From a social investigation by kites in 2021, Chronicles of the struggling and dispossessed

Our caravan managed to interview a home-owner named Marie from Lillooet, a small town an hour up the road from Lytton. Marie was a healthcare worker, and the Federal government had just offered to rent or buy out her house so that emergency crew workers could be stationed in the region to battle the proliferating fires. Cheekily, comrades asked why she decided to buy a house in a region on fire:

Well it wasn’t always on fire! But yeah, when we put an offer on the house, we did have friends say, “Are you worried about the fire zone?” I said “No, I mean, I know there’s been forest fires, but nothing was that bad.” My understanding was that the wildfire forest service comes in and they build a guard for protection and to protect the town, right? There’ve been histories of evacuations, but it didn’t really cross my mind that a town could burn to the ground. That seemed like some spectacular event.

Comrades asked Marie if she thought this was creating a shift in people’s perspective around the urgency of climate change:

I think people are still dealing with things in the day to day. I know in Lillooet there’s still fires on each side: one in Lytton, one in McKay Creek. There’s like 200 fire fighters within 80km of our town. Wait… no, more than that because Ashcroft is on evacuation notice as well, and so is 100 Mile House. Like, there’s 125 fire fighters just in Mckay Creek, so there’s encampments of forest firefighters because there’s nowhere to house them. We actually had the federal government call and ask to rent out our house because there’s nowhere for them…

And it never even crossed my mind: Where do all the people go? You evacuate 1,500 people from a town, where the fuck are they supposed to go?.. I think a lot of people still don’t know if or what they’re going back too.