Fire, Part 7: Americans and Wildfire

Liberals and conservatives now send kids to private schools presenting opposing views of world

What did you do with Prius drivers story?

Don’t ask what are they thinking It’s obvious they’re not thinking – like most, they’re just following peerp group behavior.
Or like Philippe, they’re not capable of overcoming dependencies. Can reason about what they’re doing, but smugly brag about not being able to change behavior. So it isn’t that people aren’t thinking, but that thinking doesn’t influence behavior – behavior is involuntary
Just like Guffin – smart enough to recognize not taking care of teeth, but can’t change, so he imagines implants will allow him to keep abusing
People can talk rationally while behaving irrationally
Definitely applies to social media – people can have public discourse, in which all they’re doing is talking – all talk & no action

Go West, Young Man!

Why is it so hard for our government to walk the talk, to do what it says it’s doing – to work with fire instead of against it? Why are wildfires getting bigger, and more destructive, reducing suburban neighborhoods and sometimes entire towns to ash, killing dozens of rural citizens, choking millions of city dwellers with dense clouds of smoke, requiring more and more massive paramilitary efforts to control?

It might help to take a fresh look at our history.

In school, we learned about the European Age of Discovery, in which brave explorers like Columbus and Magellan set out in wooden ships to cross oceans and discover new lands. We learned about the first settlement of North America by Pilgrims, English refugees fleeing religious persecution. We learned about the gradual colonization of eastern North America by the English, as part of the growing British Empire. The American Revolution, in which the colonists rejected British rule and established a democratic nation, the United States, based on the sanctity of individual freedom.

We learned that the United States began a new era of democratic nations, an era of freedom and democracy that gradually replaced the old European empires, all over the world. We were no longer English – from now on, we were Americans, a free people who had left the Old World behind. We went on to develop our own culture, with our own heroes and institutions.

I was born and started school in the upper Ohio River valley, in the foothills of the western Appalachians, surrounded by deciduous hardwood forest, where I spent most of my free time outdoors exploring nature. Our town was the first U.S. settlement west of the Appalachians, founded by George Washington’s senior offices in the wake of the American Revolution, capital of the new “Northwest Territory”.

But they’d built the town around prehistoric Indian mounds, an extensive urban complex of the vanished “Hopewell” culture. My dad gave me his collection of arrowheads found by our farming ancestors, and even before I started school I was pulling fossils out of the banks of the creek behind our house. So from earliest childhood I was not only steeped in American history, I had abundant exposure to deep time, and a passionate curiosity that came from direct personal experience, not from books or classrooms.

One of our family vacations took me to North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains, deep in the Appalachian spruce-fir forest, where I met Cherokee Indians. Another trip took me farther east to the nation’s capital, colonial landmarks like Williamsburg, and the decisive Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg.

As described in Part 1 of this series, we moved west to Indiana after I turned 8. Away from the dark, forested eastern hills, to the flat, open cropfields of the Midwest. I learned about the Indian Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, after which this region was settled by my ancestors, and the forests cleared for farms and towns. I looked for Indian mounds in remnants of forest that survived beside the small, serpentine rivers, but the indigenous presence had been completely erased here.

Nevertheless everything seemed old. Many of our buildings, even new ones, copied the East Coast Colonial style, with brick walls and white columns. Government buildings echoed the neo-Classical styles from ancient Greece and Rome that were popular throughout the eastern U.S. My new hometown’s heyday had been the Victorian period of the late 19th century, so our downtown, and many of our biggest homes, consisted of brick and stone buildings in the Victorian style.

We’d been taught that we were Americans, and our country represented a dramatic break from the Old World and a fresh start in the New, but actually I was living in a European Colonial town, surrounded by a landscape that had been made to look like the English Midlands.

My formal education in ecology began under Mr. Carrigan, my high school biology teacher. He cultivated a special relationship with me, introducing me to soils, soil fauna, and pollination, encouraging my fascination with snakes, intermediaries between the surface world and the hidden, mysterious underground. I spent my last summer in that place living on an ancestral farm, falling in love with the wild forest and river that bordered it.

I started college at the University of Chicago, which was modelled on Oxford University in England. The U of C’s undergraduate curriculum was based on the Great Books of Western Civilization, so I became even more mired in our European cultural legacy. The U of C was not that unique – all of what we call higher education is European in origin, structure, and practice.

