There are wildfires all over. There’s been so little rain that there’s a state burn ban, a county burn ban, and people are still out burning. Some idiot burning trash set off a huge fire that’s now burned a building in spite of many hours of firefighting efforts (in which I participated in an entirely minor and inconsequential way). The Smoky Mountains really are right now.
This is the sort of thing that troubles my hopes for human freedom. We should not need a ban; it should be totally obvious that burning anything is irresponsible and stupid. All the same, people are out here starting fires. I’m not much for telling people what to do or how to live, but this kind of thing makes me wonder.
10 comments:
…..We should not need a ban; it should be totally obvious that burning anything is irresponsible and stupid…….
I disagree.
We should burn the federal govt down……. The bureaucracy is too damn big and has been weaponized against us. Agency capture by special interest. Blah blah blah…
But that isn’t what you were talking about…..
Ya know I just did a 60 mile hike
In the woods and it was so dry. Every stream was bone dry and the critters sort of disappeared too. No water at all. We had to pack our water and it was heavy. The heaviest pack I carried in 30 years
And yes I was worried about fires the whole time as the ground was all cracked and dry and if it started to burn nothing would stop it: everything was kindling.
Pray for rain.
Greg
We have the opposite problem out here in the PNW.- the faucet was turned on a month ago...
Ya know, if unopposed, stupidity is it's own cure. Things like narcan and welfare and safety features and zero tolerance policies all dilute consequence, allowing stupidity to reproduce and sometimes reach critical mass.
How many people making decisions on getting us into war have ever been punched in the nose?
I see your point, Raven. However, setting off wildfires is likely to burn a lot of other people’s homes and not only yours. Also, I might selfishly suggest, it endangers firefighters.
You have hit my sentiments exactly. The tradeoffs are terrible. If we diminish freedoms we become less of a people able to deal with freedom. That is not a small thing. It might be the death of the Republic. Yet if we don't, innocents die, and in the evolutionary sweepstakes they may have been entirely worthy, just living too close to fools. Whichever we choose, we punish some innocents for what we hope is a larger good.
Oh yes, we do. We do. I have no patience for those who pretend otherwise, on either side. Nor do I find the "long-term view" on either side very convincing, as it always seems to favor what they would like personally to be true, not a cold accounting of the lives of others.
In some countries the persecution of the church made it stronger. In others, it just wiped them out and it's gone. I have nothing left but the existential Christian answer that we must seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit and not try to find a rule we can apply in all circumstances.
And yet...that is also open to terrible abuses.
I increasingly believe this is a cyclical process. People who live near each other do things that endanger their neighbors. The community passes rules to stop that. Then things that are not so endangering are labelled unacceptable. The community passes more rules. Eventually the Ship of State (or village or country) becomes so barnacle-encrusted it can barely sail. So the barnacles have to be scraped off or the Ship scrapped. (I think I'm losing myself in the metaphor.)
Anyhow, we (people) start off with no rules, decide we need some, keep adding more. The rules become worse than even the original problems they truly solved. We don't seem to have a mechanism to get rid of just some of the rules so we have to start over. Lather, rinse, repeat.
I'm of two minds. Certain environments need regular burns to maintain health, and the southeastern forests were burned on a regular basis by the Indians before Anglos arrived. So fire can improve the forests.
But so much fuel load has accumulated that now, it would require very careful watching under perfect conditions to reduce that load safely. Anything else endangers people, be they firefighters or home owners and travelers.
We're having grassfires and brush fires out here, thanks to the wind and very low humidity. We all need rain, or a nice wet snow.
Y'all are in my prayers, Grim. I hope that conditions improve, and the fools step back from their folly. (One of the worst recent fires out here started when a [censored] fool decided it was OK to use a cutting torch on metal surrounded by dry grass when the wind was gusting to 50 MPH.)
LittleRed1
We have a lot of controlled burns normally, because normally this is an alpine rain forest. When we get our usual 90-140” of rain, controlled burns are a very sensible thing.
After the Paradise fires, I grabbed the chainsaw and cut deadwood around our place. And ladder fuels. A couple of weeks of cutting and dragging wood out of the verge. A lot of deadwood- maybe four 12 yard dump trucks full, compacted by an excavator.
The PNW with all it's rain, still has summers where a drop does not fall from early June to late September- and the fuel load is huge- "we never get fires here"- the only people I have spoken to about this who have an inkling are the firefighters. One of these days.....
The lessons from Paradise were clear- an uninterruptible water supply AKA a well and a generator, and a hose. A defensible perimeter with all the shrubbery away from the house.
A metal roof and small vents. No buildup of pine needles etc in the roof valleys and gutters.
Nothing will stop the worst, but some can be stopped from burning a house if it is planned for.
Raven, around here people forget how fast fires climb up slopes. The local fire marshals shudder at the wooden porches and balconies that extend over brush-covered arroyos and washes. "But the view is fantastic!" Yes, it is, but if you don't remove the fuel under your porch ... (Which would then erode out from under said porch, but that's a rant for a different blog.)
LittleRed1
Well, we seem to have picked up all the rain this year, instead, and left you all little. It's usually we who are on fire about this time of year. Instead this (rather unusual) year, we just had a good rain and will have more yet.
" I have nothing left but the existential Christian answer that we must seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit and not try to find a rule we can apply in all circumstances."
Yes, AVI I think that's a good starting point- it's going to always be a dynamic process of balancing rules against needs and rights.
Your metaphor, Elise, seems quite accurate. You're right that the problem seems to be there is no way to "scrape the barnacles off", at least in recent times. We need some way to do that. Automatic sun-setting of laws might be a really good idea. Would also keep the lawmakers busy re-instituting those they though should stay so they'd make fewer new ones, perhaps. We (the nation, not us here) also need to think about checking ourselves from the regulatory influence and trying education first- it's more effective anyway. It wasn't really drunk driving laws that changed people's habits, it was social pressures and education that did. We should try to remember that. Not everything needs a law to get people to abide by it.
Oh, and Greg- being out West, I feel your pain- that's *most* hikes here, dragging along all that water.
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