Is it possible to build a system of animal agriculture that deepens rather than distances our relationship with animals? One potential ideal might be a future where anyone who chooses to eat meat keeps a handful of chickens clucking through their backyards. When I raised this possibility with one epidemiologist, though, she cautioned that an expansion of such “small-holder” poultry farms could be its own pandemic risk: Now that influenza is endemic in wild birds, a more dispersed poultry production system means more potential sites for spillover.

Octavia E. Butler was asked, seven years after the publication of her uncannily predictive 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, whether her visions of an environmentally ravaged Los Angeles, circa 2024, where the elite barricade themselves in walled fortresses surrounded by poverty-stricken encampments of drug addicts and illiterate poor, was something she really believed would happen.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” replied the writer, who grew up in Pasadena. “All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.”

Fog is a companion, part of the rhythm of summertime, flitting in and out of lives like a family member. But it does more than astonish ill-prepared tourists and dazzle photographers and poets. It nourishes the natural world. It enriches the area’s cultural identity. It might even be an untapped resource in California’s growing anxiety over water.

When does a journey begin? When droughts parch the land, or mudslides take entire farms and crash them into ravines, or floods drown the crops? When herds dwindle, or fish leave for colder seas, or extraction poisons the wells? When war breaks out over resources, when political unraveling echoes the steady and inexorable deterioration of the home ground itself? . . .

The journey begins or doesn’t begin long before the land no longer yields or the climate becomes unlivable. It begins or doesn’t begin with systemic exploitation of environments and their communities, with colonial greed that is centuries old and unceasing, that continues to rift our world.