Society

News Media and the Public Discourse: A Menagerie of Blindness and Misdirection

Saturday, June 20th, 2020: Problems & Solutions, Society.

A Menagerie of Blindness and Misdirection

Whack-a-mole, submissive sheep, blind as a bat, red herrings, and sacred cows. There’s no shortage of animal metaphors to describe our behavior and our public discourse in a heterogenous society repeatedly shocked and increasingly divided by the revelations of the news cycle.

Whack-a-Mole

Whack-a-mole: a situation in which attempts to solve a problem are piecemeal or superficial, resulting only in temporary or minor improvement

News headlines: Black people are victimized by systemic racism in the police!

Public discourse: Government must do something about police brutality and racism now!

Weeks earlier: Global pandemic is spread by travel and physical contact!

Public discourse: Government must do something about the pandemic now!

Weeks earlier: Young people say we must do something about climate change!

Public discourse: Government must do something about climate change now!

Weeks earlier: Mass shootings in our schools and public places!

Public discourse: Government must do something about gun violence now!

Weeks earlier: Supreme court nominee is a sexual predator!

Public discourse: Government must reject this nominee now!

Weeks earlier: Government is separating immigrant children from their families at the border!

Public discourse: Government must stop this separation now!

Weeks earlier: Mass shootings in our schools and public places!

Public discourse: Government must do something about gun violence now!

Weeks earlier: White supremacists are rallying nationwide!

Public discourse: Government must stop racism and white supremacists now!

Weeks earlier: Opioid addiction is a national emergency!

Public discourse: Government must stop opioid use now!

Weeks earlier: Terrorists kill tourists worldwide!

Public discourse: Government must find a solution for terrorism now!

Weeks earlier: Mass shootings in our schools and public places!

Public discourse: Government must do something about gun violence now!

Weeks earlier: Powerful men in the movie industry are sexual predators!

Public discourse: Bring these men to justice now!

Weeks earlier: The President colluded with a foreign power to win the election!

Public discourse: Impeach the President now!

In retrospect, it’s easy to see how the news media keep us in a constant state of crisis, leading us by the nose, focusing our attention exclusively on a single problem for weeks at a time, then moving immediately to the next headline issue while the previous is forgotten, in most cases without any solution ever being reached. In this endless cycle, we news consumers and citizens of a centralized, hierarchical state are helpless whiners, powerless children continually demanding that our parental leaders fix things for us. If we reflect on this phenomenon, we can only conclude that it’s a messy but essential aspect of progress in a democracy, as we try to stay informed and hope the democratic process will finally work for us.

Led by the Nose

Virtually no one questions the need for nations and national governments. From earliest childhood, we’re taught that we belong to a great country, the purpose of which is to protect us and give order to our lives, from cradle to grave.

But the size of nations, their population and geographical expanse, requires a centralized, hierarchical government. We take this for granted, along with the fact that as citizens, the government knows us primarily as anonymous statistics.

We accept that we can’t know directly the members of our government, nor can we see, hear, or feel what’s going on in our country outside our local neighborhoods. We rely on the “press,” and with the advance of technology, the “news media,” to keep us informed about our leadership and the world around us.

But in order to maintain independence from government – the “free press” – and a measure of objectivity, the news media have evolved as a private-sector institution. Individual media outlets from Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp to PBS, NPR, and Democracy Now! operate either as businesses in the capitalist economy, delivering ad-sponsored information as a consumer product, or as nonprofit organizations, funded by the rich – wealthy individuals and their philanthropic foundations.

In either case, news entities must compete for our attention in the market. And news media must filter the news for us, taking the infinite number of stories available in the world at any time and selecting only the handful they believe will draw the biggest audience. And they all march in lockstep, delivering the same headline stories out of fear they will lose audience to their competitors. Thus all news providers have studied us and learned in detail how to manipulate us for their own agenda, for what they believe is best.

As can be seen from the whack-a-mole litany of stories above, the news media are eminently successful. They keep us hooked, leading us around by the nose like so many sheep, from week to week. In our public forums, from family and neighborhood gossip to online social media, at any given time, what most of us will be reacting to and talking about will be the latest crisis in the news media.

Blind Spots and Sacred Cows

In the “whack-a-mole” of our news headlines and public discourse, some topics seldom if ever arise, either because of sociocultural taboos, because they’re not considered interesting enough to be competitive in the rapid news cycle and the media bid for our attention, or because they represent universally-held core beliefs.

Progress: A History of Violence

We’ve all been indoctrinated in the story of our culture and society, tracing it back to the Ancient Greeks. It’s a history of violence, of the growth of nations and empires by violent conquest, the violent establishment of Eurocentric colonies on other continents, the oppression, enslavement, and genocide of indigenous peoples, and the destructive exploitation of natural habitats. But we’ve been taught to view this history as “progress,” in which the incessant wars, the colonialism, slavery, and exploitation, are simply natural growing pains, mistakes which we leave behind as we advance toward a better future for all. Europeans and their colonial powers justified their violence against traditional societies and indigenous people by painting them with a broad brush, portraying them all as warlike savages to be pacified and improved by European civilization.

Believing in progress, we tend to ignore our history, assuming that the past consists only of problems we’ve already solved. We’re taught that we are a fundamentally peaceful society, so we’re always surprised by exceptions to this, and rather than questioning our fundamental values and institutions, we seek “band-aid” solutions that don’t threaten our comfortable way of life.

But violence begets violence, and the harm, the injustice we’ve done in the past is never truly repaired. It lingers, generation after generation, in the communal memories and behavior of races and cultures we’ve conquered, enslaved, and displaced: the natives of former European colonies, including our own, and the descendants of slaves imported from Africa.

Competition, Dominance, Coercion, and Aggression

Aggressive, competitive behaviors have been so deeply embedded in our culture and institutions that we take them for granted and rarely even notice them. We honor competition in our organized sports – we consider sport to be an institution that brings us all together for good, clean fun, regardless of our beliefs, religious or secular, liberal or conservative. Competition, dominance, and coercion are legitimized in our Constitution and laws, and competition is the fundamental value in our “free market” economy, grounded in the small, local businesses that most of us treasure. Even in science, competition is enshrined in the Theory of Evolution. We never consider that our competitive bias may be causing many of our problems.

Europeans romanticize warrior culture, believing that war is a noble venture fostering courage in young men. When we look at other societies, we look for warrior culture whether it is there or not. Americans’ stereotype of Native Americans is the brave, fierce Sioux warrior, feather headdress streaming as he charges into battle. New Age mysticism has adopted the notion of the “spiritual warrior” from Buddhism, and the women’s movement romanticizes “warrior women.”

Industrial Society and the Consumer Economy

Where do our basic needs – air, water, food, clothing, shelter, energy, etc. – come from? How are they produced and delivered? What is their quality? Are they sustainably produced, is the source habitat being protected, are the providers well taken care of? In our industrial society, mines and factories, including factory farms, operate around the clock, across the globe, to supply our basic needs, which are ever-increasing as we adopt more and more labor-saving devices, from computers and smart phones to robots and self-driving cars.

Consumerism itself – the notion that all human needs are commodities to be bought and sold – is rarely even acknowledged, let alone questioned, in the media and public discourse. This is bound up with our belief in progress: producing and providing your own needs is backward and primitive – civilization elevates us above all that. In our society, producers are usually ignored, whereas consumers have “rights.” Even Karl Marx, in his advocacy of labor, was a firm believer in progress, industrial society, and consumerism.

The industrial underpinnings of our civilization are virtually never questioned in our news media or public discourse, except in isolated instances like environmental disasters – Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez – and labor scandals like Apple and Foxconn. But the production and delivery of our basic needs continually consumes massive amounts of nonrenewable resources, poisoning or destroying distant habitats and threatening the health and safety of distant communities.

What about the vast, global infrastructure that enables our mobility, the distribution of raw materials, products, energy and information, our water supply, and the removal and treatment of our waste? The superhighways, powerlines, pipelines, dams and aqueducts, ports, tankers, cargo ships, railroads, and satellites overhead? We only hear about infrastructure when it fails spectacularly, as in the case of big earthen dams or poisoned urban water supplies, and then it’s seen as an isolated environmental problem, not a failure of our way of life.

Affluent white people strive to live far from mines, factories, and waste processing facilities, so they can forget that these loud, dirty, smelly facilities even exist. The provision of our basic needs is “mere subsistence,” and through civilization and progress we rise above that, to enjoy the civilized arts and sciences. We don’t want to hear about what it takes to maintain that high standard of living.

The Military, Espionage, and Law Enforcement

We take “intelligence,””security,” and “defense” for granted as essential institutions of nations. But few of us ever acknowledge that as a global superpower, our nation maintains a global military empire, with hundreds of bases imposed on other countries. We live in denial of the nuclear arsenals that could render our entire planet uninhabitable. None of us is ever informed about the covert operations of our government, at home or abroad, except in rare cases that emerge long after the fact.

Countless times, American as well as foreign citizens have been spied upon, falsely incriminated and punished. Our private-sector arms industry is one of the big three multinational business sectors, distributing deadly weapons across the globe, including to terrorist groups that then use them against us and our allies. We take it for granted that we need these violent, coercive institutions, and their ongoing operation is never reported on in the news unless there is a momentary scandal or a new war starting somewhere. In those cases, we only want our lives to get back to normal so we can forget about our real spies, armies, and arsenals, and enjoy the fictional ones in our books and movies.

We romanticize the lone police detective in his search for truth, the spy as globe-trotting sophisticate, and the brave, selfless warrior defending our freedom. But in reality the police are there to control the unruly poor and the racially undesirable, and spies and soldiers exist to protect our empire abroad.

Justice, Punishment, and Incarceration

We take it for granted that those who commit violence or otherwise break the law must be punished, and in extreme cases removed from society through incarceration. This is the foundation of our justice system, and we are never exposed to non-punitive, restorative alternatives that may exist, or may have existed, in smaller, weaker societies that have been conquered and dominated by us. The operation of our justice system is only reported on in rare cases of scandal or crisis, and in those cases, we only want our lives to get back to normal so we don’t have to think about it.

For good reason, courts and prisons scare us. Unless we’re lawyers, most of us don’t even want to think about them. So the only glimpse most of us get is in fictional TV shows and movies. The fiction is not the reality. As outrageous as some of those shows are, the reality is much worse. Studies show that less than 6% of people jailed by the police are ever brought to trial – the rest are forced by prosecutors into plea deals that result in punishment without any form of judicial or peer review. In general, our justice system delivers anything but justice, because nation-states are inherently unjust, and the underlying values of our society are unfair.

Red Herrings

While much of what’s important is left out of the news cycle, there are some issues that repeatedly arise in our news media and public discourse. These are issues that are consciously or unconsciously calculated by the media to trigger emotional responses in their audiences. And over and over again, they distract us from their root causes in our fundamental values and institutions.

Racism and Diversity

As racially-biased police brutality moves temporarily into the media spotlight, Blacks and idealistic young people march in protest, and liberals react by reluctantly, ashamedly acknowledging that they may not yet be adequately “woke.” And conservatives react by again claiming that white people are actually being unfairly discriminated against, and racism is a myth.

But to both sides, racism is a complex, amorphous topic, intimately dependent on and embedded in the history of European imperialism. Racism was predominant in ancient Greece and Rome, and on the rare occasions when Native American, Latino, and Black prisoners are brought to court rather than sentenced extrajudicially, they’re typically tried in the ostentatious, intimidating architecture of imperial Greece and Rome, and the language of our law is the language of the Roman Empire.

The imperialists of the European Enlightenment, including artists and scientists, were motivated by racism in their conquest and appropriation of native societies and cultures in the Global South. Latin, the language of the Roman Empire, is the language of science, and white scientists continue to exhibit implicit racism as they isolate themselves in the all-white enclaves of their profession. After all, white Europeans developed science, and European empires brought civilization to brown-skinned natives. We may no longer call them primitive savages, but the assumption of superiority lingers unconsciously.

