In the county where I live, there were and still are wildfires in two different locations. I’m pretty sure they got the smaller one under control, but I haven’t checked the news today to see what happened with the one that consumed 19,600 acres as of last night. It has displaced almost 10,000 people and 30 square miles are now burned to the ground. The media hyped this into a frenzy the last couple of days, so I couldn’t help but comment on it. Sure, it’s terrible that many people have lost their homes and all, but wildfires are a natural part of the world and have been for many years. If lightning strikes a dead forest, it will go up in flames. But if lightning strikes a living forest, nothing will happen. So what wildfires are is a kind of rejuvenation of a forest so it can begin a rebirth. Nothing wrong with that. Nature works in cycles, and this is the wildfire cycle in that particular region.
Forests grow and die like anything else. Once they become dry and without life, they become more susceptible to catch fire. The more dead forests there are, the more wildfires we’ll see. Luckily for me, I am miles away from the actual destruction, so I will not be impacted by this fire much. I find fire as a mataphor for what the planet is going through, with all its financial collapses and economic recessions. We need to build a whole new system to fix this, not put a band-aid on the existing system in hopes that the gigantic wound will heal. The bleeding may stop for a little while, but it will be worse in the long run. We’ll be deeper in 10 years down the road than we are now.
We need a rebirthing of the economy, a way to start over from scratch and begin anew with a better plan, hopefully learning from our previous mistakes. Some people say that something like this is impossible. Well, for those naysayers, I challenge you to think that if a revolution were possible, would it be worth it? And once you come to the conclusion that it would be worth it, you realize that it is possible. As soon as we stop our close-mindedness about certain things and how they are impossible, then we can actually make progress on that which we felt was previously impossible. Impossibility is only in our minds, so we can change them. I’ll give a concrete example here:
People say it’s impossible to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, but it makes perfect sense. People today think it’s more possible that in the future we’ll be downloading our consciousnessess into machines and be able to live much longer with our android bodies than to live like every other species on the planet. While turning into androids is certainly possible, it will throw us even more out of balance to the point that we’ll be consuming planets by the solar system just to feed our ever-expanding “progress.” Before we know it, we will have stripped the entire universe for resources. Sure, it may take a billion years to do so, but it will inevitably happen if we get the technology to be able to do it. But if we were to go back to living like we are supposed to, in balance with nature, at a sustainable population, then we could live forever as a species instead of crashing and burning or stripping the whole universe for resources, and then crashing and burning.
Wildfires consume everything in their path, destroying habitats that once were and leaving nothing but desolate land. Sounds an awful lot like humans, who are responsible for creating most of the world’s deserts. Humans, who are in some way partially responsible for global warming. But that doesn’t really bother me. Global warming is such a human-centered problem. They’re all worried that their houses and businesses will be flooded. The other animals in the world will simply move further inland and be fine. There will be insurance company defaults because they can’t afford to spend trillions of dollars to replace all of the land and structures destroyed by the water level rising 30 feet or whatever it is they are predicting.
What bothers me the most is that we are turning the world into a desert. Sure, after the whole world crashes, the Earth will heal, rebuild if we allow it to, so I guess it’s just like a wildfire. After a wildfire, all the burnt trees and plants become soil for a new forest to come along. It may take awhile, but the new forest will be more alive and diverse than the forest that was previously there. And I feel that this is what may happen with the human race. Our consciousness is being expanded on a daily basis and we are learning new and valuable things each day, so when it does all go crashing down, we’ll have a sustainable solution. Not just sustainable, but expansive in the terms of making the world more alive and diverse to the extent that we generate a net positive effect on the planet, rather than the negative one we have now. The wildfire of society has a lot to teach us about where we need to go once it finally burns out. So, I do now believe, in some terms, that society is meaningful, but only if we learn from it and don’t allow things to get out of hand again.
I just hope my house doesn’t end up getting burned down in the process.
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Interesting that you talk about how the Earth will heal. I have this theory that the Earth is a living thing. When there are cracks in the road, potholes, etc., that is a natural defense mechanism of the Earth, because those asphalt roads are not supposed to be there. In the end, if humans were wiped from the planet tomorrow, the earth would slowly heal and after a few years of healing it would be back in balance with nature and all of these things that we consider to be natural “disasters” would stop as the earth would no longer need them. Just something to try to wrap your head around.