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.

Victim to hot temperatures and high winds, some 90,000 acres have burned, hundreds of structures have been destroyed, and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated or lost power in Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

But it is…