DaveW -
I know you have moved from SoUtah to the Great Lakes (MI?) but must
still have family friends living back in Utah, not that far really from
both the North Rim fire which just burned the Grand Lodge (and much
more) there, and the LaSal FIreNado that was so spectacular and took out
a small off-grid community there.
I think you have reflected on feeling some regret over not taking
Climate Change more seriously earlier (we all have our processes and
paths around these types of things). I grew up around fire and
fire-fighting, mostly in rural pinon/ponderosa forests with my father as
a USFS disctrict ranger who used to also spend one or several multi-week
stints leading fire-crews in the Pacific NW or California. There was
no conception of there being a global scale warming/drying, but I do
remember him being acutely aware that "a good Spring" meant "a bad
Summer" in those Pacific forests, yielding a great deal more
undergrowth, etc to carry fire on the ground even before/outside the
bigger-hotter fires that would travel crown-crown.
What I'm circling in on is the question of the general denial we have
all perhaps been engaged in, each in our own way, about the sweeping
(nominally global if not Global) changes which human activity has
triggered. I once (a decade ago?) invoked the idea that homo sapiens,
at the end of the pleistocene, were the cause (as much indirectly as
directly) of the plunge in Megafauna in both the New World and northern
Eurasia. Glen schooled me on the counter-arguments against that theory
and I don't need to re-litigate that range of possibilities so much as
to simply point out that "homo sapiens" is an acutely *potent* species,
especially come neolithics, agriculture, written language, urbanization,
modern technological development (from archimedes to daVinci to the
folks doing the work in Musk's (and others) name).
All this background to open the question of whether the otherwise
well-grounded, fundamentally intelligent, situationally clever folks
which I grew up around and DaveW (and others here I am sure) feel an
affinity with or closeness to (Permaculturists before Bill Mollison?)
have shifted "forward" to recognizing that the rate of change of our
(humans + domesticates + tech + self-modifying tech) is yielding
"unexpected consequences" in a short enough time frame to see the
consequences of our actions (albeit years or decades later, but not
generations?). If my belief that homo-sapiens managed to disrupt the
megafauna (by spearing/driving-them-off-cliffs, or just disrupting all
aspects of the ecologies they depended on) holds any water, no
individual likely woke up one day and asked "where did all the Mastadons
go?" or even " where did those huge hairy, tusky creatures my great
grandfather used to speak of go?", but we are a smear of generations
(born 30's through 90s?) who likely recognize that truisms we grew up
with about the natural world as well as the political and economic
system are no longer what we either were taught to believe they were or
came to believe through our direct experience they were?
My father struggled with the locals who lived on cattle ranching and
lumber milling, not accepting that those resources they depended on were
not infiinite... they saw the limits of "timber sales" and "grazing
allotments" a huge inconvenience (at best) to an acute insult to them
and their ability to "just make a living". The local bar in the town I
went to grade school in sports a taxidermed owl with the sign "eat an
owl, save a logger" (for example). Some of the locals who worked as
seasonal fire-fighters occasionally would get busted for lighting off
forest fires to create work for themselves. My father was very pleased
with the roughly 50% of the ranchers he worked with who actually had
studied (formally or informally) range management and were as eager as
he was to make sure that 5-10 years later the grasslands their cattle
were grazing on were at least as healthy as the were today and often
they were interested in returning a formerly overgrazed section into
something yet-more-productive. Then were the other 50% who were just mad
because *they* didn't get to take *their half out of the middle*.
Mary's milieu was primarily W. Nebraska farmers who are still voting
Trump back in every chance they get, even though somewhere along the
line, most understand that the wells they sunk into the Oglala in the
60s are now dry and have to be deepened and that the dead seeds Monsanto
(and their ilk) and Fertilizers and Insecticides their fathers poured
over the landscape with gusto might well be the source of their cancers
and other maladies.
Our own founder's main business in this domain (visualizing and modeling
Wildfire and many other topographic/topological registered phenomena)
naturally engage with folks who are acute stakeholders in the areas
which are burning/flooding/toxic-pluming/eroding/etc. I understand
that Guerin has his own (equally good) reasons as Glen not to mix work
and FriAM.
And yet we are watching something as overwhelming as the Dustbowl of the
30s sweeping the whole earth, and yet we are arguing over whether EVs
cost more to operate because they are heavier and wear brakes and tires
faster? Or whether the area of strip coal mine rendered useless for
other purposes is better or worse than the same area covered in PV panels?
Ok... just a rant... triggered by my childhood memories of watching
fires crown across the road near our home while watching firenados
destroy places I'v evisited and my favorite national Park Lodge burn down.
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