Wake up calls are coming more tragically now.

Maui didn't see it coming, although maybe it should have.  After all that, and after all the wildfires, heat waves, droughts, rain and floods on the mainland and around the world, and the damage and disruption that inevitably follows, we should appreciate that climate is really out of the bottle and very possibly out of control.

Al Gore wasn't kidding, and it's coming home to roost, pretty much everywhere, including right here at home in Hawaii. And we find that it's not just another prime-time news event from a far away place; it's life and death right here on a huge scale including the dead and wounded and missing and the wholesale destruction of our homes and buildings and a considerable piece of our state economy. 

Maybe we thought that Hawaii, with its distance, was somehow exempt from these things.  We have to admit that complacency on climate (and on so many other things) has ruled the day, here and elsewhere.  No, we are not exempt, and now climate has clearly caught up with us.  You can put solar on your roof and drive electric cars and be just as green as you want, but it would not have stopped what happened in Maui, because this is a global problem, isn't it.

What happened there is not a question of living well and sustainably.  It's more like a question of herculean effort at resilience, to protect what we have, to prevent unknown levels of existential risk, and to clean up and fix up all the destruction that took place, largely beyond our expectation or imagination.  No easy task, but maybe now we'll spend more time and lots more money in dealing with it.

Of course, we all know that this will happen again.  It's not necessarily limited to wildfires, although that is certainly possible. But other things like for example extreme weather, like Hurricane Ineeki or worse, on any or all of our islands.  What have we done to protect ourselves from that, and to recover from it.  Look around and ask whether we are working on dealing with the next disaster, and the one after that.  What happened on Maui should not be seen as a one off, but as an alarm bell for many other threats to come.  All these threats still exist, and they are being exacerbated every day by global climate change.

So let's see all this as the canary in the coal mine, as a message for the future, as an alarm we really need to listen to and a lesson we really need to learn, or else we'll be even more vulnerable the next time.  It's really much more than playing the proverbial blame game, as human nature likes to do. More important, it's time to redouble our public awareness and our efforts to open our personal and legislative pocket books, and develop an agenda and organize our resources, so we won't be caught so badly the next time.

Face it, the world is different now.  If you don't think so, consider what it will take to rebuild Maui and so many other places that have been damaged or destroyed, and ask yourself whether this fire is the last of it, or just the beginning.  We need to think and act on this every day, and the media needs to cover it, every day, not just in the aftermath of the tragedy but in the very real possibility that it will happen again, and possibly soon, and possibly worse.

Tempus Fugit.  Are we ready?