In early September of this year, a startling image of the Bidwell Bar Bridge in Oroville, California entered the Twittersphere. Primarily monochromatic, the background does most of the talking: a hillside in flames, a pumpkin haze, bright embers speckled throughout like little sunspots. That bridge is a seven hour drive from my home, but as far as I was concerned, it could have been down the block. On September 9th, I couldn’t escape the image: All the major news outlets tweeted diptychs of the before and after. Climate activists quoted Bernie Sanders, touting the Green New Deal. I kept scrolling.

But there was no emergency aid to be had the next day, and it would take a phone call from Governor Gavin Newsom, more than a month later, for the White House to recognize the disaster.

Ask any Californian and they’ll tell you we have five seasons. The fifth one almost never spells disaster for us Angelenos, but it does look and smell the part. From late summer through mid-fall, a blanket of ash settles over the sky and the air picks up the scent of a next-door barbecue. I drink an extra glass of water, apply a thin layer of moisturizer, and try not to look up. If it’s a bad year, I’ll catch word that our cousins up north have evacuated. Over time, however, the sky recovers its hue and I spend the next eleven months scrubbing the episode from my memory.

Every year, these wildfires remind us how little has changed. It’s the same old control lines, cold trails and aerial attacks, the same photos as last year—or was it the year before?—that inure us to a sad reality: climate change is at our doorstep and we’re running out of ways to say it.

In the 1930s, America was undergoing a catastrophic economic slump—15 million Americans unemployed—and, to top it off, its worst environmental disaster of the 20th century. The Southern Plains region—including Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas—was, much like the California Coast Range today, opaque with particulate, forcing 2.5 million people to flee their homes and migrate westward. Therein lies the sad irony: a hundred years later, the dust chases their descendants back to where they came from.

Many today recognize the Okies by the photograph Migrant Mother. The image captures a thirty-two year old pea picker in Nipomo, California. She gazes apprehensively into the distance, brow furrowed, hand pinched pensively around her jaw. It’s impossible to tell what she’s thinking, but we can guess. The sleeping infant in her arms and two towheaded children cowering behind her give us all we need.

When Dorothea Lange captured the now-hallowed image, she was a documentary photographer working for the Farm Security Administration, one of FDR’s New Deal agencies. Her job was to capture the plight of the rural poor and, trained as a portrait photographer, she did so with images that still weigh on the eye almost a century later. Though its subject would live to regret it, Migrant Mother was published in The San Francisco News on March 10, 1936. 

Lange never considered these photos art. And yet, there’s a moving artistry about each of them. Lange distilled the Dust Bowl into vignettes that capture the human condition. Her photos linger with us because they feel uncannily like a family album and, in a way, they are. When we look at Migrant Mother, we don’t see Florence Owens Thompson, but the thousands of mothers who lost their homes alongside her. While Lange’s unethical behavior—in publishing without permission and adding erroneous details about the encounter—will always taint these photos, we can’t discount the influence they had. Lange found profundity in the grimmest of moments and, whether she knew it or not, human psychology was on her side.

When conducting endangered species campaigns, conservation biologists take into account a metric known as “charisma.” Measured by six traits—rarity, endangerment, beauty, magnificence, and endearment—charisma helps them select animals likely to generate public appeal for biodiversity. It’s the reason the World Wildlife Foundation sports a panda bear as its mascot and not a protozoan.

The success of the “charismatic fauna” shows that the heart strings connect to purse strings. Not all species have this power, but the ones that do make conservation efforts a bit easier for the rest of the animal kingdom and the ecosystems they live in. Polar bears, elephants, and sea turtles make the top of the list, and it shouldn’t surprise us that humans do, too.

Before she died Lange wrote an essay called “Photographing the Familiar.” In it, she censures the contemporary photographer for his unwillingness to embrace familiarity. “The amateur,” she writes, “forces his Sundays into a series of unnatural poses; the world is forced by the professional into unnatural shapes. Landscape, season, occasion—these are compelled to a twisted service in which they need not be interpreted but, like a process, invented.”

Lange was referring here to the photo-magazines of the 50s (in particular, the theatrical compositions published in Life), but her criticism applies elsewhere, too. Anyone who uses the camera to embellish what they see is guilty of invention. If any such inventions exist today, they’re certainly harder to spot. The Bidwell Bar Bridge gives me pause. In it, I see so much to fight for, but just as much missing. Where is Lange’s human charisma? Are the trees enough to bring us to our senses? My answer isn’t hopeful.

I wonder what Lange would have done differently. What, or rather who, would she have made her subject? The family en route to safer pastures? The firefighter on his way to work?

We’ll never know, I suppose. A part of me wishes we didn’t have to.