Traditional indigenous societies always have neighbors who are culturally or racially differentiated, and even societies that are relatively peaceful view their neighbors in ways that we would find racist, for example stigmatizing their neighbors’ diets or physical build.

The difference between these peaceful societies and ours is not that one is racist and the other tolerant, but that one – ours – is inherently violent, and the other is inherently peaceful. In peaceful, cooperative societies, the “other” may be gently teased, yet generally respected for their differences, but is never attacked.

One of the biggest red herrings in our culture is diversity. Native Americans didn’t embrace the diversity of Europeans in their midst as a benefit – we’d invaded them, perpetrated genocide, stole their land and their livelihoods, and displaced the survivors onto barren reservations. Black people, brought over from Africa as slaves, didn’t volunteer to be part of our great “melting pot” of cultures. The Asians and Latin Americans who have streamed into our country for centuries, opening the ethnic restaurants we’re addicted to, didn’t come here because they love being around white people and wanted to be part of a diverse community.

When affluent white liberals talk about diversity, they don’t mean integrating their safe neighborhoods. They love ethnic restaurants but don’t want brown neighbors. They don’t include blue collar workers or poor white trash in their vision of diversity.

What we celebrate as our society’s diversity is actually the tragic result of imperialism. We forced people off their traditional lands – that’s why we have cultural and racial diversity. Our heterogenous, pluralistic society is not the sign of progress toward global peace and tolerance. It’s a festering calamity born of centuries of aggression, oppression, and exploitation. The Rwandan genocide, the result of European imperialism forcing conflicting ethnic groups together in a “diverse” nation, shows what our “progress” is really capable of.

Humans thrive in small groups unified by shared beliefs, values, and goals, not in heterogenous masses with conflicting behavior and worldviews. Communities and societies thrive by forming a cohesive, distinct identity which is most clearly distinguished from that of their immediate neighbors, and neighboring societies are naturally vocal about their differences. In violent, competitive pluralistic societies like ours, in which distinct communities are forced together involuntarily by politics and economics, there is always tension between them, with the potential for sudden or systemic conflict and violence.

Terrorism

Terrorism is what happens when violent subcultures have been systematically oppressed by imperial powers…and then, unsurprisingly, strike back in violence. As noted above, we live in denial that our culture is imperial, and that it’s violent by nature – we ignore our violent history and coercive institutions and believe we are progressing to a peaceful norm.

Many weaker societies have been harmed by us but have not responded with violence. But in our news media and public discourse, the focus is always on the violent reactions – the Al-Qaeda and ISIS – and we are always shocked that people would want to hurt us. We tend to conclude that particular cultures – specifically Islam – are inherently violent, ignoring our own history of violence, our past conquests of Arab and Islamic societies, and our continuing interference, including “regime change” – in Middle Eastern cultures, governments, and economies.

The U.S. and its allies, particularly Israel, have practiced state terrorism since their very beginnings, in the brutal conquest of indigenous people and traditional societies. The atrocities of ISIS that have so horrified us in the news media were actually exceeded in 18th and 19th century America, perpetrated on indigenous people by American citizens known as “rangers” – the namesake of Texas Rangers, Army Rangers, and the Ford Ranger truck. These terrorist vigilantes were sponsored by the U.S. government. During the 20th century, the U.S. sponsored state terrorism in Central America, in which hundreds of thousands of indigenous people were tortured and killed. And since 2001, American Presidents have conducted covert terror campaigns against rural communities in the Middle East and Africa using missiles fired from remote-controlled drones, killing an unknown number of civilians, including women, children, and elders.

Our government has always practiced terrorism against its poor and minority citizens, from the anti-union labor massacres of the 19th century to the bombing of Black activists in the 20th. And the inherent violence of our European legacy is borne out in domestic terrorism, church bombings and mass shootings perpetrated by white supremacists.

Immigration

Accepting our childhood indoctrination in the structure of our society, we never question the need for national borders and controls on immigration. Because we live in ignorance or denial of history, we forget that these borders were imposed by our government for political and economic purposes, in violation of natural ecological regions and the territories of indigenous societies, causing permanent stress and tension in border communities and forcing traumatic disenfranchisement, migrations, and alienation.

Virtually all nations outside Europe were originally created by Europeans as colonies, often in disregard of traditional boundaries. European institutions were put in place, and when these colonies gained their independence, the institutions remained and their native leaders were trained at European universities, where they were indoctrinated in European culture. This is as true of the U.S. and Australia as it is of Mexico or Nigeria. Every country in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, and the Middle East remains a European colony in all but name. The Eurocentric leadership of former colonies continues to oppress and persecute their surviving indigenous populations.

In the past, we imported slaves across our borders, and our political, military, and commercial oppression of foreign populations continues to drive waves of refugees and immigrants toward our borders, but we seldom acknowledge this. People of European ancestry are invaders in the Western Hemisphere, and even after centuries we remain colonists on indigenous land, failing to adapt sustainably to native habitats and ecosystems.

Unaware of how our global empires have forced people off their native lands, conservationists and population activists sometimes blame immigration for overpopulation. Thanks to our biased educational system and our misdirecting media, the most educated among us are often the blindest.

Gun Violence

Mass shootings are a recurring theme throughout our history, yet we continue to fail to identify their source in our aggressive, competitive, coercive culture. We continue to celebrate physical competition and dominance in our sports, and we crave violence in our entertainment – our most popular movie franchises are Star Wars and The Avengers.

When mass shootings occur, our only solution is gun control. But the right to bear arms against government tyranny was a fundamental value of our English founding fathers, which they institutionalized in the Bill of Rights and passed on to their descendants. So on the rare occasions when gun control is implemented, it is bitterly opposed and never lasting or fully successful.

Climate Change

Like many themes in our public discourse, climate change is a coded, emotionally-charged euphemism that accompanies a cultural and political divide in our society. When liberals talk about climate change, they use it confrontationally, to attack climate change deniers. They take it to mean a multitude of destructive human-caused changes in global climate due to carbon emissions which primarily come from the use of fossil fuels. But when mentioning climate change, liberals generally also imply particular solutions: transitioning to so-called “green” or renewable energy, which implies the electrification of industries and products which previously relied on other forms of energy. To liberals, climate change implies both a general technological problem and specific technological solutions.

To conservatives, climate change represents yet another controversial theory, perhaps a conspiracy or a hoax, by means of which liberals threaten our traditional way of life.

The irony is that taken literally, climate change is acknowledged by all. The weather constantly changes, and everyone recognizes trends in their local region. What is ignored by both sides is the underlying historical, social, and anthropological context for human-caused climate change and the proposed solutions. And both sides lack an adequate understanding of climate science or alternative energy technologies, which are actually anything but green or renewable.

The anthropocentric bias of European cultures ensures that we are more concerned with impacts of climate change on humans than on the rest of nature. When we talk of the “environment,” what we generally mean is the physical surroundings of most humans: their cities, their urban neighborhoods, their homes and workplaces. Our first priority is always going to be to secure the safety and comfort of these non-natural, artificial environments, our fortress from which we view nature as a hostile force.

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg naively urges us to “stand behind the science,” unaware that the industrial application of science – petroleum technology and the internal combustion engine – is something that caused the problem to begin with. Climate science represents only a tiny minority of all scientific research, which is mainly conducted for government and industry, in pursuit of capitalist and imperialist agendas.

And climate science is yet another of the reductive sciences that have triumphed over holistic science since the 1970s. We all talk about our carbon footprint, blaming climate change on fossil fuels, rather than acknowledging the broad complex of exploitative, destructive behaviors that are degrading nature and destroying our planet: our imperialistic expansionism, our industrial infrastructure, our accelerating demand for mobility, comfort, convenience, power, and speed that are cumulatively increasing our consumption of nonrenewable resources and spreading toxic waste and invasive species. Many of these factors overlap with climate change, but in the news cycle and the dumbing down of public discourse, climate change has become the only “environmental issue” that most of us are aware of.

The fundamental problem is neither climate change, nor carbon, nor fossil fuels. The fundamental problem is not a specific technology, but our overall way of life, our values, our institutions, accumulating in Europe and its colonies over thousands of years.

Democracy and Fascism

Whenever one of our leaders exhibits autocratic tendencies, liberals and idealistic young people can be depended on to cry “fascism!” and bemoan the eroding of our “precious democracy.” But democracy and fascism have come to be defined as flip sides of the modern nation state. In either case, the machinery of the state – the bureaucracy, the military, the economy – is much the same, and citizens have no role in decision-making.

We trace our notion of democracy to the ancient Greeks, and our notion of a republic or representative democracy to ancient Rome. Of course, neither were egalitarian. In ancient Athens, the slave-holding male gentry, a minority of the population, voted directly on both leaders and major decisions that affected the entire community. That was our archetype of democracy.

Majority vote is a notoriously unstable and unfair form of decision-making and electing leaders. Peaceful societies maintain small, accountable, face-to-face communities in which leaders can be chosen and decisions made via the unanimous consensus of all members – a much more fair and sustainable solution than our “precious democracy.”

“Liberty” and “freedom” are fundamental, universal American values believed to be at the foundation of our society and economy. But in the public discourse, they become vague, emotionally-charged euphemisms that imply the use of violence to defend individual rights. Peaceful societies exercise firm restraints on individual behavior, by group consensus, to ensure the welfare of the community. Unlike us, they understand that since humans are a social species, individual welfare only results from strong, healthy communities.

Poverty, Hunger, and Disease

Poverty and hunger were the primary targets of President Johnson’s “Great Society” programs in the 1960s, and the suffering of “developing nations” continues to inspire idealistic young people and guilty billionaires like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

But the poverty, hunger, and disease of indigenous and poor populations in former colonies have been directly caused by European and American imperialism, and are continually exacerbated by Eurocentric governments and our military and industrial operations. First Europeans conquered their societies and territories, then supported European businesses in the takeover of their productive lands, driving the people into urban slums. These newly poor people ended up living in squalor and vulnerable to disease.

After independence, European institutions and Eurocentric leadership remained, and as the former imperialists rushed to put a band-aid on the problem by feeding the poor and treating their diseases, we enabled population explosions that lead to overconsumption of resources. And finally, ignoring our role in the historical process, we view these poor third-world societies as the main culprits in the overpopulation of the earth. Why can’t they be enlightened like us?

Like most of our buzzwords, poverty is relative. In our capitalist consumer society, we pity people who get by with less, whether voluntarily or not. Whether we’re willing to admit it or not, we behave as if happiness is a commodity that can be bought. We believe money and technology are the solutions to every problem. Some of the happiest and healthiest people I’ve known are those who consume the least, and thrive in what others call poverty. And some of the unhealthiest are those caught up in the rat race of conspicuous consumption.

The world doesn’t have a poverty problem, it has a wealth problem. Global poverty only exists because of capitalism and imperialism, which lead to economic inequality. The lifestyle of the wealthy depends on exploitation of the poor, mostly in foreign countries where they are out of sight, out of mind. A minority is wealthy because many others are disadvantaged. And even the middle and lower classes in affluent societies depend on products and services that are affordable because they come from poor regions and depend on cheap labor.

Peaceful societies are egalitarian. Despite the rhetoric of the wealthy, white Founding Fathers, nations are by necessity hierarchical and generate economic inequality, which, alongside other causes, generates suffering, conflict, and violence. Our individualistic society, with its Horatio Alger myth that anyone can get rich, pits us against each other and victimizes the people who provide our products and services.

Space Exploration and Colonization

Among all the contentious, divisive stories that regularly make the news, space exploration is one topic that’s supposed to truly unite us, something we can all be proud of, the achievement that offers us hope in our future despite all the problems that challenge and divide us. We in the “advanced” nations proclaim space exploration as a noble effort that all humans can share in with pride, regardless of race or creed, wealth or poverty.

