I wrote this on social media.
I speak for myself, not my workplace. This is a reply I made to a cousin of mine who asked how do we fix this forest fire problem (he mentioned more jobs “raking” the forests). Enjoy!
I’m no Forester, but I have been working as a clerk for the Forest Service for awhile. I have also thought through a few various perspectives on how our species can survive. Here’s the quick take. Native communities managed the forests for millennia, understanding that fire is a natural part of the ecosystem. Some communities even set fire to regularly clear underbrush. With a regular clearing of underbrush, when fires do come through they are not as intense. In my opinion, the best thing we could do is return national forests and parks to local native communities while paying for their restoration. Yes, that would be reparations. Granted, there are a lot of details to work out and I would guess that I am in an extreme minority on this issue. So, short of #landback if we could follow a model of reintroducing fire to the landscape, we could prevent a lot of this type of wildfire. Here’s where it gets difficult. In our current economic system, to pay for the work of preparing the land to have fire again, some timber harvesting must take place. Since the FS has often overdone it and the junk bond criminals have clear cut their way out of debt to our communities’ peril, citizens have little choice but to use lawsuits (among other tools) to stop overzealous, unsustainable timber harvesting. And as a radical left environmentalist even I can understand that some legal action is preventing “good” projects from getting the fuels out of the forest. On top of all that, climate change is real, making the summers drier and the weather more unpredictable. Most folks working in the forests know that things have changed and will continue to change. Only a radical restructuring of our society will allow us to adapt to a changing environment. It is all hands on deck. Only by supporting each other, developing relational rather than transactional societies can we continue as a species. We can do it and I believe we will. So, yes, we need to do a major amount of restoration work in our forests and plan to manage our forests for the reintroduction of healthy fire. There is so much work to be done and we have so much more productivity than any time in human history. So we have the surplus labor to get this done — it’s just controlled by a very small percentage (say 1%?) of the people. We can employ everyone in making our communities safe, solving multiple problems, but we can’t have billionaires hoarding the wealth to get the job done. It really is a simple fix. But what do I know? I’m just a low paid government clerk. — Solomon Everta, Radical Librarian at Cooperation Humboldt
Solomon Everta 