Knock on Wood
Notes from the Fire Tower: 🔥 watch towers, conspiracies, disinformation, 'climate change' and the carbon cycle 🌎
This week’s collection of fire news “Our vulnerability is smacking us in the face,” has a diversity of subjects and deep dives that we haven’t seen in a while because everything has been on fire. To be clear, there are still plenty of fires burning out there, but no fresh scary deadly ones (knock on wood🪵).
The New York Times showed us luscious photos and told tales from America’s fire watch towers, as well as cautionary tales of conspiracy theories, while The Washington Post delivered nuance, a lot of it, into the reporting on the science climate change.
…Even as such studies become commonplace, a few researchers worry that focusing too much on climate change might distract the public from local government failures that can make things like extreme weather more deadly and destructive. For example, a study on how warming temperatures boosted recent Maui wildfires might distract from how the electrical grid may have contributed. — Washington Post
I have marveled at the taglines in the press recently about wildfire getting worse, “because of climate change”. As someone who’s been worried about climate change—and watching the news coverage of it—since I was wee, I was kind of excited to just be able to use that phrase so freely all of a sudden. But, not so fast.
While it’s nice shorthand to use the phrase ‘climate change’ to talk about the problem, it does mask possible solutions and stifle critical discourse on other societal woes while simultaneously ostracizing the non-believers, or worse—gives them fodder to dismiss the impact of human action on the climate altogether. [Scientist] “Patrick Brown said that, in a quest for a ‘clean narrative,’ editors and reviewers ignore factors beyond climate change.”
The last most-vital piece I read, Forests Are No Longer Our Climate Friends (<-unlocked article) is a by-the-numbers look at the fire-climate change-carbon cycle that’s illustrating quite clearly to us that forests, like so many other natural systems, are sounding an alarm.
“...We’ve so weakened our forest — through decades of business-as-usual industrial logging and fossil-fuelled climate shifts — that it has switched to hemorrhaging CO₂ instead of absorbing it.” —Barry Saxifrage from Canada’s National Observer
If we’re going to win this, we need to all pull on the same oar—so all of this kind of discourse is very relevant to those of us trying to talk about fires, and/or technology and resilience. Let’s keep reading the news, teaching our kids how to understand science (and its nuance) while soaking in the learnings from the language, events, and our communal reactions to it all.
Here’s this week’s table of contents for you to pick and choose from:
Fire, Generally 🔥
🌳 Forest exhalations, surfing traditions, trauma-turned-conspiracy theory, a little Maui update
Climate 🌎
This is just the tip of the iceberg, “we are much more vulnerable than we thought”
Firefighting 🚒
A Bill to support wildland firefighter pay (call your Senators), Firehawk nitty gritty, residents return to Yellowknife 🇨🇦, operations halted due to a refuel mishap, and a new industry-academia partnership
Firetech
Pano rolls out cameras for early detection in Washington State
Thanks again Andrea for your insights. I just read an article in Scientific American by Meghan Bartels on Planetary Boundaries and your piece fits well with hers. A summary of her concluding remarks is that we don't need more data, we already know that we are exceeding most of the boundaries necessary for our planet to survive. What we need are practical solutions that will bring us back into those boundaries, that we can implement, that everyone can understand and accept. Pretty much impossible but we have to try.