Expansion of our species into space is considered an inevitable consequence of the Progress we take for granted. But in our much-denied historical context, progress has involved the violent conquest of new territories and indigenous societies and the appropriation and exploitation of their resources. Exploration, in the European sense and the sense we now apply to space, is the vanguard of imperialism. First the brave white explorers use their advanced technology to travel to remote places, where they establish a beachhead. Commercial enterprises follow, to extract natural and human resources for the enrichment of their investors back home. Military forces accompany the businesses, to protect them from the natives. Colonial governments are set up to control surviving native populations, followed by white colonists who gradually displace the natives until they believe themselves the natives and the original natives the ungrateful outsiders.

Space, like the Antarctic continent, may lack indigenous populations. But like Antarctica, space is merely another target for exploitation by our aggressive, out-of-control consumer society, a place in which imperial powers can compete for advantage. And as in the exploration of Antarctica, space can only be reached by exploiting resources back home to build and power the vessels of exploration. The earth is sacrificed to get to space.

Science is used as a justification for exploration, but science is never purely a search for truth. The more expensive the exploration, the more science is guided by capitalism and imperialism. Space exploration teaches us nothing about how to take care of our habitats and communities on earth, which is by far the most important thing we need to figure out.

Humans evolved as part of natural, terrestrial ecosystems. We continue to thrive only with the help of our non-human partners in these ecosystems, which fill the gaps in our knowledge and perform services we may not even be aware of. Naive and ignorant space enthusiasts like Elon Musk believe in the myth of human exceptionalism: the misperception that as the pinnacle of natural evolution, humans deserve to expand throughout the universe.

Alienated from nature, proponents of space exploration are unaware that evolution has no pinnacle, and humans have no more knowledge or wisdom than our nonhuman partners. Space enthusiasts mistakenly believe science knows enough to manufacture “life support systems” from scratch, to “terraform” other planets, transforming them into human habitat. But only terrestrial organisms can create our habitat, and we need to submit to their nonhuman wisdom.

Humans are neither superior nor sufficient; our knowledge, skills, and wisdom are not enough. We need our wild, native, terrestrial ecosystems, and we thrive by practicing restraint, living within our limits. Exploration is part of expansionism. Space exploration and colonization are imperialism, plain and simple, the doomed products of hubris and aggression.

Think Locally, Act Locally

Whereas conservatives tend to reject intervention in foreign affairs, the specter of climate change has renewed the commitment of liberals to globalism. But as we can see from our analysis of news media and public discourse, we simply lack the accurate information to think globally.

The global way of thinking is just another conceit of imperialism. We first-world people who have the luxury to consider ourselves global citizens have the illusion that we know what’s going on everywhere, but we don’t even come close. Our news media leave out almost everything that’s really important, and traveling to learn about distant places is a wasteful luxury that can only give us snapshots.

Even our science betrays us – we only know the “planet” through expensive machines like spacecraft, airplanes, and scientific instruments, tools of the capitalist, imperialist elites. These instruments filter out context and leave us with decontextualized data which is only useful in our misguided, doomed attempts to engineer nature and society. The “planet” is a presumptuous first-world fantasy.

The only societies that live responsibly are those that tend to their local habitats and communities, ignoring the follies of the larger world, but keeping an eye out for threats that can be avoided. Many threats are unavoidable. The juggernaut of civilization has trampled and obliterated many sustainable societies. That’s the nature of humanity, and like most stories in the news, it’s not an edifying one.

No matter how many or how often moles pop up in the news to be whacked, people still cling desperately to what they believe are the benefits of their culture and their nation, partly because most people fear change, partly because they’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated, but also because instead of valid alternatives, the filtered, curated news media keep showing them apocalyptic failures – the chaos of places like Syria and Libya. Compared to that, a nation of gun-toting racists seems like paradise.

Our local environment is the only one we can truly know. The more we can disentangle ourselves from the larger, inadequately known world outside, with its destructive infrastructure, greedy empires, and misdirecting news media, and the more we take responsibility for our own needs, the better we can take care of our communities, and the happier and healthier we will be.

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Fire, Part 6: Government and Wildfire

Wednesday, March 24th, 2021: Fire, Nature, Problems & Solutions, Society, Wildfire.

All images by Max unless otherwise credited.

Previous: Wildfire Revelations

The Political Cycle

The political polarization we’re all seeing now – a society divided between liberals and conservatives – is nothing new. I was aware of it long ago, in childhood, growing up in small, rural communities far off the beaten path. Society was split into opposing but roughly equal halves, and since we were a democracy, electing leaders every four years, leadership alternated, back and forth between political parties, from the local to the national level, in a four-to-eight-year cycle.

But to a kid, those were the mysterious affairs of adults. My family was not politically engaged or active, and I entered adolescence at a time when young people were rebelling against the Establishment – all the established institutions of our society and culture.

The Vietnam War had been started by Kennedy, the cherished martyr, and was escalated by Johnson. Both were Democrats, but they were followed by Nixon, a Republican, who pursued it further, ordering the bombing of Cambodia, a country we hadn’t even declared war on. The older people who became my mentors, and continue to inspire me decades later, urged me to think critically, and to question all authority, regardless of what party or tradition it came from.

That became a mantra of the Counterculture, which launched a sweeping critique of our society, showing how the schools had indoctrinated us in a false view of history. We learned how our government engaged in global imperialism, our capitalist economy exploited and oppressed both humans and nature, science and technology served the military-industrial complex, and corporate media sold us a false view of the world. We began to explore and investigate alternatives, better ways to live – other cultures, past and present.

Howard Zinn summarized many of these revelations in his A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980. Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was president at the time, but his leadership had failed miserably when faced with both national and global crises, so the cyclical system followed up with Reagan, a Republican.

To my generation, Zinn’s book was redundant. The subsequent election of a third-rate movie star as national leader was nothing more than a cruel joke. We already knew our society was failing and our culture was bankrupt. We turned our backs on both and tried to invent something new, in our own backyard – the DIY underground arts scene of San Francisco. Punk music was our first inspiration. The nihilism of the Sex Pistols encouraged us to tear everything down and start over.

Now, decades later, mired in the capitalist economy and burdened with family responsibilities, most of my peers have abandoned the ideals of the Counterculture. They’ve joined the Establishment, chosing sides in the two-party system, in which both sides believe passionately in their country, but fear that the other is trying to destroy it. Liberals fear conservatives will establish fascism, rape the environment, and persecute minorities. Conservatives fear liberals will establish communism, restrict individual freedom, and take away their precious guns.

For various reasons, both sides tend to settle in enclaves where they become isolated from the opposing side. Each side gets its information from targeted national media – and social media communities – which present the world from their point of view. Urban liberals never interact with rural conservatives, so they may imagine they don’t exist, or are an irrelevant minority. Since both sides are ignorant of the other, they develop all sorts of misconceptions.

When the political cycle turns, and leadership flips from your side to the other, you become even more committed. Both sides send their children to private schools that present the world from their point of view. From generation to generation, the divide deepens and both sides become more entrenched.

The Romance of Fire Towers

In the early 1970s – the heyday of the Counterculture – I was in college, but hadn’t formally declared a major subject. I was working hard in the University of Chicago’s tiny studio art program and had applied to prominent art schools. But the economy was in a recession, and I was desperately poor and needed a career that would free me from dependence on the limited resources of my family.

My dad, who had moved to California after the divorce, started sending me applications to take a summer job as a fire lookout for the Forest Service somewhere in the West. Like me, he’d aspired to be an artist and musician. The high point of his life had been in grad school in the late 1940s, when he’d immersed himself in the postwar urban jazz scene during the invention of bebop by icons like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis.

But he knew I also shared his love of nature, and I think he hoped that the solitude and responsibilities of a fire lookout would help me make my decision – hopefully away from the temptations of the urban arts scene, which could only lead to the insecurity of an artist’s life.

Jack Kerouac, an aspiring writer, was a contemporary of my dad in the postwar jazz scene. While Dad was jamming onstage and capturing it in paintings afterward, Kerouac was working on a new style of writing inspired by bebop. While my dad moved on to start a career in science and raise a family, Kerouac hung in there, discovering Buddhism and yearning for a connection with nature.

After finishing On the Road, his first experiment in writing-as-free-improvisation, Kerouac got a job as a fire lookout in a remote Forest Service tower in Washington State. He hoped to use the solitude of the wilderness as an opportunity to advance his writing, to integrate Buddhism’s contemplation of nature with the urban music scene that inspired him, but the contrast was too jarring, and the solitude failed to stimulate his creative juices. He wasn’t able to write about the experience until long after he left the fire tower, in Dharma Bums and Desolation Angels.

But Kerouac became such a youth-culture icon that his brief gig as a government fire lookout helped romanticize the job for generations of young people. Forest Service fire towers have become linked with the Buddhist practice of pursuing enlightenment through passive contemplation of nature. This is especially attractive to writers, who need to sit still for hours, free of distractions, to do their work. But at the age of 19, solitary contemplation was the last thing I needed. I needed to immerse myself in society, not to withdraw from it.

Like Kerouac, my dad was an eloquent writer, and his letters and Forest Service job applications went into my archives, where they were destroyed last year along with thousands of other irreplaceable keepsakes, in the house fire that inspired this series of Dispatches.

Politics and Profit in the Desert

Eventually, after two decades of immersion in urban culture, my own search for connection with nature led me to a field office of the Bureau of Land Management in the California desert. The BLM is an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, which claims its mission is to “manage and sustain America’s lands, water, wildlife, and energy resources, honor our nation’s responsibilities to tribal nations, and advocate for America’s island communities.” I spent days in that office squinting at old microfilm records and talking to staffers about mineral rights, easements, and other arcane interests shared by rural landowners and federal agencies.

The land I ended up buying fell within a Wilderness Study Area, and friends notified me that the BLM had invited a group of “stakeholders” to meet and contribute to a Resource Management Plan for the area. The plan was not the government’s idea – it was demanded by conservationists concerned about the endangered desert tortoise and bighorn sheep, whose populations were barely hanging on in this and neighboring mountain ranges. Private landowners within the area were not considered stakeholders, so I just showed up and started adding my two cents from the peanut gallery.

Who did the BLM consider stakeholders in public land? The ranching community turned out to be the most important component. The area included only one vast grazing allotment, with one permit holder, but he came supported by members of his large family and a slick city politician, president of a coalition that had been thrown together to protect desert ranchers from environmental regulation.

In those meetings I learned how the U.S. government, through its agencies the BLM and the Forest Service, subsidizes private-sector ranching, by charging grazing fees far below market rates and relieving ranchers of most of the financial and management burden for the damage done to natural habitat by livestock. Subsidized ranching has persisted since the 19th century because of the long-standing, high-level connections maintained between ranching families and both political parties.

I also learned that the leaders of government agencies are political appointees, both in Washington and at the regional level, so local policy swings back and forth between pro-conservation and pro-development. At the time of the Wilderness Plan meetings, we were in the Republican phase of the cycle. George H. W. Bush was President, and our local BLM office manager was a pro-development conservative.

The BLM office administering the wilderness surrounding my land had only two rangers to patrol and enforce regulations on an area larger than some states. The rest of the staff was office-based, and as regulations expand, more bureaucracy is needed, increasing the disparity between field and office staff. When the BLM attempted to enforce environmental regulations against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy in the early 1990s, he successfully resisted, mounting an armed uprising in 2014, which he won. Now an intimidated BLM allows him to operate outside the law.

The other commercial stakeholders in these desert mountains are miners. Like ranching, the business of mining is subsidized and largely unregulated. The government, again through its agencies BLM and Forest Service, allows mining companies to keep all the profit they take from public lands, with little or no responsibility for conservation or cleanup. The public land surrounding my place in the desert is littered with mine ruins, equipment, and materials abandoned by private businesses over the past century and a half.

The only other stakeholders invited to the meetings were the conservationists who’d requested the plan – represented by the Sierra Club – and off-roaders, who contribute to local economies through their purchase of permits, machines, fuel, camping gear, restaurant meals, and hotel stays. Of course, off-roaders are passionately opposed to environmental regulation, so conservationists were outnumbered three to one.

