Private Story
Eden in Ashes - Climate Change grant
Wednesday I was driving to Ventura to photograph the fire when I heard about the Skirball Fire in Bel Air, so I headed that direction, and finally arrived there after getting stuck in traffic for two hours. I began making photos of that fire, then the next night I headed to Ventura, where I slept a few hours at the house of an old friend only to learn the fire jumped the 101 Freeway that night.
I arrived in La Conchita later in the morning, but the fire had mostly moved on, and I headed up Highway 1 only to run into a wall of fire burning through a palm tree grove.
Over the next several days I documented the fire often arriving after the flames had subsided, but left behind smoldering devastation. I made this series of photographs, which I'm tentatively titling, "Eden in Ashes," since the fire burned part's Ojai that were once lush, and Southern California turned into a hellscape of fire and smoke as six fires burn, and as I write this, The Thomas Fire has scorched and blackened over 200,000 acres making it one of the worst fires in modern California history.
I recently read in the New York Times that there are 100 million dead trees in California and the state could see wild fires on a scale never seen, which is interesting since the worst season in recent California history included the Thomas Fire.
According to data from CalEPA, "Wildfires have burned nearly twice as many acres since 2000 as the previous 50 years combined."
I'm already planning to document wildfires in California next summer in 2018, but having grant money and/or a publication that would be willing to publish this evidence of global warming's results would be helpful.
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