Six years, two months, and 17 days ago, we woke up to a massive smoke column blocking the sun from our house.

Within minutes, we were fleeing for our lives, leaving the house we’d worked so hard on to burn. High winds early that morning caused electrical lines to contact vegetation and then helped build and push a monster of flame at speeds where the best we humans could hope for was to get out of the way.

The Camp Fire was an unprecedented firestorm at the time, just like the unprecedented hurricanes, floods, droughts, and high temperatures our world has been experiencing ever since. Tragically, we’re establishing a large body of precedent: mountains of ash, washed-out valleys of rock, mud flats where art districts used to flourish, massive coral reef die-offs. Greenland is starting to look like a nice place for a summer house.

I’ve had numerous people kindly asking over the past week if the horrific fires in Los Angeles have been reawakening the trauma for me. It certainly reminds me of the lesson that many Angelinos have been learning: that so much of what happens in our lives is out of our control.

These fires were unstoppable. They were not the result of human screw-ups. And first responders and public safety did (as usual) a phenomenal job of helping get people out of harm’s way.

I’m not traumatized that the fires are happening. But what I am experiencing is something closer to fury at our collective unwillingness or inability to come together and start doing absolutely everything in our power to mitigate the human-caused climate change driving these previously “unprecedented” events.

Science has now clearly shown us how the fossil fuels we have used to develop our world over the past 150 years have had the unintended side effect of dramatically warming our planet and acidifying our oceans. The increased intensity of winds, droughts, heat domes, warming ocean temperatures, attendant hurricane strength, and larger fires are all directly attributable to our collective actions and choices.

And I believe this is the best news we could possibly have. While much of our lives are out of our control, climate change is not one of those things. If these phenomena were in our power to cause, they are also in our power to change. We can, collectively, do something about this.

We are at least a decade past when all denial and argument over whether the evidence points toward our need to drastically cut back on our use of fossil fuels and propagation of cattle (the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions), and now solidly into a place where we need to urgently debate and decide how we are going to respond.

Humans aren’t the strongest or fastest species on earth, but we are by far the best at teamwork. It’s our superpower.

It is high time we start putting this superpower to work, doing everything in our considerable power to ensure that this beautiful, amazing, and habitable planet we inherited from our ancestors is something we pass on to our descendants. (If we don’t, there will be no history for us to go down in as the dumbest humans to ever live.)

There is so much we can do: We can support transitioning to cleaner forms of energy, cut back on beef consumption, and take steps to consume less. We can also demand that our leaders take climate change seriously. We can work together with our neighbors, our fellow Americans, and our fellow human beings from every diverse part of this planet to build trust, mutual support, and a better world for all.

Jesus has a poignant line we’ve all heard quoted at weddings: “What God has joined together, let no human separate.”

It would be foolish to think he was just only about two people committing their lives to one another. I think this applies to all of this: our planet, our fellow human beings, and all the life that makes our lives possible.

What God has joined together: the trees, the birds, the bees, the bacteria, the seeds, the algae, the olives, the grapes, the tomatoes, and the tomatillos. Our lives, our planet, our purpose — they’ve never been about turning a profit — they’ve been about the beauty, holiness, and inextricable connection of all life the whole time.

Let’s make a better world together.