BLM had scientists on staff – botanists to monitor forage plants on cattle range, mineral experts to review mining claims. But when it came to the tortoise and the bighorn, the state had jurisdiction. Just as the federal government manages rocks and plants as commercial resources, the state manages wildlife, so wildlife biologists were brought in as consultants, from the California Department of Fish and Game. Privately, they referred to the BLM as the “Bureau of Livestock and Mining.”

Government agencies always claim that commercial users of public land are important because they pay fees which can then be used for conservation. A friend studying endangered desert bighorn sheep invited me to a trophy hunt once, almost 30 years ago. Sheep tags were going for $80,000 back then – probably at least 5 times that now – and rich surgeons and tech CEOs arrived in camp from all over the country. It was a big, multi-day event that began at sunset with huge steaks sizzling on a giant campfire grill at the base of the mountains. The next day, I was allowed onboard a helicopter for a preliminary survey of the range, trying to spot where to send the hunters for the best chance at a trophy.

In the popular rhetoric and public discourse, mining companies contribute to local economies, and ranchers are seen to represent a precious, dying way of life preserving traditional values like self-reliance, responsibility, hard work, honesty and integrity. Likewise, hunters have long been praised as the original conservationists. In my Indiana hometown, the Conservation Club was a group of hunters that protected habitat for deer, pheasants, ducks, and other game species.

But just as our educational system largely ignores the role of capitalism and imperialism in our history, the mythology of mining, ranching, and hunting whitewashes reality. Mining companies destroy natural habitat and pollute local air, soil, and water, and rarely are required restore, clean up, or compensate local communities for the damage. Minerals they take from local habitats are sold as commodities on global markets, where profits go to distant shareholders.

In the desert, the government allows ranchers to run cattle in wilderness areas, trampling soils, spreading invasive plants, spreading disease to wildlife, and fouling native water sources. Whereas in traditional subsistence cultures, livestock are kept to feed and clothe the local community, in capitalist society, they’re sold as commodities in regional markets, for the sole profit of the rancher. And our society provides ample evidence that capitalist markets produce gross inequality, poverty, and conflict.

Rather than taking a holistic, ecosystem approach to conservation, hunters typically work to promote a single game species. Quail hunters in the desert build and maintain concrete “guzzlers” to collect and store rainwater runoff, which can then be accessed only by quail. Likewise, the rich hunters who can afford a bighorn tag use helicopters to install water tanks and piping deep in wilderness areas to artificially sustain sheep populations in drought years.

Since scientists are hired by government agencies as specialists supporting these commercial resources, they generally consider mining, ranching, and hunting as necessary evils – they’re just happy to be paid to collect and study data in their fields of study. But most of the agency scientists I met inspired me with their love of the desert, its natural habitats and wildlife, and how incredibly hard they worked to protect them.

My curiosity led me to meet many more conservation scientists over the following decades, to the point where they now make up as much as half of my friends. I’ve spent dozens of days and nights with them in the field, climbing rugged, trackless mountains under the blistering summer sun, trudging thigh-deep through wetlands in the middle of the night, collecting data essential for groundbreaking studies to protect endangered species. All these scientists believe in what they do, while conducting a running battle against “democracy” – the political cycle – and the extractive focus of their powerful commercial constituencies.

All of the land administered by BLM in the desert had been taken by force or fraud from indigenous people. There were still plenty of those people living in the desert, but none were represented on the BLM staff or in the scientific community. Nor were there any Hispanic BLM staffers or scientists, although Hispanics made up at least a quarter of the local population. Segregation and tacit discrimination were typical in California as a whole, so none of my new agency contacts or scientist friends seemed aware of, let alone concerned about, the disparity.

Politics and Profit in the Southwestern Forests

California’s desert mountains, administered by the BLM, are largely unforested. But the taller and wetter mountains surrounding my new home in the Southwest provide habitat for large stands of evergreen conifers and their deciduous allies, so my weekly hikes follow trails through land managed by Jack Kerouac’s old employer, the United States Forest Service.

In contrast with BLM and Interior, USFS is an agency of the Department of Agriculture, which claims its mission is to “to provide economic opportunity through innovation, helping rural America to thrive; to promote agriculture production that better nourishes Americans while also helping feed others throughout the world; and to preserve our Nation’s natural resources through conservation, restored forests, improved watersheds, and healthy private working lands.” Note how Ag’s rhetoric is more honest than Interior’s, putting economic values up front. And anyone should be able to infer that as part of Ag, USFS is likely to treat forests as crops.

In contrast with the white-administered California desert, the southwest New Mexico Forest Service more closely reflects our local demographics in its inclusion of Hispanic staffers. Latinos are avid users of the forest: campers, hunters, fishermen, and woodcutters. The same can’t be said of Native Americans – the Apaches resident here before the American invasion were all driven away to distant reservations, and I’m not aware of any native involvement in USFS. Now that we’ve put them out of sight, natives are out of mind.

I’ve met and talked to USFS staff regularly and frequently since I moved here. In fact, our whole community is actively involved with the Forest Service, from ranchers who run cattle on public land, to commercial logging operations, to hunters, fishermen, campers, and hikers who use Forest Service roads, campgrounds, and trails, homeowners who live in the forest, and businesspeople who benefit from tourist revenue.

My interactions primarily involve reporting invasive plants and the abuse or violation of regulations that I’ve encountered while hiking, like the cattle that regularly trespass into wilderness areas, and the rogue woodcutters that vandalize trails so they can illegally take motor vehicles deep into roadless areas, where they illegally harvest live trees in response to the voracious public demand for firewood. I also, rarely, run into trail maintenance crews. Contrary to popular belief, the federal government provides almost no funding for trail maintenance, and most trail work is done not by the Forest Service but by citizen volunteers from local non-profit groups.

Like in the desert, the U.S. government allows ranchers to run cattle all over our local wilderness areas, and ranchers are never held responsible for trespass or damage to protected habitats. By law, the Forest Service, not private ranchers, is responsible for fencing and repairing damage caused by livestock. But of course, the federal government doesn’t provide adequate funding for that. So laws and regulations are only enforced sporadically when private non-profit groups like the Center for Biological Diversity take the government to court and force compliance.

Forest Service staff dutifully note my reports on invasive plants and tresspass cattle, but admit that because of underfunding and understaffing, there’s generally nothing they can do. When I report illegal or abusive activity by commercial users like ranchers, woodcutters, or hunting guides, I’m consistently treated as an annoying troublemaker. Impatient Forest Service staff point out that commercial users are high-value – they pay fees that go directly into Forest Service salaries – but as a mere hiker and taxpayer I’m so far down the scale that I don’t count.

During those early meetings with BLM in the desert, and in the three decades since, I’ve gotten to know both government agencies and their constituencies pretty well. The old desert rancher and his family, decent people with values, knowledge, and skill that I respect. Agency staff who are typically friendly and hard-working, but frustrated by the short terms and high turnover in political jobs. Scientists who are passionate about conservation. Hunters who work hard to maintain native habitat.

In a society increasingly divided between liberals and conservatives, the majority rule of “democracy” perennially flips back and forth between opposing camps. Government agencies, led by political appointees, function cyclically, each new administration trying to reverse the “damage” of the previous cycle.

In our capitalist culture, with its worship of free enterprise, everything is measured by its economic value. Natural resources on public land are seen primarily as commodities to be extracted and sold for private profit. Taxpayer-funded government agencies support private businesses. Significant conservation is only achieved under legal pressure from private non-profit groups.

Heroic Firefighters, Romantic Lookouts

As I described in Part 5, our wildfire season starts during the pre-monsoon months of May and June. I moved here at the beginning of May 2006 and began spending several evenings per week with new friends at downtown watering holes – the corner bar and grill and the wine bar across the street. The stars of both scenes were Forest Service firefighters who’d just arrived from all over the country and would be stationed here for the season. They were young, athletic men, daredevil adrenaline junkies, and our women, young and old, clustered around them and hung on their every word.

Shortly after arriving, I started commuting out of our tiny local airport. The Forest Service has a permanent fire station there, where firefighters are based, and I saw how fleets of planes, helicopters, and trucks, as well as busloads of personnel, accumulate every season. Our monsoon was late that year, but it started with a big storm that turned the gully cutting through downtown into a raging orange river. And the hunkiest of that season’s firefighters was captured on the front page of our newspaper as he kayaked on that dangerous flood, all the way out of town to where it finally spread and dissipated miles out on the alluvial plain. The women swooned.

Five years later, a woman I was interested in took me to a talk, a book launch, by a local author, Philip Connors. Connors was a handsome former copy editor on the Wall Street Journal. Stuck in the concrete jungle of Manhattan, he’d fallen for the romance of the Forest Service fire tower. He’d followed Kerouac’s example, getting a job with the Forest Service as a fire lookout in a tower on a high peak just east of my new hometown, where he hoped to gain enlightenment, and a marketable story, through the contemplation of nature.

He’d spent several seasons there, and one of the big East Coast publishing houses had just released his memoir, Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout. It was getting rave reviews in the national press, and would go on to win the National Outdoor Book Award. Connors was our new local hero.

But not much of a public speaker. Facing a devoted crowd of young people and retirees, he struggled to enliven the months he spent in that tower – attempting to protect government trees from wildfire, reflecting on his limited life experience, occasionally spotting bears and other wildlife. Connors was no Kerouac, but he seemed like a nice guy. I could see how working on Wall Street could make you long for a different view out your window.

But I never romanticized fire lookouts in the first place – mountains should be sacred, and it saddens me when people violate their peaks with towers and antennae. And Connors’s experience as a solitary, passive observer compared poorly with the decades I’d already spent busting ass all over the desert with conservation biologists, learning about ecology, helping to save endangered species, and working to restore natural habitats.

Connors’s book begins by repeating the official gospel of contemporary wildfire management, a story of past mistakes being steadily corrected by science. From its inception until the most recent generation, the Forest Service tried to prevent or suppress all wildfires, in order to protect the natural resources – the trees – as well as the recreational features, private property, and businesses within or adjacent to its boundaries. Then, during the past four decades, there was a gradual shift.

New science claimed that forests evolved with fire and needed it to maintain diversity and productivity. Agency policy abandoned prevention and suppression and refocused on reducing built-up fuels and restoring natural fire regimes in fire-adapted habitats. More evidence of Progress: thanks to science, European culture was learning from its past mistakes, and the future would be a better place.

In our area, as in most fire-adapted habitat throughout the West, land users, homeowners, and media are regularly notified of “prescribed burns” planned by federal agencies in pursuit of the new management policy. And in remote rural areas like my new backyard, wildfires are sometimes allowed to burn without intervention when they don’t directly threaten human lives or property. Thus, environmentally-concerned city dwellers are reassured that the new policy is being successfully implemented.

But at the same time, ever larger, apocalyptic mega-wildfires occur, often near big cities, at what has come to be called the wildland-urban interface. A century of fire prevention and suppression resulted in widespread accumulation of fuels, while cities were sprawling and urban refugees were building farther and farther into fuel-rich forests. So that now, despite the official policy, most wildfires threaten lives, property, and the respiratory health of city-dwellers. The new policy of fuel reduction and prescribed burning requires little manpower, equipment, and expenditure, while the old romantic, military model of firefighting continues to expand, deploying billions of dollars worth of “assets” – armies of heroic firefighters, bulldozers, trucks, helicopters, and airplanes.

Throughout the fire season, we watch the hotshot caravans passing, the helicopters beating overhead, dipping to siphon water out of the giant plastic “pumpkin” tanks temporarily set up along rural roads. Somewhere out of sight in the backcountry, bulldozers cut fire breaks across natural habitat, lines of suited firefighters light backfires with gas-filled driptorches, aircraft dump water and bright red chemical fire retardant on native forests.

Marketing the Military Model

My desert friends and I subscribe to the annual BLM California calendar and the weekly BLM California News.Bytes newsletter. The calendar features beautiful landscape photography, and the newsletter keeps us abreast of events on public land in the desert.

