Wildfire is the greatest force of fairness in the Universe – it reduces everything into the same fundamental element. Homes, trees, skin, bones… all distilled into a great black heap of powered carbon to be scattered across the Earth and be reborn into something new.
If life feeds death, and death creates life, what separates the two? How do you know what’s living and what’s dying? @1:24
Within the first two minutes, I was hooked into the documentary Hotshots… and will be for a long while. Mainly because an idea was once again rekindled with new fuel – that such a spark can generate a creative maelstrom of ideas which will resonate and leave me struggling to coherently define the intangible cloud of concepts and analogies… points and generalizations… assertations and equivocations.
The world of my mind – never absolute, and never compromising… and this, this was another “Edward Ellsberg” or “Will to Fight” moment – when a figure or something read makes sense on a level where it becomes a relief to know that another piece of a mental puzzle just clicked.
I am not going to completely spoil the entire narrative of the documentary for you; I cannot and shall not deprive the worthwhile payments from the creative and interpretive forces which labored for so long to produce and offer it to the world.
However, I can offer you a few of my thoughts I jotted down in long-hand notes as I watched; these notes… they might need to be considered by more folks beyond the subject area of Forestry Technicians and the incessant battle of Man against Nature…
Before I go too much further, I want to re-share a quote which kept coming to mind as I compiled my notes:
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, Address on the first Anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, 13Mar1962.
The documentary continues…
It’s hubris to think you can stop it. When you cut an arbitrary line in an ocean of fuel, you’re not stopping a fire – you’re only investing in a larger one in the future. The more fires you have, the smaller they get. @46:30
I honestly don’t think that the point of Hotshots was political, beyond the well-deserved digs directed towards the bureaucracies which may abuse the trust of a public which, understandably, cannot fathom the risk/reward matrixes involved in what could easily be described as “Wildfire Inc.”
However, the parallels between “fuel debt” and “freedom debt” became more and more persistent as I continued watching.
For example, a substitution is interestingly plausible:
“It’s hubris to think you can stop it. When you cut an arbitrary line selectively enforce laws in an ocean of fuel growing discontent and distrust, you’re not stopping a fire silencing criticism – you’re only investing in a larger one more intense and desperate pushback in the future. The more fires honest and genuine discussions and accountability you have, the smaller they get.”
“The more frequently fire is introduced into the landscape, the healthier the trees become.” @49:20
Dave immediately came to mind: his stance of being “a staunch supporter of the freedom of speech” is essentially advocating the imperative of strong competence in maintaining dialogue and disagreement being necessary for the cohesion of the society in which disagreement is encouraged.
…And the beauty of it all is that the more aggressively they suppress the fires, the bigger the fires get; and the bigger the fires get, the more budget they need to suppress them. It’s a positive feedback loop, when all you had to do was clear the brush. @58:00
We love complex solutions. More technology, more automation, more secondary education… bigger, costly, convoluted, mired in the layers of nuance which become the liabilities of single points of failure buried in comfortable reassurances. Yet, the simple solution just…doesn’t…compute – there’s NO way such a contrary and obvious course of action would or could make sense.
“If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to.”
The Operative, Serenity
It is in our nature, though – to create and to destroy. It is the cyclic function of Nature, regardless of cellular complexity, sentience, or potential; it is the fundamental Truth of that world between extremes – between Life and Death: the art of existence and the quest for meaning.
It clicked – all of it: what I watched, what I have experienced, what I ponder, and what I hope. It reinforced my stance on my choice to become Viciously Optimistic.
And it ended on a note that continues to make me smile as much as it continues to make sense:
And Life says: “Look death – look what you’ve made me. You’ve made me better than even before. Brighter than I ever was.”
And Death says to her: “Good. Now I know where to find you next time.” @1:39:52
We have choices, but we cannot escape the inevitability of the Universal consequences of having choices – the responsibility of understanding the cycle of life. Instead, we might be better off appreciating the experiences of those choices and the perspectives which come with the results, rather than the idea of the absolutes which may guide us.
Much thanks to Gabriel Kirkpatrick Mann for this spark…
milsurpwriter 