[FRIAM] acutely destructive fires in Utah/Grand Canyon

[Steve Smith]

DaveW -

I know you have moved from SoUtah to the Great Lakes (MI?) but must 
still have family friends living back in Utah, not that far really from 
both the North Rim fire which just burned the Grand Lodge (and much 
more) there, and the LaSal FIreNado that was so spectacular and took out 
a small off-grid community there.

I think you have reflected on feeling some regret over not taking 
Climate Change more seriously earlier (we all have our processes and 
paths around these types of things).   I grew up around fire and 
fire-fighting, mostly in rural pinon/ponderosa forests with my father as 
a USFS disctrict ranger who used to also spend one or several multi-week 
stints leading fire-crews in the Pacific NW or California.   There was 
no conception of there being a global scale warming/drying, but I do 
remember him being acutely aware that "a good Spring" meant "a bad 
Summer" in those Pacific forests, yielding a great deal more 
undergrowth, etc to carry fire on the ground even before/outside the 
bigger-hotter fires that would travel crown-crown.

What I'm circling in on is the question of the general denial we have 
all perhaps been engaged in, each in our own way, about the sweeping 
(nominally global if not Global) changes which human activity has 
triggered.  I once (a decade ago?) invoked the idea that homo sapiens, 
at the end of the pleistocene, were the cause (as much indirectly as 
directly) of the plunge in Megafauna in both the New World and northern 
Eurasia.  Glen schooled me on the counter-arguments against that theory 
and I don't need to re-litigate that range of possibilities so much as 
to simply point out that "homo sapiens" is an acutely *potent* species, 
especially come neolithics, agriculture, written language, urbanization, 
modern technological development (from archimedes to daVinci to the 
folks doing the work in Musk's (and others) name).

All this background to open the question of whether the otherwise 
well-grounded, fundamentally intelligent, situationally clever folks 
which I grew up around and DaveW (and others here I am sure) feel an 
affinity with or closeness to (Permaculturists before Bill Mollison?) 
have shifted "forward" to recognizing that the rate of change of our 
(humans + domesticates + tech + self-modifying tech) is yielding 
"unexpected consequences" in a short enough time frame to see the 
consequences of our actions (albeit years or decades later, but not 
generations?).   If my belief that homo-sapiens managed to disrupt the 
megafauna (by spearing/driving-them-off-cliffs, or just disrupting all 
aspects of the ecologies they depended on) holds any water, no 
individual likely woke up one day and asked "where did all the Mastadons 
go?"   or even " where did those huge hairy, tusky creatures my great 
grandfather used to speak of go?", but we are a smear of generations 
(born 30's through 90s?) who likely recognize that truisms we grew up 
with about the natural world as well as the political and economic 
system are no longer what we either were taught to believe they were or 
came to believe through our direct experience they were?

My father struggled with the locals who lived on cattle ranching and 
lumber milling, not accepting that those resources they depended on were 
not infiinite...  they saw the limits of "timber sales" and "grazing 
allotments" a huge inconvenience (at best) to an acute insult to them 
and their ability to "just make a living".   The local bar in the town I 
went to grade school in sports a taxidermed owl with the sign "eat an 
owl, save a logger" (for example).   Some of the locals who worked as 
seasonal fire-fighters occasionally would get busted for lighting off 
forest fires to create work for themselves.   My father was very pleased 
with the roughly 50% of the ranchers he worked with who actually had 
studied (formally or informally) range management and were as eager as 
he was to make sure that 5-10 years later the grasslands their cattle 
were grazing on were at least as healthy as the were today and often 
they were interested in returning a formerly overgrazed section into 
something yet-more-productive. Then were the other 50% who were just mad 
because *they* didn't get to take *their half out of the middle*.

Mary's milieu was primarily W. Nebraska farmers who are still voting 
Trump back in every chance they get, even though somewhere along the 
line, most understand that the wells they sunk into the Oglala in the 
60s are now dry and have to be deepened and that the dead seeds Monsanto 
(and their ilk) and Fertilizers and Insecticides their fathers poured 
over the landscape with gusto might well be the source of their cancers 
and other maladies.

Our own founder's main business in this domain (visualizing and modeling 
Wildfire and many other topographic/topological registered phenomena) 
naturally engage with folks who are acute stakeholders in the areas 
which are burning/flooding/toxic-pluming/eroding/etc.   I understand 
that Guerin has his own (equally good) reasons as Glen not to mix work 
and FriAM.

And yet we are watching something as overwhelming as the Dustbowl of the 
30s sweeping the whole earth, and yet we are arguing over whether EVs 
cost more to operate because they are heavier and wear brakes and tires 
faster?  Or whether the area of strip coal mine rendered useless for 
other purposes is better or worse than the same area covered in PV panels?

Ok... just a rant... triggered by my childhood memories of watching 
fires crown across the road near our home while watching firenados 
destroy places I'v evisited and my favorite national Park Lodge burn down.