But while Trump was president, the BLM newsletter bragged about his contributions to both the economy and conservation. And now, only two months into the Biden presidency, News.Bytes brags about overturning Trump’s legacy and employing the “best available science” to advance conservation. Regardless of the party in power, information we get from the government can’t be entirely trusted. It’s always going to function partly as PR – as advertising for the current administration.

In July 2017, a wildfire in California’s Sierra Nevada threatened the hometown of one of my favorite families – ironically, an ecologist, his botanist wife, and their kids. Home and business owners threatened directly by a wildfire rely on emergency phone alerts and daily public briefings by the law enforcement types who lead the military-style firefighting response. But I’d spent quality time at my friends’ place and was desperate for up-to-date information, so I turned to to InciWeb, the website maintained by government agencies involved with wildfire.

Government response to a wildfire starts when the agency with local jurisdiction names the “incident” (usually after a nearby landmark) and assigns an Incident Commander, who then puts together a team. Information – news, announcements, maps, photos, and videos – starts appearing under the new incident page of InciWeb.

My friends’ home escaped the fire, but I became an InciWeb addict, tuning in every morning during each year’s wildfire season to see what was burning in my region and my friends’ regions. I learned the idiosyncracies of the bureaucratic systems. In the bilingual Southwest, incident commanders routinely misspelled the Anglo place names that are assigned to new fires, and those misspelled names became the permanent incident titles in the public record: Brigham became Bringham, Vicks Peak became Vics. Information on InciWeb was good PR for the agencies – they could impress the public with how hard they were working for those tax dollars – but some incident teams did a better job than others.

After a serious wildfire erupted in a popular wilderness area near me last summer, the original incident team uploaded almost nothing to InciWeb for several weeks. Then they were suddenly replaced by a completely different team, which immediately started uploading a torrent of updates, maps, photos, and videos.

What kind of picture did all this government information portray about the actual fire? Sure, there were detailed maps of the perimeter, but as we saw in previous Dispatches of this series, a wildfire boundary is largely meaningless.

Most of the photos posted on InciWeb are of firefighters and equipment, bureaucrats briefing the public, or dramatic sunsets seen through smoke. Most of the videos are of aircraft dropping water and chemicals. Heroic firefighters, our tax dollars hard at work, and a bit of entertainment to hook the audience. Almost nothing about the unfolding, localized ecological interactions of the fire with habitat and wildlife, the natural adaptations and responses.

War on Wildfire

Aggression and violent conflict are so fundamental and essential to our society and culture that most people believe them to be universal human traits, just as they accept the polarization of society as a necessary evil of the democratic process.

But human societies don’t universally frame every problem as an enemy to be battled and conquered, the way we do, in our War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Crime, War on Cancer, War on Obesity, and most recently, the Battle Against Climate Change.

European history, the history we were taught in school, is a 2,000 year series of wars, revolutions, city-states, nations, and empires, one following the other. Europeans fought so many wars no one can keep track of them. The need to compete, to dominate others and the earth, is so fundamental to European culture that few of us are even aware of it. In media and the public discourse, people in our society are always said to be “fighting” one thing or another.

Conflict and violence are so fundamental to our culture that they bias our view of others. We romanticize indigenous people as brave warriors, overlooking examples of peaceful cooperation and coexistence. But anthropological research has uncovered many societies, throughout history and around the world, that prevent or manage conflict without violence. These societies don’t respond to challenges like climate change by fighting or waging war – they cooperate, resolve differences peacefully, and adapt to changing conditions.

It’s now widely acknowledged that the War on Drugs was a mistake. We’ve obviously never won the War on Poverty, the War on Cancer, or the War on Obesity. The War on Crime has resulted in mass incarceration of dark-skinned minorities. Does anyone really believe the War on Climate Change will be more successful?

And what about the War on Wildfire? We’re clearly not winning that one. According to official policy, we’re not even supposed to be fighting it. The Forest Service is supposed to be managing forests sustainably, but it’s clearly not working. As in all our wars, our rhetoric is not matching our accomplishments.

Maybe it’s time for a closer look at how we reached this state of crisis between our society and its environment, and this level of denial between rhetoric and reality.

Next: Americans and Wildfire

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Fire, Part 7: Americans and Wildfire

Wednesday, March 31st, 2021: Fire, Nature, Problems & Solutions, Society, Wildfire.

All images by Max unless otherwise credited.

Previous: Government and Wildfire

Go West, Young Man!

Why is it so hard for our government to walk the talk, to do what it says it’s doing – to work with fire instead of against it? Why are wildfires getting bigger, and more destructive, reducing suburban neighborhoods and sometimes entire towns to ash, killing dozens of rural citizens, choking millions of city dwellers with dense clouds of smoke, requiring more and more massive paramilitary efforts to control?

It might help to take a fresh look at our history.

In school, I learned about the European Age of Discovery, in which brave explorers like Columbus and Magellan set out in wooden ships to cross oceans and discover new lands. I learned about the first settlement of North America by Pilgrims, English refugees fleeing religious persecution. I learned about the gradual colonization of eastern North America by the English, as part of the growing British Empire. The American Revolution, in which the colonists rejected British rule and established a democratic nation, the United States, based on the sanctity of individual freedom.

I learned that the United States began a new era of democratic nations, an era of freedom and democracy that gradually replaced the old European empires, all over the world. We were no longer English – from now on, we were Americans, a free people who had left the Old World behind. We went on to develop our own culture, with our own heroes and institutions.

I was born and started school in the upper Ohio River valley, in the foothills of the western Appalachians, surrounded by deciduous hardwood forest, where I spent most of my free time outdoors exploring nature. Our town was the first U.S. settlement west of the Appalachians, founded by George Washington’s senior officers in the wake of the American Revolution, capital of the new “Northwest Territory”.

But they’d built the town around prehistoric Indian mounds, an extensive ceremonial complex of the vanished “Hopewell” culture. My dad gave me his collection of arrowheads found by our farming ancestors, and even before I started school I was pulling fossils out of the banks of the creek behind our house. So from earliest childhood I was not only steeped in American history, I had abundant exposure to deep time, and a passionate curiosity that came from direct personal experience, not from books or classrooms.

One of our family vacations took me to North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains, deep in the Appalachian spruce-fir forest, where I met Cherokee Indians and toured the mammoth Fontana Dam and hydroelectric generating station, which destroyed a vast area of natural riparian habitat as part of liberal President Roosevelt’s New Deal. Another trip took me farther east to the nation’s capital, colonial landmarks like Williamsburg, and the decisive Civil War battlefield of Gettysburg.

As described in Part 1 of this series, we moved west to Indiana after I turned 8. Away from the dark, forested eastern mountains, to the flat, open cropfields of the Midwest. I learned about the Indian Wars of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, after which this region was settled by my ancestors, and the forests cleared for farms and towns. I looked for Indian mounds in remnants of forest that survived beside the small, serpentine rivers, but the indigenous presence had been completely erased here.

Nevertheless everything seemed old. Many of our buildings, even new ones, copied the East Coast Colonial style, with brick walls and white columns. Government buildings echoed the neo-Classical styles from ancient Greece and Rome that were popular throughout the eastern U.S. My new hometown’s heyday had been the Victorian period of the late 19th century, so our downtown, and many of our biggest homes, consisted of brick and stone buildings in the English Victorian style.

We’d been taught that we were Americans, and our country represented a dramatic break from the Old World and a fresh start in the New, but actually I was living in a European Colonial town, surrounded by a landscape that had been tranformed to look like the English Midlands.

My formal education in ecology began under Mr. Carrigan, my high school biology teacher. He cultivated a special relationship with me, introducing me to soils, soil fauna, and pollination, encouraging my fascination with snakes, intermediaries between the surface world and the hidden, mysterious underground. I spent my last summer in that place living on an ancestral farm, falling in love with the wild forest and river that bordered it.

I started college at the University of Chicago, which was modelled on Oxford University in England. The U of C’s undergraduate curriculum was based on the Great Books of Western Civilization, so I became even more mired in our European cultural legacy. The U of C was not that unique – all of what we call higher education is European in origin, structure, and practice.

But from there I was catapulted far west, to northern California, echoing the 19th century mass migration that settled our West Coast. That move west was seminal for me – it began my cultural awakening, my growth away from the European legacy, the baggage burdening the eastern U.S., which always looks eastward to the Old World for its history and validation. Despite my thorough indoctrination in European culture, the mentors of my youth had rebelled against the system, encouraging me to question authority and think critically, and I was more than ready to unlearn the propaganda from those many years of school and replace it with accurate knowledge about the world.

I’d known since early childhood that there was a deep, rich, non-European past underlying this entire continent, but in the West it was closer to the surface. Colonists had not transformed the landscape the way they had back east, and large populations of Native Americans survived here and there, in places like the Southwest that were exotic, beautiful, and deeply intriguing to me.

The California desert was the place that quickly captured my heart. As I described in Parts 2 and 3, I encountered natural desert habitats that at first seemed to be pristine wilderness, but turned out to be littered with ancient potsherds, fragments of stone tools, petroglyphs and pictographs that tapped into my childhood curiosity about deep time and fired my artist’s imagination. I met desert rats and field scientists and learned about prehistoric tribes, desert ecology, the history of mining and ranching, the damage to desert habitats caused by cattle grazing, military operations and motorized recreation, the spread of invasive plants, and wildfire.

I spent a lot of time in and around Las Vegas, assisting a friend with wildlife research and conservation, experiencing firsthand the uncontrolled development, growth, and consumption resulting from our society’s founding belief in personal freedom and free enterprise. The rapid destruction of natural habitat by urban and industrial sprawl, the massive solar plants consuming multiple square miles of nature every year.

I met Native Americans and heard their stories, which contradicted much of what I’d learned from Anglo archaeologists. I studied aboriginal survival skills to get a firsthand sense of how indigenous people had lived in the arid Southwest. I lived and worked on ecological preserves, learning about regional ecology and the ecosystem services provided by native habitats and wildlife. I started my Pictures of Knowledge project – titled by biologist friends – to develop a more accurate understanding of humans in nature.

I revisited Mr. Carrigan – my old high school biology teacher, now retired – and saw his eyes light up with enthusiasm as he described how he had directed an engineering effort that dredged and channelized the river bordering our old family farm, to reduce flooding of crop fields. Dozens of miles of precious riparian habitat had escaped destruction throughout seven generations of European culture, only to be wiped out virtually overnight, in the interest of commercial efficiency and profit.

I listened to a radio interview with Elizabeth Kolbert, the New Yorker staff writer and author of The Sixth Extinction. She was emerging as a national authority on climate change and species extinction, but when asked why we should care about these things, she was stumped. She couldn’t explain why humans need wild habitats and ecosystems. After an awkward silence, all she could offer was “well, um, nature is beautiful, it has spiritual value, to lose it would be a tragic loss”.

And in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, after a decade of catastrophic wildfires all over the West, I encountered well-educated, liberal city dwellers from California and other affluent states, driving Priuses up 4wd roads, deep into our fire-adapted local forests, looking for remote cabins, rural properties where they could “get away from it all”.

They’d watched forested suburbs going up in flames on TV, they’d read magazine articles about why forests need to burn, and they’d listened to Forest Service authorities explaining why fire suppression had to end. But they were still moving into fire-adapted forests, and they still expected the government to protect them.

As cognitive scientists have pointed out, people can think critically, exercise reason and logic, share and compare observations and ideas with their peers in the public discourse – but in the long run, it may make little difference what we think and say, because most of our behavior is involuntary. We imitate family, friends, teachers, and celebrity heroes, we act on unconscious urges, we fall prey to habits and addictions we know are bad for us.

Fouling Their Nest

As I described above, for me, moving west was also moving away from our European Colonial legacy. Not to forget or deny it, but to peel back the layer of “American” colonial culture superimposed on this continent, to expose the rich legacy of indigenous cultures underlying ours. To put the imported colonial culture in a broader context, to compare it to cultures that are truly native to this land.

What kind of ecological culture did Europeans bring with them to this continent – how had they treated their habitats back home?

