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I've been thinking alot about forest fires lately. Fires, flood, famine, fate. I guess the first weeks of the Bush adminstration has me concerned about the environment and global warming and all sorts of stuff. There is a contingent of people, sort of a lunatic fringe religion, that maintains that the earth is a dynamic living organism that will retaliate against man for his trespasses and is unforgiving in its wrath. Sounds like Judaism to me, but what do I know? Substitute "God" for "earth", and insert Noah's flood, and you'll catch my point. What got me thinking about all this is what comes after man? Nature seems to have this way of correcting problems: if you have an Ice Age, then you need a warm-up. You have a dominant species threatening to take over the resources of the planet, you drop a meteor on the earth, wipe them out and start over again (and here, we see, religion mirrors science in a way) Forest fires are a good example of this, in that not only does it involve innocent natural resources (i.e. trees) but in many cases are caused by man (God's "instrument", if you will). A forest fire, while generally thought of as bad, can actually be better for the environment than a mature forest with a lot of unnecessary brush. Fires tend to clear out overgrowth, and dying and dead trees faster than the young strong ones (those best adapted to survival). So then I pondered brush fires, like those in Southern California. The fields there are heavily influenced by man's activities in and around them. Fires burn through and suddenly nature has evened the score, burning down a few houses in the process. Floods. Davenport, Iowa has been excoriated for its lack of flood dykes and so on, but maybe they're on to something by not putting up unnecessary protection from the river. After all, all you do when you put up a floodwall is move the problem further downstream, and as it is, the Louisiana marshes have all they can handle. So you get a small flood in Iowa rather than a massive one in Louisiana. And now, I started to think about global warming. Sure, last summer in New York City, there wasn't a single day when it hit ninety, much less one hundred, but does that in and of itself mean we're not warming up? I doubt it, because one thing I sort of noticed in all these catastrophes is that nature has this way of reverse-warning us a problem is coming. Worried about a fire? OK, she'll throw a flood and some mudslides your way. Worried about floods? Well, maybe a drought is needed. And yet, in New York, we had a cool summer. But this winter and the winter before was a lot warmer than usual. And the trees blossomed a whole lot earlier than expected. I'm very concerned by all this, yet it seems Our Fraudulence is not. I wonder why? |