But from there I was catapulted far west, to northern California, echoing the 19th century mass migration that settled our West Coast. That move west was seminal for me – it began my cultural awakening, my growth away from the European legacy, the baggage burdening the eastern U.S., which always looks eastward to the Old World for its history and its validation. Despite my thorough indoctrination in European culture, the mentors of my youth had rebelled against the system, encouraging me to question authority and think critically, and I was more than ready to unlearn the propaganda from those many years of school and replace it with accurate knowledge about the world.

I’d known since early childhood that there was a deep, rich, non-European past underlying this entire continent, but in the West it was closer to the surface. Colonists had not transformed the landscape the way they had back east, and large populations of Native Americans survived here and there, in places like the Southwest that were exotic, beautiful, and deeply intriguing to me.

The California desert was the place that quickly captured my heart. As I described in Parts 2 and 3, I encountered natural desert habitats that at first seemed to be pristine wilderness, but turned out to be littered with ancient potsherds, fragments of stone tools, petroglyphs and pictographs that tapped into my childhood curiosity about deep time and fired my artist’s imagination. I met desert rats and field scientists and learned about prehistoric tribes, desert ecology, the history of mining and ranching, the damage to desert habitats caused by cattle grazing, military operations and motorized recreation, the spread of invasive plants, and wildfire.

I spent a lot of time in and around Las Vegas, assisting a friend with wildlife research and conservation, experiencing firsthand the uncontrolled development, growth, and consumption resulting from our society’s founding belief in personal freedom and free enterprise. The rapid destruction of natural habitat by urban and industrial sprawl, the massive solar plants consuming multiple square miles of nature every year.

I met Native Americans and heard their stories, which contradicted much of what I’d learned from Anglo archaeologists. I studied aboriginal survival skills to get a firsthand sense of how indigenous people had lived in the arid Southwest. I lived and worked on ecological preserves, learning about regional ecology and the ecosystem services provided by native habitats and wildlife. I started my Pictures of Knowledge project – titled by biologist friends – to develop a more accurate understanding of humans in nature.

I revisited Mr. Carrigan – my old high school biology teacher, now retired – and saw his eyes light up with enthusiasm as he described how he had directed an engineering effort that dredged and channelized the river bordering our old family farm, to reduce flooding of crop fields. Dozens of miles of precious riparian habitat had escaped destruction throughout seven generations of European culture, only to be wiped out virtually overnight, in the interest of commercial efficiency and profit.

I listened to a radio interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker staff writer and author of The Sixth Extinction. She was emerging as a national authority on climate change and species extinction, but when asked why we should care about these things, she was stumped. She couldn’t explain why humans need wild habitats and ecosystems. After an awkward silence, all she could offer was “well, um, nature is beautiful, it has spiritual value, to lose it would be a tragic loss”.

And in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, after a decade of catastrophic wildfires all over the West, I encountered well-educated city dwellers from California and other affluent states, driving Priuses up 4wd roads, deep into our fire-adapted local forests, looking for remote cabins, rural properties where they could “get away from it all”.

What were they thinking? After all this talk of climate change, after all the tragic news about wildfires, why did they believe it was smart, wise, or responsible to move into fire-adapted forest, and expect the government to protect them? What’s wrong with our society, our culture, our educational system, our media, and our government that enables this degree of blindness and dysfunction?

Fouling the Nest

As I described above, for me, moving west was also moving away from our European Colonial legacy. Not to forget or deny it, but to peel back the layer of “American” colonial culture superimposed on this continent, to expose the rich legacy of indigenous cultures underlying ours. To put the imported colonial culture in a broader context, to compare it to cultures that are truly native to this land.

What kind of ecological culture did Europeans bring with them to this continent – how had they treated their habitats back home?

Much of Europe had already been ecologically degraded centuries before, its wildlands deforested, mined, and overgrazed by goats, sheep, and cattle. (M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild)

According to Josh Davis at London’s Natural History Museum:

Centuries of farming, building and industry have made the UK one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe. Extensive agricultural lands and road networks, in combination with other factors, have reduced the wildlife in the UK to a point hardly seen elsewhere.

A new analysis looking into how much biodiversity is left in different countries around the world has shown that the UK has some of the lowest amounts of biodiversity remaining.

Before the Industrial Revolution, forests covered much more of the UK than they do now. Large areas of wilderness were home to animals and plants which are now a rare sight, or gone completely. Red squirrels, beavers, wolves and bears were once common in the British Isles.

The advent of mass farming, factories, roads, trainlines and urban sprawl has been a death knell for wild places, and it was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.