Much of Europe had already been ecologically degraded centuries before, its wildlands deforested, mined, and overgrazed by goats, sheep, and cattle. (M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources)

According to Josh Davis at London’s Natural History Museum:

Centuries of farming, building and industry have made the UK one of the most nature-depleted countries in Europe. Extensive agricultural lands and road networks, in combination with other factors, have reduced the wildlife in the UK to a point hardly seen elsewhere.

A new analysis looking into how much biodiversity is left in different countries around the world has shown that the UK has some of the lowest amounts of biodiversity remaining.

Before the Industrial Revolution, forests covered much more of the UK than they do now. Large areas of wilderness were home to animals and plants which are now a rare sight, or gone completely. Red squirrels, beavers, wolves and bears were once common in the British Isles.

The advent of mass farming, factories, roads, trainlines and urban sprawl has been a death knell for wild places, and it was accelerated by the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.

This was our ancestors’ cultural legacy. What did they find waiting for them in the “New World”?

Discovering a Virgin Land

Around the arrival of Columbus, “it’s said that squirrels could travel from tree to tree from the Northeast to the Mississippi without ever having to touch the ground,” said Chris Roddick, chief arborist at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in New York. “In the old growth forests in the Northeast, you had hemlock that were six or seven feet in diameter, chestnut trees 200 feet tall.”

But we all know North America wasn’t an empty wilderness. Like Europe, it was filled with people, hundreds of local and regional indigenous tribes that had interacted with nature for thousands of years. The Eastern Seaboard of what’s now the U.S. was dotted with native villages surrounded by cropfields. Centuries later, records are poor and data is sparse, but it stands to reason that instead of continuous forest, eastern North America was a mosaic of habitats cultivated in part by Native Americans. And we’re now rediscovering that one of their tools was fire.

The early European settlers found that much of the East was already being fired on a frequent basis by Indians…These settlers gradually displaced the Indians, but continued their use of fire for many of the same reasons, i.e., to clear the woods of underbrush, to expose nuts, to clear agricultural fields, etc. Frequent fires occurred over large areas of the eastern landscape into the early decades of the 20th century. (D. H. Van Lear and R. F. Harlow, Fire in the Eastern United States: Influence on Wildlife Habitat, U.S. Forest Service)

Developing a Healthy Economy

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Fire, Part 8: Native Americans and Wildfire

Wednesday, April 14th, 2021: Fire, Nature, Problems & Solutions, Wildfire.

All images by Max unless otherwise credited.

Previous: Americans and Wildfire

Both Sides of the Tracks

My ancestors were poor Gaelic farmers in the Scottish highlands and border country who were driven from their homelands and forced to emigrate to North America. Here, we didn’t become part of the power structure that founded the United States. We remained ethnic underdogs, independent and self-reliant, no friends of government.

I grew up in small rural communities within which Blacks had their own tiny enclaves, enduring racism but studying with us in school and becoming our sports heroes. Thanks to my parents’ cosmopolitan aspirations, I was raised not to look down on other races and ethnic groups, but to admire them – my dad idolized Black musicians like Miles Davis and Charles Mingus, and my childhood soundtrack ranged from Jamaican-American singer Harry Belafonte to African superstars Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela.

I came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and started college at the peak of the Black Power movement. Native Americans and their legacy had been thoroughly erased from my Midwestern county, but in high school, I supported the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, and hung a poster of Apache leader Geronimo over my bed.

The University of Chicago was an island of whiteness surrounded by one of the world’s largest and most nightmarish Black ghettos. Its Eurocentric curriculum was designed to impress students with the towering achievements of the white race, but in a gesture to accommodate the Counterculture, the U of C had scrambled to hire a few token radicals like Bill Zimmerman, co-founder of Science for the People. He taught me how racism and imperialism are justified using myths about cultural evolution and the superiority of European culture.

Zimmerman introduced me to the anthropology of indigenous cultures and the work of Thomas Kuhn, often considered the most influential philosopher of science in the 20th century. Kuhn showed that far from the objective search for truth it claims to be, science is a competitive political activity. Scientists routinely form prejudiced hypotheses, resist new ideas, and reject data which challenge their preconceived notions.

Forced to switch from the arts to science and technology, my social circle expanded to include Asians, who were accepted as “honorary white people” because they adapted easily to European values and institutions. But nowhere in those elite programs did I see a Black, Latino, or indigenous face. Those races remained in the background, working in inferior roles, safely segregated in impoverished enclaves.

After grad school at Stanford, I’d had enough of that white European bullshit. Needing cheap studio space for my art and music, I lived for decades in poor Black and mixed ethnic neighborhoods, while working day jobs with whites and Asians. I had a Mexican-American girlfriend with indigenous ancestry who became the love of my life. I had Black and Native American bandmates, roommates, and landlords, and even went to jail with them, where we all encountered racism and injustice.

I studied West African music and culture and the Native American cultures of the Great Basin and Mojave Desert, and those became the main inspirations for my art and music. I studied aboriginal survival skills to understand how indigenous people had thrived in the arid Southwest. I spent time with the desert tribe’s most celebrated traditional craftsperson and their leading environmental activist, and got involved with a coalition of tribespeople preserving natural habitats as sacred cultural spaces – something our secular society can’t do.

All that firsthand experience led me to respect and admire traditional cultures and oppressed races more than the European civilization that had conquered, enslaved, and oppressed them.

Meanwhile, my brother and father – the rocket scientist who had once worshiped Black musicians – were being turned into racists by Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the neo-conservative movement. And while I was living and working in poor neighborhoods and learning about other cultures firsthand, most of my friends in science and academia were gravitating more and more toward safe, clean all-white enclaves where they only encountered people of color in inferior roles, as gardeners, custodians, dishwashers in restaurants, and the like. They voted for liberal politicians, and praised diversity, while tacitly accepting inequality and segregation.

The Myth of the Noble Scientist

In 2004, two years into my research for Pictures of Knowledge, I was visiting an old friend, a professor at a large state university who conducts research and conservation on endangered species. When I tried to share what I’d learned about indigenous conservation practices, he interrupted me impatiently, citing a recent study in the popular scientific literature about a prehistoric tribe somewhere in the South Pacific that had over-exploited their resources, driven species to extinction, and experienced a population crash. “Indigenous people are NOT conservationists!” he shouted.

Later that year I joined some even older friends involved with ecological research and conservation at an elite university. Again on the topic of conservation, when I offered “In some traditional societies…” they began shouting in unison, “NOBLE SAVAGE, NOBLE SAVAGE, NOBLE SAVAGE!” I was never allowed to finish.

For more than a decade after that, whenever I raised the subject of traditional societies and indigenous practices with biologists, they were quick to interrupt, ridiculing me for “romanticizing the noble savage” and dismissing my observations before I even had a chance to articulate them. Most recently, when I tried to share anthropologists’ observations about indigenous conservation practices in an email exchange with friends in science and academia, a senior wildlife biologist immediately dismissed them: “For North America the evidence is the opposite. The myth was the noble savage.”

As mentioned above, I studied science at the University of Chicago and Stanford. I’ve helped my biologist friends collect data in the field and process it in the lab. I respect and praise their work and treasure our friendships. Why have they responded with ridicule and contempt to the very mention of the traditional cultures I’ve spent much of my life studying and experiencing firsthand? Why do they reject evidence of indigenous conservation without even examining it? And what do they mean by the “noble savage”?

This myth has had a murky history. To the extent scientists or academics are even aware of it, they attribute it to the Enlightenment-era Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. But recently, in his book The Myth of the Noble Savage (University of California Press), Ter Ellingson, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington, has shown it to be the creation of a faction of racist anthropologists in the mid-19th century – the intellectual ancestors of today’s right-wing think tanks and reactionary academics like Harvard’s Steven Pinker.

It turns out the noble savage was actually never a popular fantasy in historical European culture. The racist academics presented the fake myth as a “straw man” which they could easily demolish – relying partly on Darwin’s new theory of natural selection – in order to condemn indigenous cultures and defend European imperialism and white superiority.

The mere repetition of the words Noble Savage sufficed to serve as a devastating weapon against any opposition to the racist agenda. The myth of the Noble Savage became a weapon in the Ethnological Society’s scientific-racist project of helping to naturalise a genocidal stance towards the “inferior” races. (Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage)

In this fabricated myth, indigenous people were falsely idealized as representing an original, wild, unspoiled state of humanity, living in peaceful harmony with nature. One of the worst mistakes a white European could make was to romanticize the noble savage – succumbing to irrational fantasies, idealizing nonindustrial societies and cultures, ignoring their negative traits and failings, fabricating valse virtues and successes.

In science and academia, the noble savage became a supremely effective insult, slander, and put-down for which there was no defense. If you said anything positive about indigenous people, you were immediately accused of romanticizing the noble savage, and you automatically lost all credibility. The slur was likely to cling to you forever, branding you as “too trusting” of anything that didn’t conform to institutional orthodoxy. Evidence of indigenous failures was welcomed, while evidence of indigenous achievements was dismissed.

Of course, none of my scientist friends had ever studied this cultural history. None of them knew what the original “noble savage” meant, let alone how it was manipulated by 19th century racists. My friends had simply copied the insult from elders and peers in academia – and sadly, I’ve even found them teaching it to their children.

Nor had any of my friends ever studied the conservation practices of indigenous cultures. From the way they heard the “noble savage” slur used in their milieu, they assumed there was conclusive evidence, somewhere, that all indigenous people had abused nature. When pressed, the best evidence they could cite against indigenous conservation was a widely publicized hypothesis that Pleistocene megafauna – mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, etc. – went extinct 8,000 years ago due to over-hunting by prehistoric humans.

As one of my friends noted, there are other isolated reports of indigenous over-harvesting. But scientists don’t cite these reports out of concern for objectivity – they cite them to discredit all indigenous people and those who seek to learn from them, and to dismiss evidence which challenges institutional racism and white superiority.

When it supports their claims, Western scientists value what Traditional Knowledge has to offer. If not, they dismiss it…when Traditional Knowledge is seen to challenge scientific “truths —then its utility is questioned or dismissed as myth. Science is promoted as objective, quantifiable, and the foundation for “real” knowledge creation or evaluation while Traditional Knowledge may be seen as anecdotal, imprecise and unfamiliar in form. (George Nicholas, Professor of Archaeology, Simon Fraser University, Smithsonian Magazine)

The racist slander of the Noble Savage has ensured that seven generations of biologists have willfully ignored indigenous knowledge about the natural systems and habitats they presume to study, knowledge they’re only now beginning to catch up with.

The Ascent of White Men

The very things I admire about my scientist friends – their love of nature and commitment to field work and conservation – have given them a limited, inaccurate view of science. They’re lucky to make a living exploring beautiful natural areas, restoring habitat and collecting data to help preserve endangered species.

But growing up amid industrial farms, coal mines, oil and gas fields, and chemical factories, with a research chemist and rocket scientist for a Dad, studying the physical sciences and engineering and working in the electronics, communications, nuclear, entertainment, and internet industries – all that has taught me firsthand how the discoveries of physicists, chemists, earth scientists, geneticists, roboticists, and computer scientists damage natural habitats, pollute our environments, and endanger humans and wildlife.

It’s ironic that, while attacking me for “romanticizing the noble savage”, my friends have consistently romanticized science.

Scientists tend to judge non-whites by European standards, reserving their respect for “civilized” high-achieving Asians, and the few Blacks, Latinos, or Native Americans who’ve become scientific researchers, college professors, published authors, or national leaders. One of the most insidious prejudices in science, and our society as a whole, is the conflation of wealth, power, and technological progress with cultural evolution. In the 19th century, Europeans saw the increasing wealth and power they were gaining, through imperial conquest and advances in science and technology, as evidence they were progressing away from primitive savagery toward civilized Enlightenment. The defenders of European imperialism who introduced the noble savage as a racist insult also helped frame the theory of the “Ascent of Man”.

