Christmas started at Costco after Labor Day. By now, merrymakers have officially bought gifts and all kinds of other items to decorate their homes for the holidays. Now imagine there are no landfills and no recycling centers. What if you had to keep your trash and recyclables in your own yard? What kinds of things would you buy -- and what wouldn't you buy?

Sierra Club staff and volunteers can see and smell the smoke from our head office in Oakland, and up here in Lake County, I can see and taste the smoke from the fires burning near me and those further south in the wine country.

And what we're seeing and smelling from the multiple wildfires blazing simultaneously around the place I've called home for 36 years is horrific beyond measure: 42 people dead and hundreds missing. More than 5,700 homes and structures destroyed. Schools closed, desperate families camping on beaches. The worst air quality on record.

Are you tired of being stuck in traffic in the San Fernando Valley? Here's a way to be part of the solution. The Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority has spent several years studying the possibility of creating a 9.2-mile line that would travel from Sylmar at the San Fernando Road Metrolink station at its northern end and then head south on Van Nuys Boulevard to the Orange Line station.