This was our ancestors’ cultural legacy. What did they find waiting for them in the “New World”?

Discovering a Virgin Land

Around the arrival of Columbus, “it’s said that squirrels could travel from tree to tree from the Northeast to the Mississippi without ever having to touch the ground,” said Chris Roddick, chief arborist at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York. “In the old growth forests in the Northeast, you had hemlock that were six or seven feet in diameter, chestnut trees 200 feet tall.”

But we all know North America wasn’t an empty wilderness. Like Europe, it was filled with people, hundreds of local and regional indigenous tribes that had interacted with nature for thousands of years. The Eastern Seaboard of what’s now the U.S. was dotted with native villages surrounded by cropfields. Centuries later, records are poor and data is sparse, but it stands to reason that instead of continuous forest, the Northeast was a mosaic of habitats cultivated in part by Native Americans. And we’re now rediscovering that one of their tools was fire.

The early European settlers found that much of the East was already being fired on a frequent basis by Indians…These settlers gradually displaced the Indians, but continued their use of fire for many of the same reasons, i.e., to clear the woods of underbrush, to expose nuts, to clear agricultural fields, etc. Frequent fires occurred over large areas of the eastern landscape into the early decades of the 20th century. (Lear and Harlow, USFS)

Developing a Healthy Economy

Lear and Harlow say settlers “displaced” the Indians, suggesting they were just gently nudged aside. That’s a fine euphemism for the genocide we know occurred, and hints at the unconscious anti-indigenous racism inherent to our culture, including science and academia. North American wasn’t settled, it was violently conquered and colonized. Native Americans were either decimated by the diseases we imported, cheated out of their habitat in unfair trade, slaughtered for their land and resources, or violently driven westward ahead of our invasion.

Reviewing the Forest Service maps I included in Part 2, comparing pre-conquest forest cover to that in the early 20th century, we can see far beyond Lear and Harlow’s observations. The European colonists didn’t just use fire to clear a few fields, so they could feed their families. They were part of a global empire with a capitalist consumer economy that would transform much of the world into corporate plantations, producing highly profitable addictive substances like tobacco, coffee, tea, sugar, rum, whiskey, and opium, alongside emerging consumer staples like cotton and palm oil.

To establish these commodity crops and plantations, European colonists employed advanced technology developed by their scientists and engineers to broadly eliminate natural habitat which had been tended by indigenous societies for millenia, across most of the U.S. east of the Mississippi.

Using steel axes, saws, shovels, chains, winches, mule teams, and eventually steam-powered and gas-powered tractors, excavators, and other heavy equipment, European colonists cleared forests, drained and filled wetlands, dammed rivers, and dug canals. Most of the eastern indigenous subsistence mosaic was replaced by plowed fields planted with commercial crops – imported from Europe or appropriated from natives – including pastures for European livestock.

That colonial exploitation began the accumulation of wealth that would eventually enable the U.S. to build a global political, military, economic, industrial, and cultural empire. But indigenous burning, and the many other forms of indigenous tending documented in recent studies, comprised ecosystem services provided by humans in cooperation with nature – nutrient cycling, soil renewal, water purification, fuel reduction, etc. In the long term, everyone – colonists, surviving natives, and wildlife – lost many of the ecosystem services provided by the original mosaic. Including climate regulation.

The very essence of the frontier experience lies in the extent of its resources, and when resources are boundless, why conserve them or even utilise them efficiently? The principal goal is to exploit them as quickly as possible, then move on. It is this frontier attitude to resource utilisation that lies at the heart of much capitalism, and which presents such a challenge to conservationists today. (Flannery, The Eternal Frontier)

Land of Liberty

The first European ventures in the Western Hemisphere were combined military, commercial, and religious expeditions – to dominate native populations, claim their land for the empire, exploit their labor and natural resources for profit, and convert them to Christianity. The first colonists in what is now the U.S. were part of these combined ventures, in what eventually became my home state of New Mexico.

But with colonial settlement, religious oppression, and commercial exploitation, European diseases and brutality began to depopulate the New World, and accounts of the richness of indigenous habitats gradually reached the “common people” back in Europe. Many Europeans, like the Pilgrims and my Scottish ancestors, suffered from the oppression of empire at home, and the first European colonists in eastern North America were refugees seeking the freedom to practice religions unpopular in Europe.

