[FRIAM] acutely destructive fires in Utah/Grand Canyon

[Prof David West]

Hi Steve,

I am living in beautiful Saint Paul MN: 90 degrees and 90% humidity. No air conditioning in our house. Dogs retreated to under porch digging nests in the cooler soil - I just swelter. Oh, the air is polluted with tons of smoke—"very dangerous level"—from the half of Canada that is being consumed with fire.

My brother still lives in southern Utah, about midway between Bryce and Zion. There was a huge fire just to the east of him (about 20 miles) burning east and north, then the two Grand Canyon fires. Has had smoke issues a couple of days but nothing more.

I have never been a climate change skeptic, nor unwilling to acknowledge the role played by humans.

I have been a critic of the monolithic orthodoxy surrounding the political and "scientific" posturing. But that is just my general antipathy to simplistic science.

Gaia is a *complex* system (person), so when scientists treat her otherwise—as if she was a deterministic system—and make bold, and dire, predictions, set absolute tipping points, etc., I just want to scream liar liar. It is more complicated than that—as our former colleague at FRIAM used to say.

Worse, are the "solutions." There is no way to know if reducing carbon will, in fact, have the effect expected, let alone, solve the problem. And why does anyone think that human actions over a span of one or two decades will have any meaningful effect on forces that accumulated over 2-10 centuries?

"Human Caused Climate Change" has ceased to be a scientific issue and become nothing more than a cudgel used by various groups to increase their political and economic power at the expense of the others. (No cynicism here.)

Mostly, i am betting on Gaia to solve the problem in her own way. Probably indirectly with a mega-pandemic or some such.

davew


On Tue, Jul 15, 2025, at 5:03 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
> 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.
>
>
> .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. 
> / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe   /   Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom 
> https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
> to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:  5/2017 thru present 
> https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>   1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20250715/13e4804b/attachment.html>