Ring of Fire

Been an interesting past couple weeks, here and everywhere else. You may have seen that the northern half of our fair state has been aflame lately, probably as divine retribution for allowing homosexuals to have basic civil rights. First was the Humboldt Fire a couple weeks ago (so called because of the street in Chico near where it originated), which raced up the back of the canyon to Paradise and burned through several dozen homes and back down the other side of the ridge before it was finally contained, thanks to the tireless efforts of fire crews from all over California.

Then last weekend, just as that blaze was under control, freak thunderstorms hit, lightning sparking something like 800 fires across more than a dozen counties all over the north, in a very crude giant circle a couple hundred miles in diameter. The town I'm in is not far from the center of that circle, so we were fortunately unscathed by any actual fires. Instead, for the entire week we were treated to a massive grey smoke curtain extending in all directions. Air quality was bad but livable, but the really strange thing was the unrelenting greyness, for this time of year.

Since we had originally been forecast for around 100º weather, it was strangely relieving to have cool mornings that oddly replicated some of the mildly foggy mornings we normally get in October. This would be followed by muggy afternoons, the only evidence of heat coming from the sun glowering through the smoke overhead, white with an unpleasant orange corona. This went on all week, with the attendant low visibility and funky air quality. Finally it's starting to dissipate, so it will be nice to get some outdoor walking in before the July/August heat waves.

It's way better than what people along the Mississippi are having to deal with; we got flooded back in 1998, only a foot or two, but even that sucks to all hell. At least we were able to save our house, although tearing out a house full of saturated carpet (and there are several ranches nearby, so there were ample amounts of cow shit, firewood, and diesel fuel in the floodwater) and having industrial dehydrators dry out your house (and your sinuses) for six weeks is no picnic. But there are entire towns in Iowa and Illinois and Missouri that are completely wrecked. They will go back in and rebuild and get back to their lives as best they can, and good luck with that. A friend of mine in Iowa was fortunate in that he lives up a hill, so his house escaped flood damage. But he works at the Winnebago plant nearby, and as you might expect, the company has experienced catastrophic losses due to gas prices, so they're shutting down the plant. Perhaps he can help with the rebuilding.

And what of that, the rebuilding? This is the second time in fifteen years that the Mississippi has experienced "100-year" or "500-year" flooding. So either their metrics are way off, or something is happening. Soil erosion seems to be a tremendous problem in that part of the country; excessive farming has leached and destroyed the topsoil. Non-replenishable fossil aquifers are being tapped at record rates for agriculture, and even as the Midwest learns to swim yet again, California is having another drought year (last year was not quite dry enough to be technically a drought year, but was very close; this year is the real deal).

And as the desertification and massive globalization of China continue apace, you wonder where it all intersects, and where it will culminate fifteen or even five years down the road. Some of your more, let's say, strident environmental advocates equate humanity with a virus afflicting the planet. Certainly in its more extreme manifestations there's a strong case to be made there, though instead of making it about us one way or the other, we just have to look at it as ecosystems reacting to imposed conditions of unsustainability, and whether we will adapt or revert accordingly, or continue to proceed blindly.

But the real problem is that there is no political means on any scale for dealing with the inevitable fallout of those destructive practices. Whether the scarce commodity is food, fuel, money, land, or water, the problem is usually not production but almost always distribution, coupled with the failure to recognize and adapt to severity.

The favored political mechanism for dealing with the people who are adversely affected by these shortages the most severely, and have been disempowered from any real role in their own lives, is walls. Walls to keep people out, to keep them in, to manage and direct their lives for them, since they are not permitted or entrusted to do so themselves. It deceptively grants the soothing sense of security; whether it's a gated community or a ghetto, everyone knows where their assigned places are and are not.

Fast forward a decade or two in all those places:

• a Mexican nation with a dead infrastructure, a desperate population, a dry oil supply, and drug cartels directing a failed government;



• the Baghdad maze of sectarian ghettos, protecting neighbors from neighbors and cordoning them all off for supervision, whether by wearied and dismayed American troops or revanchist sectarian squads;



• Palestinian refugee camps teeming with poverty and rage and despair, unable to live with dignity in Israel, unwanted by their fellow Arab nations;



• an economically stratified America, run by multinational merchant princes for their own benefit, throwing us a bone or a distraction to keep us at bay for one more profit-taking, one more empty financial speculation to be ultimately bailed out by the taxpayer, islands of gated communities and two-tiered education and health systems in giant lakes and oceans of people just trying to dog-paddle to shore.

We've spent a trillion dollars in Iraq so far, in five years, with nothing to show for it but skyrocketing food and fuel prices; how much infrastructure, how many college educations and fully-funded health-care programs would a trillion dollars have covered for the next generation? That openly upward wealth transfer, that theft of opportunity in an economically pyramidal society, necessitates the walls, if only to add insult to injury.

With regards to the environment, in many cases we have done things as if we would always be able to control the consequences, as if nature couldn't simply shrug her shoulders once in a while and knock things down again, for us to rebuild newer and better diversions and obstructions, with newer and worse consequences. The political side of that coin has that same inexorability in many places and social groups, an opaque curtain of smoke, obscuring truth and relief, but only temporarily.