This “freedom” – rhetorically known as “liberty” – became one of the founding values of colonial society. The land-owning and business-owning classes in the colonies – minor aristocracy and the urban middle class that was becoming known in Europe as the bourgeoisie – resented taxes and other forms of imperial control imposed from Europe. The European culture they inherited was intensely individualistic and competitive, and their Judeo-Christian religious tradition had granted them dominion over nature. They eventually formed a nation – the United States – based on individual freedom, private property, and free enterprise.

As white Europeans pushed westward, replacing indigenous communal subsistence ecologies and habitat with capitalist consumer economies, cropfields and pastures, they corralled surviving native communities into less economically desirable fragments called reservations. Eventually, in the late 19th century, with most of the continent transformed, romantic activists like the Scotsman John Muir warned white citizens that surviving fragments of native habitat with “scenic” value to Europeans were in danger of being lost to settlement and commercial development.

In the words of Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the New York Zoological Society in the early twentieth century, ‘nowhere is Nature being destroyed so rapidly as in the United States…an earthly paradise is being turned into an earthly Hades; and it is not savages or primitive men who are doing this, but men and women who boast of their civilization’. This is the sad story of the economic machine that ate the life of a continent, and it was not just animals that were fed into its maw, but people and cultures too. (Flannery, The Eternal Frontier)

These fragments of surviving habitat had provided final refuge for indigenous communities which had so far escaped European conquest; in response to white concern over the loss of “wild nature,” these indigenous refuges were confiscated and native people were driven off. This became a model for European colonial “conservation” worldwide. Indigenous people were driven off, their land was now called “public” – meaning it was for the use of white colonists – and the former indigenous refuges were now “preserved for future generations” of white colonists as National (and State) Parks and Preserves. This racist policy was eventually promoted as “America’s Best Idea”.

Managing Resources

Gifford Pinchot and a handful of his contemporaries…went to Europe to study the relatively new profession of forestry…In Europe, forestry practices were developed to reforest lands that had long ago been denuded by the large rural population to provide timber, charcoal, firewood, and pasture…Under Pinchot’s leadership, the Forest Service claimed fire control as its compelling mission…The Forest Service used zealous promotion and propaganda to build an aggressive national program for suppressing forest fires in all forests…People who suggested that fire be used or sometimes be allowed to burn were ignored or put down. (Carl E. Fiedler and Stephen F. Arno, Ponderosa: People, Fire, and the West’s Most Iconic Tree)

Not until the early 1900s were there serious efforts to exclude fire as an ecological process in eastern North America. In 1910, an outbreak of wildfires in the western United States–concentrated in Idaho and Montana, burned millions of acres, much of which was on national forests, and killed 78 firefighters…These events occurred just after the Forest Service had made fire control a top priority on the nation’s national forests and caused the public to become concerned about the sustainability of the nation’s natural resources. (Lear and Harlow, USFS)

Led by the Forest Service and the state forestry commissions, the public began to see fire as an enemy to be suppressed at all costs. An era of fire suppression began that created different environments from those that had existed for millennia, often to the detriment of many wildlife species. (Lear and Harlow, USFS)

Thus federal agencies’ policy of fire suppression emerged in collaboration with media and public opinion – just as now, sensational media stories of wildfire trigger emotional reactions and demands for political action on climate change – actions which will have unforseen consequences far in the future, beyond our leaders’ brief terms of office, beyond our own lifetimes.

Government fire suppression didn’t just apply to the parks and preserves set aside for white people. Government fire suppression furthered our founding values of free enterprise and private property, enabling private individuals and businesses to expand further into fire-adapted natural habitat.

By the 1950’s North Americans had eliminated about four-fifths of the continent’s wildlife, cut more than half its timber, all but destroyed its native cultures, dammed most of its rivers, destroyed its most productive freshwater fisheries and depleted a good proportion of its soils. (Flannery, The Eternal Frontier)

As the innovations of science and technology enabled population growth, cities, farms, and factories continued to expand and consume natural habitat, until, in the Postwar Boom of the mid-20th century, our science achieved a quantum leap in environmental destruction through the “miracle products” of chemistry like plastics, chemical fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, and the nuclear radiation unleashed by physicists in medicine and electric power generation. Whereas before, urban and industrial development had consumed and replaced discrete patches of rural habitat, these new substances spread continuously through air, water, soil, and living populations, both urban and rural.

We’re all familiar with the revelations of these dangers in the early 1960s and the subsequent Environmental Movement, the establishment of the EPA, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and the Endangered Species act. But despite these brief flurries of public opinion and legislation, the chemical industry continued to churn out plastics and other pollutants, and fire suppression and individual freedom ensured that natural habitat continued to be consumed as cities, homes, and businesses moved deeper into rural land.