To white people, human progress is proved by our ancestors’ assumed progression from Stone Age hunter-gatherers – the Noble Savage – to the metal-workers of the Bronze Age and Iron Age, to the Discovery of Agriculture in the Middle East, the Rise of Civilization, the Anthropocene, the European Enlightenment, and the rise of science. Despite our contemporary rhetoric praising diversity and tolerance, white people of European ancestry, including our most celebrated scientists, share a tacit belief in the evolution of culture from primitive to civilized, and the superiority of civilized people.

But the Ascent of Man is proving to be just another myth. There was no time when ancestral humans wandered carefree in a Garden of Eden, all their needs provided without having to work. Human culture did not take a quantum leap forward through a “Discovery of Agriculture” in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, launching a new geological era, the Anthropocene. Some societies – our own, and the historical examples we admire (Ancient Egypt and Greece, the Roman Republic and Empire, the Inca and Classical Maya) – are simply unable to manage their aggression. They expand, conquer, dominate, and ultimately collapse.

But many others take the path of peace and thrive by reining in aggression. Like other animal species, nonindustrial humans have always studied their habitats closely and worked with plant and animal populations in complex and sophisticated ways.

Indigenous peoples have been pigeonholed by social scientists into one of two categories, “hunter-gatherer” or “agriculturalist,” obscuring the ancient role of many indigenous peoples as wildland managers and limiting their use of and impacts on nature to the two extremes of human intervention…and it has led to a focus on domestication as the only way in which humans can influence plants and animals and shape natural environments.

Anthropology has changed significantly in the past one hundred years…but the basic elements of the nineteenth-century view of California Indians is still with us. The term “hunter-gatherer” is still used and still implies an evolutionary sequence of progress. The notion of the evolution of human cultures remains implicit in the layout of many current human ecology and anthropology textbooks and is explicit in recent anthropological journal articles that refer to this progression as “the ascent of man.” (M. Kat Anderson, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources)

Rediscovering Native Tending

At the same time those white scientists and conservationists were ridiculing and bullying me on the topic of indigenous conservation and the noble savage, University of California botanist M. Kat Anderson mustered the courage to stand up to anti-indigenous racism in the male scientific establishment. Her book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources, published in 2013, was a meticulous, comprehensively researched study of the ecological practices of dozens of tribes across dozens of widely varying natural habitats, from coasts to river valleys and interior basins, from deserts to alpine forests, from thousands of years ago into the present.

By virtue of their daily use of plants, California Indians acquired extensive and special knowledge of the life histories of plant species, and they understood how different harvesting strategies affected natural regeneration…These [indigenous] harvest and management practices, on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries, possibly thousands of years…During the course of their long history in California, Indians so exhaustively explored the plant kingdom for its uses and so thoroughly tested nature’s responses to human harvesting and tending that they discovered how to use nature in a way that provided them with a relatively secure existence while allowing for the maximum diversity of other species…When historical indigenous interactions–both harvesting strategies and resource management practices–are investigated in depth, we find that by keeping ecosystems in a modest or intermediate level of disturbance, in many senses Indians lived in ecological harmony with nature. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)

As I’ve found while researching Pictures of Knowledge, abundant evidence of indigenous conservation and sustainable resource management has long been embedded in the ethnographic literature, hidden from lay audiences and ignored by the broader scientific community. But in the wake of Anderson’s book, many similar reports on indigenous ecology have surfaced from around the world – North and South America, Asia, Australia, and Africa – confirming my insights and Anderson’s findings.

For instance, in the past two decades, archaeologists and environmental scientists working in coastal British Columbia have come to recognize evidence of mariculture—the intentional management of marine resources—that pre-dates European settlement. Over the course of thousands of years, the ancestors of the Kwakwaka’wakw and other Indigenous groups there created and maintained what have become known as “clam gardens”—rock-walled, terrace-like constructions that provide ideal habitat for butter clams and other edible shellfish…This resource management strategy reflects a sophisticated body of ecological understanding and practice that predates modern management systems by millennia.

These published research studies now prove that Indigenous communities knew about mariculture for generations—but Western scientists never asked them about it before. Once tangible remains were detected, it was clear mariculture management was in use for thousands of years. (Nicholas, Smithsonian)

These reports continued to accumulate until finally, long after the Black Lives Matter movement made racism a hot topic in white society, the predominantly white scientific, academic, and conservation establishments were forced to respond. In September 2020, Scientific American published a formal apology for its long-standing role in institutional racism. And The Conversation, a fact-based online news source supported by Boston University, the University of California, Penn State, Rutgers, Tufts, Vanderbilt, and many others, formally acknowledged the racism inherent in the environmental movement since its origins in the work of icons like John Muir.

American environmentalism’s racist roots have influenced global conservation practices. Most notably, they are embedded in longstanding prejudices against local communities and a focus on protecting pristine wildernesses. (Prakash Kashwan, editor, The Conversation)

Riches Squandered

I’ve described how I grew up amid the impressive earthworks of the prehistoric Hopewell culture. European culture is obsessed with monumental architecture – even the Black astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson used drone footage of skyscrapers to illustrate the highest achievements of mankind in a pro-science TV commercial.

But I also described how, 30 years later, I was even more impressed at finding stone tools, potsherds, petroglyphs and pictographs in my beloved Mojave Desert. My long, privileged education had revealed exactly how white Europeans built cities, skyscrapers, computers, and rocket ships. And my adventurous life had exposed the cost – global, catastrophic damage to natural ecosystems and traditional human societies. But the discovery that people had thrived in the desert, making everything they needed from scratch using local natural materials, with no lasting damage to their environment – that I found truly inspiring.

When the European ancestors of modern white Americans invaded North America, they encountered indigenous societies and natural habitats which had co-existed in dynamic equilibrium for thousands of years. Native cultures spanned a diverse ecological spectrum. Some – like the tribes Kat Anderson studied in California – were able to occupy the same habitat for countless generations, practicing a resilient blend of wild harvesting and agriculture that adjusted to changes in climate and other disturbances.

Unlike European colonists and modern Americans, these ecologically-adapted indigenous societies didn’t construct “permanent” homes, cities, infrastructure, or political boundaries in habitats where fire, flood, and other cyclical disturbances could be expected. When they encountered disturbances rendering local habitats unusable – like prolonged droughts – they adapted by migrating, carrying their resilient practices to other habitats where they could put down new roots.

A few native cultures, like the Cahokians of the Mississippi Valley and the Ancestral Puebloans of the Southwest, did come to rely more exclusively on agriculture, expanding and developing social hierarchies, seeking to dominate their neighbors and develop empires. Like empires in the Old World, these native empires rose and fell and faded away in a cycle of generations. None of these North American native empires survived at the time of European invasion.

Countless historical documents show that when they first arrived, and as they invaded westward, European colonists found natural habitats of almost unfathomable productivity which were the result of thousands of years of indigenous tending.

Every day of every year for millenia, the indigenous people of California interacted with the native plants and animals that surrounded them. They…achieved an intimacy with nature unmatched by the modern-day wilderness guide, trained field botanist, or applied ecologist…In the process, they maintained, enhanced, and in part created a fertility that was eventually to be exploited by European and Asian farmers, ranchers, and entrepreneurs, who imagined themselves to have built civilization out of an unpeopled wilderness.

Coastal salt marshes were at one time much more extensive than today, forming important habitat rich in plant and animal life…Pure grasslands, including coastal prairies, valley grasslands, vernal pools, and montaine meadows, covered one-fifth of the state before 1850…Before dams and man-made levees, river boundaries surged and retreated with the seasons…Riparian woodlands, which before 1850 covered 900,000 acres in the Central Valley, teemed with animal life. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)

Artisans of Wildfire

There wasn’t much of that richness left for me to see, generations later, as I made my own way westward into valleys trampled and overgrazed by cattle, deserts and coastal hills blanketed by invasive plants, mountains ravaged by mining and clear-cutting of timber. But as mentioned in previous parts of this series, I did occasionally stumble upon beautiful “parklike” stands of native Southwestern forest which can result either from “natural” fire regimes or from indigenous burning to clear undergrowth and excess fuel. And in remote, hidden corners of the desert, I was sometimes surprised by lush stands of honey mesquite, which my Indian friends told me had been planted and maintained by their ancestors – like the native water sources which their people maintain today.

The California landscapes that early explorers, settlers, and missionaries found so remarkably rich were in part shaped, and regularly renewed, by the land management practices employed by native peoples. Many of the biologically richest of California’s habitats were not climax communities at the time Euro-Americans arrived but instead were mosaics of various stages of ecological succession, or fire subclimaxes, intensified and perpetuated by seasonally scheduled burning. In a very real sense, some of the most productive and carefully managed habitats were in fact Indian artifacts. In many cases these landscapes experienced far greater degrees of managerial care and ecologically sophisticated manipulation than are found today.

It is likely that over centuries or perhaps millenia of indigenous management, certain plant communities came to require human tending and use for their continued fertility and renewal and for the maintenance of the abundance and diversity patterns needed to support human populations.

Countless studies have shown that fire has always been a primary tool in indigenous conservation, worldwide. In the forests of eastern North America, before the European invasion:

Over thousands of years, the American Indian became expert in using fire for various purposes, e.g., for hunting, to concentrate prey species in convenient areas, to encourage fruit and berry production, to keep the woods open along major corridors of travel, to fire-proof their villages, and other uses…Because of their farming and burning activities, Indians ensured that much of the eastern forests was in early successional habitats.

Indians often burned as frequently as twice a year, complementing lightning as an ignition source. Their burning extended the fire season beyond the “natural” lightning-fire season of summer. These frequent and often extensive fires, along with the wildlife foraging that fire encouraged, created and maintained open woodlands, savannahs, and prairies throughout the eastern United States.

In fact, much of the eastern forests at the time of Columbus could be regarded as a cultural artifact of Indian activities…The eastern forest at that time was a shifting mosaic of woodlands, savannahs, forests, and prairies, all in varying stages of succession. (D. H. Van Lear and R. F. Harlow, U.S. Forest Service)

In California:

Fire was the most significant, effective, efficient, and widely employed vegetation management tool of the California Indian tribes. The slow match gave them the technological capability to burn both small patches and extensive tracts of vegetation in a systematic fashion…In addition, most tribes had the ability to fell trees and large shrubs with fire for meeting cultural needs. They used this tool to create village sites and to convert riparian habitat and floodplain into farming areas in southeastern California.

Deliberate burning increased the abundance and density of edible tubers, greens, fruits, seeds, and mushrooms…enhanced feed for wildlife; controlled the insects and diseases that could damage wild foods and basketry material; increased the quantity and quality of material used for basketry and cordage; and encouraged the sprouts used for making household items, granaries, fish weirs, clothing, games, hunting and fishing traps, and weapons. It also removed dead material and promoted growth through the recycling of nutrients, decreased plant competition, and maintained specific plant community types such as coastal prairies and montane meadows.

Many wild plant populations accumulate aging parts (dead branches and shoots, leaves, cones, and seed pods) that may reduce plant vigor and productivity over time. Fires set by California Indians consumed this biomass and released some of the plant nutrients it contained.

Scientific studies have recently shown that nutrient movement can take a long time, relative to human life spans…In some ecosystems the nutrient storage compartment (e.g. the litter on the forest floor) can become a vault, locked against internal cycling…Like soil arthropods, bacteria, and fungi, fire is a mineralizing agent in forests and other vegetation types, but it works much faster than decay organisms and thus speeds up nutrient recycling and the return of sites to high productivity.

Freshwater marshes in the Central Valley of California were burned by the Wukchumni Yokuts, and in the Panamint Valley by the Timbisha Shoshone, to clear out old reeds, recycle nutrients, stimulate new plant growth, and provide open water for waterfowl…Deergrass, an important native bunchgrass for coiled basketry in central and southern California, was burned in chaparral, lower montane forests, and oak woodland plant communities by the Cahuilla, Foothill Yokuts, Kumeyaay (Diegueno), Luiseno, Sierra Miwok, and Western Mono tribes to clear away accumulated dead material and increase flower stalk yields.

