our material plane altogether. Both dynamics are rooted in a desire to escape from the troubles that we face—to save ourselves the grief of living in the present. But what this moment demands is an earnest and compassionate confrontation with the circumstances at hand. We must face this moment head-on, with open eyes and hearts, in order to be capable of meaningful response.
As Haraway writes, “Mixed-up times are overflowing with both pain and joy—with vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy, with unnecessary killing of ongoingness but also with necessary resurgence” (Haraway 2016, p. 1). If there are blessings to be found in endings and crises, they are not merely the promises of ‘new beginnings’, but also the bittersweet moments of connection and convivial care shared in the throes of the darkness. This ‘joy’ cannot be accessed by sweeping pain under the proverbial rug, nor by trying to pray it away or exploit it for our own emboldenment. Instead, it emerges in the myriad expressions of care: in the countless volunteers who have stepped up to assist the humans and animals displaced by the crisis, in the firefighters who put their lives on the line to protect their communities, in the animal-lovers setting out bowls of food and water for wildlife seeking respite in a human-dominated world, in those who have offered resources or opened their doors to strangers whose lives have been reduced to ash. These acts of care are not based on a dismissal of grief, Stoic detachment, or an ‘I told you so’ haughtiness - they are practices of staying with the trouble, nurturing connection and care in apocalyptic times.
Naturally, I am highly concerned about the other-than-human experiences (and our acknowledgment of it) in this moment. While these ‘wildfires’ have largely impacted urban environments, there are still many ‘natural’ landscapes that have been forever altered in this crisis. Fires are, of course, a natural part of the cycles of such places—but that doesn’t mean that suffering and pain are not encountered. The loss of a landscape is not like the loss of a building. A forest is not a place, it’s a community: a community of animals, plants, fungi, microbes, minerals, perhaps even ‘spirits’ (if our personal cosmologies allow for such possibilities). It’s not all about the loss of beauty, or hiking trails, or ‘natural resources’. Suffering is not exclusively human, and it is profoundly important that we allow ourselves to acknowledge this truth as we continue walking the perilous trails of the Anthropocene.
To that end, it is of course important for us to recognise the role that our disregard has played in creating our present climatic and environmental circumstances. Our rejection of any domain of value and meaning outside the human (and perhaps the transcendent divine) has made us numb to the experiences of our other-than-human kin. By reducing them to ‘resources’, we have condemned them to eternal enslavement in our heartless systems of instrumentalist exploitation. So many of us have utterly abandoned any sense of meaningful integration with the so-called ‘natural’ world, the consequences of which are stark and terrifying. If we want to follow Haraway’s advice in making the Anthropocene epoch “as thin as possible” in the geological record, we must allow ourselves to return to the proverbial ‘ground’. To embrace our natural state as living beings in a living world. Allowing ourselves the empathic space to care for others, to attend to their sufferings, is very much a part of that process. We don’t need to fix the pain of others, nor explain it away, in order to attend to it. We simply need to hold space for it, allowing for the experiences of others to stir our hearts and remind us of what it means to be in authentic communion with others.
The confluence of peril, pain, and beauty in this moment reminds me of one of my favourite lines from J.R.R. Tolkien, spoken by Haldir in the woods of Lothlórien after Gandalf’s fall in Moria: “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” Pain, grief, love, and hope are not disconnected phenomena, and if we ignore the former, we will miss the opportunity for the latter to emerge. The perilousness of our present moment—environmental, political, social, and otherwise—provides us with the opportunity to put our deepest values into action. It’s not merely about preventing future catastrophes, nor about magically suppressing present ones, but about creating pockets of care and alternative ways of being amidst the infernos, so that new growth can emerge from the cracks of our crumbling world.