McClure Reservoir 2013. Photo: City of Santa Fe.
Our forest service is planning another assault on our trees, within a few miles of the Santa Fe Plaza, having done no environmental impact study and having failed so far to alert the public.
This is the area of the two reservoirs that supply almost all our drinking water, which might well be contaminated by ash. There are many houses in the immediate vicinity whose inhabitants, already wheezing with seasonal allergies, will have no escape from the smoke. And, since toxic sprays must be used to induce the wet trees to burn, as well as bombs dropped from helicopters, we will all be breathing poisons. The destruction of habitant is heart-breaking, especially as many species build nests and lay eggs in the early spring, while the litters of coyotes, also under assault from trophy hunters, will likely be burned to death.
This policy—burn the forest to save the forest—was initiated under the Obama administration in the conviction that burning would stop wildfires. But, as we saw with the raging fires in California, the attempt has not been successful. And yet it goes on and on…
What is it in men that delights in lighting fires?
I don’t know the answer.
It seems linked to the excitement of causing big explosions in war, in the sense of personal power that comes perhaps only from destruction.
Santa Fe being Santa Fe, it’s likely that a bunch of us will attend Tuesday’s meeting, which has not yet been publicly announced, to insist on an environmental impact statement before the helicopters and the flame throwers arrive…
Only in the west.
[For more on our forest management policies, please see Chad Hanson’s piece in the Los Angeles Times, “Lessons from the La Tuna Fire.”]
Thanks for posting this Sallie. Just heard that the Tuesday hearing has been postponed but do not know the date for the new one, if this is indeed the case.
You Stated: “What is it in men that delights in lighting fires?”
“Destructive Violence … “The availability of guns has a curious and macabre relation to violence. This form of technology not only vastly increases the range and the effectiveness of violence but also has an effect – generally dulling – on the consciousness of those who use them. My having in my hand a pistol with which to shoot some living thing changed me into an entirely different person psychologically. I could deal out death to anyone since I was possessed by this instrument of death; I had become an irrational man of hostility. The gun had me rather than my having it. I had become its instrument. Seized with a dislike for the person I had become, I took the gun back into the house and put it away. We understand only vaguely the effect that technology can have on the consciousness of a person, but it is clear that the possession of guns can radically change personality. Glenn Gray remarked that, as an officer in the army, he did not feel dressed when he went out without his pistol strapped to his belt.
An extreme form of such an effect on personality can be seen in the career of Charles Fairweather, the teen-ager who went on a rampage in Nebraska and murdered eleven people before he was caught. ‘I love guns,’ he had said as a boy. ‘They give me a feeling of power like nothing else.’ It is obvious that the person on a binge of violence must become unfeeling and detached, like a soldier mowing down the enemy with a machine gun, or else he could never do what he feels he has to do. The symbol of the gun as a phallus and its relation to sex is well known. Both are long and slim, both eject a substance that can radically change the person into whom it is directed. Hence the gun has become, especially with simple people, a symbol par excellence of masculine power. Stanley Kunitz remarks, ‘we hunted with guns to eat, we hunted with guns to make the land safe for our homes, and we hunted with guns to live in the pioneer period. In all these ways the gun was valuable, a laudable symbol of power, and handling it well was also laudable.’ Many a person feels that when he possesses a gun that he now has a power that had been unfairly taken away from him. And what a power it is! He can now make this big explosion and hurl that projectile to kill things much larger than himself. … The consciousness is surrendered willingly.” – Rollo May