Fire helped to control the pathogens and insects that would otherwise compete for the same resources used by native people…Ruby Cordero (Chukchansi Yokuts/Sierra Miwok)…recalls burning to eliminate insects that attacked shrubs that were important for basketry…Many Indian tribes in California burned in oak…woodlands and tan oak…stands to reduce insect pests that inhabit acorns and overwinter in oak leaf duff…According to Kathy Heffner…all of the tribes she interviewed in northern California (Hupa, Wailaki, Tolowa, Yurok, and Karuk) burned under the California black oaks and other oak species to destroy the insect pests…Fungi and bacteria also have the potential to decrease substantially the mast crop of oaks…Fire may have helped to curb these pathogens as well…The Luiseno in southern California burned regularly as well to destroy insect pests and diseases that damaged native food crops…

An extremely important reason for setting fires was to increase forage for wildlife…It has been shown that pruning or burning vegetation increases the forage value for certain wildlife and that the number of larger game animals increases after fire…Today elders from a number of tribes substantiate that the practice of burning is highly beneficial to wildlife. The Sierra Miwok elder Bill Franklin learned about burning from his father and grandfather: “They said the Indians used to burn in the fall–October and November. They set the fires from the bottom of the slope to decrease the snowpack, get rid of the debris so there’s no fire danger and they burned in the hunting areas so there was more food for the deer…”

Fire was also used in hunting many kinds of animals…Fire was a tool used often for driving rabbits…Many tribes captured ground squirrels, a reliable food source, by smoking them out of their burrows with the aid of a fire fan or burning them out…The larvae of wasps and yellowjackets were a delicacy eaten by many tribes, and fire was sometimes used to find them…Similarly, tribes throughout California used fire to capture grasshoppers.

In forests and woodlands, thickets of shrubs and small trees tended to accumulate over time, creating a potential wildfire hazard. Aware of the danger uncontrolled fires would pose to villages and collecting sites, California Indians regularly fired the understory in forests and woodlands “to keep the brush down” and promote the growth of wildflowers and grasses. After repeated burning, the fires were of low intensity and crown fires uncommon in many areas.

Heightened species diversity, abundance, and density have been associated with regular, intermediate-density, spatially heterogenous disturbance. Based on this relationship, it can be hypothesized that the disturbance caused by California Indians’ use of fire in a variety of ecosystems, occuring at intermediate intensities and frequencies, promoted a maximally heterogenous mosaic of vegetation types and increased species diversity. (Anderson, Tending the Wild)

In the ponderosa pine forests of the Southwest, the scene of my recent “burn scar” hikes:

In the last few decades, investigations of tribal traditions and research by historians, ethnobotanists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and ecologists have revealed a wealth of evidence implying that fires ignited by Native peoples have influenced landscape vegetation for hundreds and probably thousands of years…Intervals between fires in these forests mostly ranged from an average of only about two years in parts of northern Arizona to twenty-five or thirty years at higher elevations and moist sites, with many areas averaging between seven and fifteen years. This pattern of frequent fires was instrumental in producing and maintaining parklike ponderosa forests with big trees and open, grassy understories. Fires thinned out saplings and shrubs and killed some of the overstory trees, particularly those with a scar exposing heart rot. (Carl E. Fiedler and Stephen F. Arno, Ponderosa: People, Fire, and the West’s Most Iconic Tree)

Next: Restoring Wildfire

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Pet Parade

Tuesday, January 24th, 2023: Burro Mountains, Hikes, Problems & Solutions, Society, Southwest New Mexico.

My headache had been so bad on Saturday, I didn’t expect to hike on Sunday, and turned off my alarm before going to bed. But I woke up feeling good for a change and took a leisurely approach to deciding where to go. I couldn’t do any of my usual hikes because of deep snow, flooded creeks, or deep mud, and exertion was making the headaches worse so I wanted something without a lot of elevation gain. And it was getting too late for a long drive so I also needed something close to town.

I decided to check out a segment of the national divide trail, a little farther south, which I believed would be completely unused this time of year. I’d never been there and wasn’t even sure there would be a recognizable trailhead, but I printed a topo map, bundled up, and headed out into sub-freezing temps under a clear blue sky.

This would be a meandering route through open woodland across a rumpled basin, a maze of low hills and shallow drainages between 6,000′ and 6,400′, trending north toward the small mountain range southwest of town that I’ve climbed over a hundred times in my short midweek hikes. I was starting where the national trail crosses the highway south, and at best, if conditions were really good and my headache didn’t intervene, I might make it the entire 8 miles to the popular trailhead at the foot of the mountains. I knew it wouldn’t be a spectacular hike but I expected to make good time and hoped to achieve more mileage than in all the difficult snow hikes of the past two months.

This segment of trail crosses multiple cattle grazing allotments, encountering gate after gate, and several dirt roads used by ranchers and off-road enthusiasts. I began to notice mountain bike tracks during the first couple of miles, which makes sense, because even competitive mountain bikers seem to do most of their riding on gentle trails.

About two miles in, I heard voices behind me, then a whirring sound, and stepped aside to let a biking couple ride past, followed by their dog. They appeared roughly my age, were overdressed for the weather, and were riding slow, hence the dog had no trouble keeping up. I’d never seen adult mountain bikers ride so slow, and while I was friendly as usual, I was sorry they had to haul these expensive, resource-intensive machines out, further distancing themselves from nature, instead of using the feet they were born with.

I encountered them again, returning, shortly before reaching the graded forest road at the midpoint of my hike. They had stopped to chat with a male hiker, also our age, who was heading up the trail with his dog. We all agreed this trail had suddenly become popular because it remained snow-free and less muddy than others near town. Having caught up with the single guy, I knew I was faster than him, so I continued up the trail, observing to myself that no one can seem to do anything anymore without a dog by their side.

When I reached the graded road I saw the male hiker’s car, a new Honda SUV. On this 8-mile segment of trail, he was only walking 2 or 3 miles total, and the mountain bikers were doing about 8 miles out and back, which is nothing for a bike, but is a decent workout for a dog. This jibes with my experience of dog people. With few exceptions, when you own a dog, your main priority is not to stay fit or experience wild nature. Dog people may say they’re going for a hike, but what they really mean is that they’re obligated to walk the dog(s), ideally for a half hour a day, and they seldom go farther on foot than 2 or 3 miles.

Once past the graded forest road, the trail begins a gentle climb into the foothills of the low mountain range. A mile or so past the road I approached another gate with a middle-aged woman on a horse and two more dogs. The dogs ran to meet me, and the woman waited for me to open the gate for her. She said she was trying to train a “new horse” and it wouldn’t carry her close enough to open the gate from the saddle. Of course getting off the horse would be too much trouble, I thought to myself. But I’m always nice to strangers as long as they’re nice to me.

After letting them through I kept climbing until I came out on a series of broad, heavily grazed grassy ledges overlooking dozens of miles of alluvial landscape to the east, punctuated by low hills and bounded by distant ranges. I’d been diligent about hydrating and realized I was running low on water, despite having plenty of time to reach the next trailhead. I normally bring 3 liters in winter, but had packed only 2 this morning, with the idea of a shorter hike, before deciding on this trail. I hated to turn back now, when I could practically see the trailhead only a mile or so away across the foothills, but dehydration would definitely bring my headache back, so I just went another quarter mile, then reluctantly turned around.

I hadn’t gone too far back before meeting the equestrienne and her entourage of pets. She’d started at the northern trailhead, and like the male hiker I’d met earlier, she was only doing about a 3 mile round-trip. As is typical, I was the only serious trail user among the whole day’s crowd.

Returning, I walked slower and paid more attention to habitat. The maze-like basin south of the foothills was just high enough for a few pinyon, but consisted mostly of open juniper-oak woodland with bunchgrasses, beargrass, and various shrubs in between. I remained frustrated to be unable to do the full distance, but was grateful my headache hadn’t returned. It was an easy hike I wouldn’t be anxious to revisit, but it’s always interesting to see a familiar landscape from a slightly different vantage point.

Two miles from my vehicle I came upon yet another party, a couple my age, this time with two obviously expensive purebred dogs, one a big shaggy wolfhound. They struggled to restrain the dogs as I passed. Like I said, I’m always friendly, but after passing them I’d exhausted my tolerance for pet owners.

When I was a kid growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, pets were for kids, in affluent or midde class families. Working class families couldn’t afford pets. The lifespan of cats, dogs, and horses is how long it takes humans to become adults, so as you became an adult, you left your pet behind. Childless adults, and parents whose kids had grown up, did not have pets.

In subsequent decades, as capitalism and technology increasingly fragmented human communities and isolated individuals, turning social services into commodities, individuals became lonelier, more vulnerable, in need of companionship their dwindling human relationships couldn’t provide. With the advent of social media in the new millenium, childless, socially isolated adults acquired pets in order to share and get “likes” from distant people called “friends” that they could only interact with digitally.

But social media can’t fully explain the epidemic of pet ownership among adults. Why do most childless adults now own pets, whereas virtually none did when I was a child?

The most common answer I’ve heard is that “I’ve always had one”. But this is simply acknowledging a habit you can’t control, like smoking cigarettes or drinking yourself into a stupor every night. To me, it suggests that in some sense, you never grew up – when you reached the age of adulthood and your childhood pet died, you simply got another one, clinging to that juvenile master-slave relationship with animals.

It’s widely acknowledged that for childless or single adults, pets are acquired as surrogate children or “living plush toys” – something to cuddle since you lack a human companion. The latter clearly shows the infantile nature of much pet ownership.

Mental health authorities commonly claim that pet ownership improves the individual’s mental health. But the anthropocentric and individualistic nature of our culture ensures that these specialists remain ignorant of the broader context, the root causes of social isolation and the ecological and sociological impacts of pet ownership. According to a recent Forbes survey, 78% of pet owners acquired their pets during the COVID pandemic.

Pet owners love to claim that they’re “animal lovers”, when all they really are is pet lovers. On today’s 12-mile hike through mostly wild, native habitat, I encountered 6 people with 7 pets, 840 lbs of humans with 1,230 lbs of pets. These people obviously consider themselves nature lovers, but by taking their pets into nature they reduce their opportunities for encountering wildlife, since their pets either scare wild animals away or actively chase them.

Geographically and ecologically, both humans and their domestic animals displace wildlife, taking resources away from wildlife, damaging and destroying native habitats and hastening the extinction of wild species. I’m sure all the trail users I encountered consider themselves conservationists or even environmentalists, but in reality, as a group, they’re increasing their consumption of natural resources by 150% through the practice of pet ownership.

Most of the world is inhabited by poor people who can’t take proper care of their pets. Dogs and cats roam semi-wild, eating garbage and human feces. But the U.S. is also failing to control its pets. According to some sources, the U.S. has about 60 million indoor cats and 70 million feral cats. Almost 80 million dogs and over 9 million equines, 300,000 of which are feral. On a societal level, pet ownership is clearly ecologically irresponsible.

The devastation of pet ownership isn’t just ecological, it’s also social. Affluent pet owners live in social bubbles where everyone has the luxury to observe the social compact. Cats don’t kill songbirds, dogs don’t bark or chase strangers. But it’s very different in working-class communities like mine. Working-class families now own pets, but can’t take responsibility for them. Cats and dogs run wild through neighborhoods, the nights are a cacophony of barks and sirens.

And it’s not completely true that affluent pet owners observe the social compact. The pet industry has trained affluent consumers to favor so-called “rescue” animals – a marketing euphemism for shelter animals, which is in turn a marketing euphemism for strays. These animals are largely untrainable, so now, their affluent owners increasingly enable their anti-social behavior.

When I encounter old friends I haven’t seen in years, I want to hug them. But if they’re a dog owner, the untrained rescue dog always precedes them – to me, it’s like they’re thrusting their animal at me. Instead of my friends reaching to hug me, the first thing I get is their dog jumping at my chest, soiling my clothes. Would you let your child kick a friend in the chest?

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