Getting Away From It All

Eventually, in recent decades, just as science was beginning to discover the role of fire in ecosystems and government agencies were struggling to overhaul fire management policy, both scientists and agencies identified a fly in the ointment – the newly-christened wildland-urban interface, the physical boundary between nature and human dwellings and businesses.

Just as we belatedly recognized the need for wildfire to maintain natural habitat and ecosystem services, we discovered that our policy of fire suppression had made wildfire nearly impossible to restore to the system – because there were people, buildings, pets, and equipment already established there, throughout fire-adapted habitats. Private property and free enterprise are fundamental to our culture, but ecological sustainability appears nowhere in the Constitution or other founding documents, because it was not part of our European legacy.

At the same time the environmental movement was burgeoning and timber sales were being appealed, people were moving into homes and developments located in forests beyond the traditional suburbs. It became feasible to extend power and phone lines into the woods and maybe even to obtain a conventional mortgage loan. Comfortable four-wheel-drive vehicles and pickup-mounted snowplows were now available, allowing year-round access…

By the late 1980s a few million people had moved into the western forests…The new residents often resisted suggestions to thin their own forest, yet most had fire insurance and expected the rural fire department to come to their aid if a fire came near…

Television news and movies feature heroic images of brave firefighters and their impressive technology battling destructive fires…These superheroes had a record of defeated wildfires, and most forest residents felt confident that the fire department could protect them…Exurban housing in ponderosa pine forests threatens wildlands like national forests, national parks, and other preserves, because it prevents managers from using prescribed burning or allowing natural fires to burn to maintain the ecosystem. (Carl E. Fiedler and Stephen F. Arno, Ponderosa: People, Fire, and the West’s Most Iconic Tree)

Climate Change

When people talk climate change, they mean ensuring the continuity of our nation, gov, inst, so that children won’t have to change way of consumer lifestyle to adapt, because gov & industry change tech, provide same prods & svcs

We’ve seen how, during the early 20th century, public opinion in our ecologically ignorant and environmentally destructive culture was manipulated by science, government, and media to demand wildfire suppression. Government propaganda promoting this policy – the Smokey Bear campaign – continued through my childhood and youth. And the unforseen consequences of this cultural manipulation, misguided public opinion, and political action accumulated for more than a century, resulting in our current wildfire crisis.

Now science and liberal media are urging us to demand political action on climate change, which is presented as the cause of all our pressing environmental problems, including destructive wildfire.

Yes, average temperatures are rising globally. Average precipitation is decreasing in many areas, and natural habitats are drying out, increasing fuel loads for wildfire. Climate change can make wildfire worse, but it’s not the root cause. Wildfire is a problem for us because our culture denies its value and its necessity. Wildfire is a creative force – our culture is what’s destructive.

Wildfires are getting bigger and more damaging because from the very beginning, European colonists unleashed a plague of livestock and invasive plants to disrupt and replace native ecosystems. European colonists deforested the Eastern U.S., dammed rivers, drained and filled wetlands, causing damage that has yet to be repaired.

Wildfires are getting bigger and more destructive because in the early 20th century, white Americans reacted to sensational news stories and urgent warnings from science and media, building a groundswell of public opinion that forced government and industry to take major short-term actions – fire suppression – with unforseen consequences unfolding far into the future. We suppressed the wildfires the forest needed, and the longer we suppressed fires, the more desperately they were needed.

Wildfires are getting bigger and more destructive because we continue to deny nature and her cycles, moving into these fire-starved forests, building homes and businesses we imagine to be “permanent”, so when they eventually burn, we suffer, and we fight back. But worst of all, wildfires are getting bigger and more destructive because we slaughtered and drove off the natives who sustainably tended fire-adapted habitats.

Climate change isn’t causing destructive wildfires – we should’ve been having frequent wildfire all along, and our culture, our entire civilized way of life, is responsible for making it worse now. Climate change is only one of many consequences of industrial civilization. And the actions we take now, in a desperate effort to save that civilization, will have far-reaching, unforseen consequences, just like the fire suppression we demanded over a century ago.

