Welcome again to my parking lot. The space between breaths where I catch myself at the beginning and end of each day. Before I go any farther, thank you for being here. Being here makes you part of my community. Some of you are friends, some family, some strangers, but we are linked by a common thread of caring about how we inhabit this world. I am curious — what led you here, to this page? What are you curious about? Reflecting on?
Today’s topic is the nuts and bolts of it. What holds something together? What keeps it from falling apart? I think the answer is in good tending. And what does that entail? There are so many opportunities for little things to get missed in a world of constant movement, especially the more complicated that world gets. At work we say, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Maybe the subject is on my mind because 3 of the 4 screws on the starter plate of the chainsaw I tuned last disappeared during project work yesterday. Is this a reflection of my energy, trying to be everywhere at once, and therefore nowhere in particular?
Have you heard of the Swiss cheese model — the concept of where holes in each layer continue to stack up until something falls through all of them? It is a way of explaining how a bad incident usually transpires from an alignment of ignored details.
I thought I was doing pretty good when I stopped by the parts store on the way to the auto shop this morning on my day off to replace a turn signal bulb on my truck that’s been out for a couple weeks. I must have spent 20 minutes trying to put the new bulb back in as it kept falling out (even with electrical tape, please forgive me) before I accepted the fact that the whole assembly was corroded and the issue indeed went deeper than a new bulb. I went back in the store, found the replacement plug, secured the new bulb into it, and voila! A working light. I was slightly annoyed at myself for taking so long to see the bigger picture, but glad to have the lesson. Then it was on to the auto shop.
There I got a little more than a slap on the wrist. Speaking of being in alignment, my wheel base on my truck home was not. My rear brakes were almost non-existent. I was also due for tires. This is now an all-day affair. One of the realities of being in fire and living out of a truck is that you pay intermittent rent to your vehicle. If well maintained, rent stays pretty regular and is fairly predictable to keep up on. If negligent, rent comes in hot and searing. Today’s rent reflected that I haven’t been able to be everywhere at once and my truck took the back burner. Maintenance issues stacked up to the point someone else pointed out the serious threat to safety that was accruing. I took a swallow of humility, footed the bill, and ultimately, thanked the universe for giving me a pass.
My truck didn’t break down or lose a tire mid-interstate, and that small dose of luck is humbling. In my opinion, worth the debt. I will commit to working a lifetime at becoming better at tending the places I inhabit, if the return is making those places last for years, even generations to come. The questions resurface. What holds something together? What keeps it from falling apart? What merits throttling along at a breakneck pace in a machine that is falling apart? If I don’t take care of the vehicle that I inhabit, why should I expect it to take care of me?
I listened to a TED talk by Paul Hessburg recently on why wildfires have gotten worse. He described those vast dense swaths of forests in our nation as “an epidemic of trees”. Decades of fire suppression and a subsequent buildup of fuels and disease, human development, insect outbreaks, and climate change create the perfect storm for the megafires we are experiencing with greater intensity and severity each year. Our forests are vulnerable and primed for a blowup. A landscape that historically saw fires with a high frequency, low-intensity regime now can barely handle what it is up against.
Somehow, we all carry on about our daily lives with business as usual, as if we weren’t all driving this machine down the path it is on, in the state it is in. It is more than a little ironic how little responsibility we all actually take for the worsening fires, droughts, floods, and so called “natural” disasters. They might more accurately be called “cultural” disasters. A failure to pay attention, to pay rent to the place we inhabit, to tend to our privilege to be here at all, driving what could very well be called a stolen car.
Maybe that’s the explanation. One big game of grand theft auto. That would at least account for the reckless pace with which we are consuming miles on this road with no real game plan for where we’re going. Picking up spot fires left and right and before too long there will be enough that we won’t really have an escape route. How much longer will we continue framing the environmental problems arising as separate from ourselves? Humans are an essential part of this equation. Fire and indigenous peoples existed on this landscape for millennia in harmony. A century ago we turned to fire suppression in the name of forest conservation (click on the image below to learn more).
One of my closest mentors once told me, it is not so much where you are going so much as how you are getting there. So how will it be? It crossed my mind the other day, moving in line with my handcrew, that I could see myself as a cog in a machine, like I’ve heard so many times, but that this connotation made me disposable. And I think the point I want to make here, is that we cannot afford to consider any one part of this machine we are part of disposable. The ancient indigenous wisdom, the folks doing suppression and keeping people safe, the small grassroots groups trying to educate around wildfire’s place on the landscape — it all matters immensely. It will take this collective effort of mitigating big fires and keeping the small fires burning to keep the wheels rolling and shift the paradigm from taking our home for granted to doing everything we can to keep it in a good working condition. Maybe we are beyond the word “sustainability”. We have a machine to restore, and then an even greater responsibility to maintain it.
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