Click for larger view My wife and occasional New Colonist contributor, Gina Morey , photographed the plume of smoke from the Station fire in the.... My wife and occasional New Colonist contributor, Gina Morey, photographed the plume of smoke from the Station fire in the San Gabriel Mountains three or four days ago, using her iPhone. At the time she was in the parking lot of the Whole Foods on Fairfax and Third, not too far from our apartment, and a good thirty or forty miles from the fire.

As of today, the fire has burned over 140,000 acres of mostly wildland, but has also come close to entering the cities of Alta Dena, Sierra Madre, Pasadena, Glendale, Sylmar, and a few others south of the San Gabriels, as well as Action and other small towns and bedroom communities on the other side of the hill.

The weather has been hot and dry--hotter and drier than "normal" for LA in August--and we are yet again in the midst of a long drought. The fire has been almost impossible to fight--firefighters dedicate themselves to saving a few important structures (including the famed Mt. Wilson Observatory!) and keeping the fire out of the city grids that creep right onto the foothills.

The Santa Ana winds are not blowing, or it is certain that, with this "uberfire," large stretches of city would be in flames.

That's a matter of luck, for which all here are thankful.

What is not a matter of luck is the influence of Global Warming on these increasingly vicious fire seasons here (or floods or droughts elsewhere), and that's what makes this photo both poignant and maddening to me: the vast parking lot filled with big cars, most of them from nearby neighborhoods, are a direct cause of this fire's ferocity.

Yes, we always have fires, but not like this....

More maddening as Whole Foods likes to tout itself as "green," and its customers no doubt think of themselves as righteously "green" for shopping there.

Yet this Whole Foods, at least, has but one poorly designed bicycle rack--a type you cannot use a U-lock on--and if it is full, and you lock up to the rail around the café tables in front, a guard comes out and yells at you. (This has happened to Gina at this store.)

And don't sputter to me about carrying groceries: I did all the grocery shopping for a family of three for over ten years by bicycle. An ordinary bicycle too, not a bakfiets or cargo bike.

It comes down to this: if you are driving a personal motor vehicle, you are not green. The rest is bullshit. Even electric cars are not green: the embedded energy is huge, the electricity must be made somewhere, and the excessive acreage of roads and parking in itself imposes a massive carbon burden.

Every mile you drive adds just a bit more fuel to the fire of climate catastrophe.