Maybe in final section – overlaps with end of part 7 – last thing we need is to mitigate or fight climate change – climate change natural process of renewal like wildfire that we need to adapt to by abandoning industrial civ, maladapted institutions, behaviors, values, embrace like indigenous the processes of cyclical renewal in nature
Small scale socieities & communities around the world capable of doing that, we’re not

Colonists to the Bitter End

Much of this may belong in final section on wildfire

Another way of stating conclusion abt what causes wildfire – we’ve developed a society over thousands of years that can’t tolerate natural cycles – civilization itself is intended to subdue nature & prevent restorative events that occur in healthy habitats & ecosystesm
Really need to highlight political economy issue – what it really means in imperialist capitalism – now it’s vague what you’re saying about business vs private nonprofits vs govt – not clarifying how things work in modern capitalist world vs how they might’ve worked long ago
Taht also applies to part 7, transition over time – although really hasn’t changed that much – in colonial days, plantations dominated worldwide – now we have rhetoric that obscurs it
FS, Alicia Edwards – developing local resilience by transition to tourism, bike racing? Industries totally dependent on national economy, importing thousands of strangers from outside, at great energy cost? All she’s doing is imitating what other uncritical peers are doing nationwide, groupthink. Give me a break
Anything to keep a failing system on life support

So to answer the questions posed at the beginning of this Dispatch, our government can’t work with fire because, contrary to our myth of progress, the past matters. The past is not over. Time is not linear. Nature renews itself in cycles. European colonists damaged and destroyed native habitats and ecosystems across the continent, and prevented the cyclical restoration of fire-adapted habitats, and all that damage is still waiting to be repaired, that lost habitat underlying ranches, farms, and cities is still waiting to be restored.

Clarify that industrial civilization isn’t just historically grounded in dysfunctional behaviors & values, but that it depends on them for its power, wealth, continued existence – why you can’t just fix consequences of it – patient is terminal
Can’t renew lost habitats because population built on toxic industrial infrastructure, depend on them. Monbiot – saying we need solar & wind to prevent human suffering. Civilization causes human suffering – decimated, oppressed, displaced indigenous because of us, it – suffering already exists, solar & wind won’t stop it. We’ve been able to ingnore because believe it redeemed by benefits of civilization we see while ignoring suffering in background. Empires & colonies of Europe raped & pillaged and murdered indigenous & habitats around world while white minorities praised benefits that accrued predominantly to them, believing their benefits redeemed destruction, now peopple who talk about mitigating climate change to prevent human suffering in denial of that

The European culture we inherited was not ecologically sustainable – did not have healthy ecological values. Anthropocentrism, competitive individualism, the capitalist economy and primacy of free enterprise that we inherited from Europe are incompatible with conservation and ecological sustainability. And everything about our society and culture in the U.S. shows that despite our vaunted Declaration of Independence and American Revolution, we remain European colonists on this land.

To replace the hundreds of regionally-adapted indigenous cultures we first encountered in North American, we’ve imposed a single European language, a uniform industrial infrastructure and a generic consumer way of life, a centralized top-down political and economic hierarchy, European-style architecture and European-style clothing. We’ve replaced the incredible diversity of native habitats and ecosystems with factory farms hosting a handful of generic, engineered and chemically-managed commodity crops like wheat, corn, soy, cotton, cattle, pigs, and chickens.

For generations, our colonial society has been conditioned by science, government, education, and media to view wildfire as a predominantly destructive force. Even now that continues, in the condensed spectacles of the news cycle, reporting live from the wildland-urban interface – the shock, the horror, the tragedy.

You think your government and industry are going to rein in climate change, control wildfire and pandemics? You think you’re gonna terraform Mars? Good luck with that, teenage fanboy.

Climate change, like wildfire, like pandemics, is part of a natural cycle that we…

Climate change, like wildfire, is part of natural cycles. We can make it worse, or we can try to work with it, adapt to it. One thing we can’t do is control it through engineering and technology.

Part 7 about past damage never repaired, Part 8 value of Natives we removed, last section to show problems never solved until damage repaired – so in Part 7, minimize that – only clues

The balance of nature, including native wildfire regimes and cycles, will not be restored until our imperial nation, our centralized hierarchical society, our European colonial culture, and our industrial civilization collapse and are replaced by locally-adapted, locally-accountable cultures of habitat.

Of course we’ve been indoctrinated and habituated so thoroughly in our way of life that this is almost impossible to accept. Many of my friends, particularly my scientist friends, have found their comfort zones in the hierarchical bureaucracies of government and academia. And we’re warned by the schools, the government, and the news media that the only alternative to civilization is anarchy, chaos, and savagery. The only alternative to democractic nations is totalitarianism, fascism, oppression and persecution.

Is this true – are there really no better alternatives to our way life, and our dysfunctional relationship with wildfire?