How West Coast cartoonists deliver powerful art from the wildfires
Jack Ohman, who has lived much of his life in the American West, long listened to words of warning about catastrophic wildfires. The caution struck particularly close to home because his late father, John H. Ohman, was a deputy chief of the U.S. Forest Service.
“He warned me for years that Oregon was really vulnerable from a forest management standpoint,” the Sacramento Bee cartoonist says of his dad, who retired to the Pacific Northwest after many decades as a forest pathologist and agricultural official. “Unfortunately, he was correct.”
Now Ohman -- the cartoonist at the Oregonian in Portland before moving to Sacramento in 2013 -- uses his editorial perch to call out climate-change deniers and antiscience politicians as unprecedented fires ravage the terrain he knows so well. “I feel an obligation,” he says, “to cover this.”
In one recent cartoon, he depicts President Donald Trump benefiting from technology throughout his career, yet only supporting science when the motives are self-serving. In another Ohman illustration, timed to Trump’s brief stop earlier this week in California, the president calls climate change a hoax yet can’t see the governor for the burning trees.
“It’s emotionally devastating on every level,” the Pulitzer-winning artist says. “I have many friends and family members affected by all of it, particularly in Oregon -- entire towns wiped out, and the death toll is vastly understated.” Wildfires in the West have burned more than 5 million acres this season, killing at least 35 people, according to reports, as millions continue to face serious air-quality health risks.
Throughout the region, some prominent political cartoonists are also drawing commentary on the fires through a personal lens.
“Friends and family up and down the coast who have been sequestered because of COVID-19 are now locked indoors because hazardous smoke fills the air,” says David Horsey, the Seattle Times cartoonist who previously worked at the Los Angeles Times.