I do not remember summers being filled with smoke when I was a kid. To clarify that a bit I will let you know that I have been a resident of Oregon for 52 years now. I grew up in a small logging town at the south end of the Willamette Valley, and apart from 5 years spent as a soldier and traveling to different parts of the world during that time, my entire life has been spent in the Pacific Northwest. This does not make me a subject matter expert on fires or forest management by any means, what it does do, is provide history and a refence through that history of something that has changed.
So, what is it that has changed you may ask. I think primarily what is different is the level of connection to nature, the amount of time spent outdoors by the people who live here, and our interconnectedness with how our activities have impacted our forests. Whether it is that we are being visited by the past sins of clear-cutting native forests of diverse flora and replacing them with monoculture trees to maximize productivity and profits. Or, maybe it is that we as a culture simply do not respect our forests enough to maintain them properly with our labor and attention. We no longer revere our natural world and see her as our first home, and what is in reality our only home. For without the nature we take for granted we simply would no longer exist.
What if we were to promote a simple shift of cognition, a different way of thinking? What if we were to move from progress towards a more technologically advanced world, a more industrialized world, to a right view of our relationship to the natural world that we reside in? Instead of viewing nature as a resource through which we can gain monetary profit, we view this natural world as part of us, or get really radical and realize that we are one with the whole of nature, inseparable. Our society or culture displays this idea of separateness, of individuality, a perspective view, that apart from nature we can exist and have no reliance on anything other than self. With that view, of course there will be neglect, of course there will be dysfunction, this is the same with any relationship, on any level. That is what I believe has happened to our relationship with our natural world, with this nature that we are surrounded by and in reality, “one” with. Respect has faltered, attention has declined, and with this has come a broken relationship with our home, and our home is now burning.
I certainly do not have a full understanding of how we have come to this point of the Northwest being on fire every single summer now, but I do remember a time when this wasn’t happening. Some will say it is part of “climate change” and I don’t necessarily ascribe to that train of thought. Even others would say that blame should be placed on the homeless epidemic and how homeless people are interacting with the forests. Really there would be too many points of blame to list, so I just won’t list them. What I will do is point us back towards our relationship with our world, and really with each other. If that one relationship was mended, if it was brought back into a right and true understanding, then so much suffering could be avoided. If we were to look at each other as “one”, not separate, understanding that what I do to you I do to myself, what I do to my world I do to myself, then we would be getting close to the right mindset. Then we would respect our surroundings and each other, then we would be kind to our world and in turn to each other. Imagine how many problems, how much struggle, how much suffering could be avoided, if we just loved, everything.
Then, maybe the fires would stop burning.
I guess this wasn’t much about fires at all.