We Don’t Just Need Wild Fire Leadership
I have this almost unnatural enthusiasm for controlled burnings on public and private land so when I saw this post by Bob Cringely where he shows the parallels between the lack of controlled burnings and our current economic crisis I had to share it with you. Here’s an excerpt:
In the early 1980s I was a volunteer firefighter for a tiny community in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. We all lived in a beautiful redwood forest and our task was to keep that forest from burning down in a huge conflagration, taking us all with it. The job was made all the harder because our little part of paradise hadn’t burned since the 1920s, so there was 60+ years of flammable undergrowth just waiting to light off. The current financial crisis facing the United States and the world really isn’t much different from that.
An unmanaged forest, one without the sort of fire control we attempted to provide, would naturally burn every few years. The undergrowth would build up, reach a critical mass, some source of ignition would come along — usually lightning — and all that undergrowth would burn. The redwoods themselves would be scarred but not really threatened, as we could see from the charring that marked them from countless such fires over centuries. Of course burning undergrowth threatened homes and property, too, so there was a natural desire on the part of that community to want the next burn to not come this year, please not this year. So there came a policy of aggressively fighting fires with the result that we eventually faced 60 (now 90!) years of flammable material growth rather than six or eight years. And the probable fire fueled by 60 years of undergrowth would have been so bad that our job changed to one of trying to prevent fires from happening, well, ever. This was an impossible task, of course. Eventually the stars would align the wrong way and the whole place would burn down, we all knew it. Just let it not happen on our watch.
Does this sound familiar?
Part of what makes up this term “conscious politics” that I am fleshing out here in this blog is the courage to be willing to name the problems rather than just hope they won’t happen on our watch. I’m not sure our country has a lot of practice with our political leaders “being real” with us. I’m not sure citizens know how to respond to that, but I also think that part of the uproar from citizens about politics does center around the desire to hear the truth and to have some leadership around what they and government can do.
I urge you to continue reading Cringely’s post and his exploration of the role government can play to positively impact climate change by doing one simple thing.