One afternoon last summer, as the worst wildfires in Oregon’s history raged outside, my toddler and I sat down to watch Wall-E, the 2008 animated film about the last robot left on Earth, who is trying to clean all the garbage off the planet so humans can return home.
We don’t normally watch TV in the afternoons, but this was an act of desperation. We hadn’t been able to go outside for over four days. At the time, the air quality in Portland was the worst in the world. I had sealed our windows with duct tape, but the entire house still reeked of smoke. The sky was orange and dim; ash rained down like snowflakes. With that scene outside, we sat in the house spellbound, watching a cheerful robot dance to show tunes while wearing a garbage can lid as a hat and battling an animated apocalypse on the screen.
