Ventura county is burning. My hometown is climate change's latest victim | Steven Thrasher

Affordable housing has been lost to the California wildfires, leaving poor people without homes – and without hope of help from federal government

An unbearable amount of Ventura county in southern California, where I was born and raised, is simply gone. And as I hear about site after site from my childhood simply disappearing into scorched earth, I am realizing that climate change is not only erasing the present, it is also destroying the physical touchstones to my own past.

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I'm able to separate my emotions from the story until I hear a coyote wail in pain or see cats scurry. Meanwhile, sirens ring and ash falls