By Seth Barnes Barnes Burning
ON SUNDAY NIGHT, I WAS FLYING BACK to California from the East Coast. From cruising altitude, you could make out the hot-red wildfires beginning to rage below. It was the first day of the recent conflagration, so news of the fires hadn’t reached us yet. Doing my best Smokey The Bear impersonation, I quickly calculated that the blazes were part of an isolated event in the recesses of some national forest. I returned to stoking my bitterness over the ridiculous choice to screen the movie “Nancy Drew” to a plane full of adults.
Of course, after we arrived and woke up the next morning, it was clear a completely different matter was at hand. The smoke over Malibu blotted out the sun. The combination of Santa Ana winds and choking smoke particles made breathing difficult. And we in Santa Monica; we’re the lucky ones by far, for our homes and livelihoods were, for the most part, not at risk. Many of us spent the day worried about friends and family affected by the disaster and wondering how we could help those in need. The big takeaway from all this is simple: We are not in charge.
“Save the earth” — Out lives are but a blip compared to the relentless stretch of the natural world. Which, in my eyes, makes us stewards of the particular plot we inhabit. I say that as a cold, hard piece of analysis rather than a dippy statement
That’s an easy fact to forget. For if you look at the mass of humanity spread across the Los Angeles basin, it’s clear we’re a species confident about the control and order we exert over the land. Flying into L.A. gives you an opportunity to spend 45 minutes looking at the sprawl of concrete, asphalt and electrical development splayed out across the landscape. Inherently, there’s nothing wrong with this. Our brains have granted us the ability to thrive more than survive. So it’s easy to forget that we are still at the mercy of anything. Technological innovation has brought us Google Maps, a software program that allows developers to create real-time mash-ups showing the progress and scope of these wildfires in excruciating detail. But we’re still at the mercy of an arid, desert environment that’s only produced three inches of rain in the last year. We’re at the mercy of nature as it surrounds our homes. When fires start to burn in this environment, no matter our technical expertise or understanding of the environmental condition, fire department chiefs still say things like “these wildfires aren’t going to let up until they reach the ocean or the wind shifts.” We’re totally powerless.
Modern mankind spends more time developing and enhancing conveniences than trying to just “survive,” so it’s easy to forget that our dwellings are actually shelter against the harsh world around us. Recent news about the bottoming-out sub-prime mortgage market frames the issue nicely: Real estate has become a convertible asset, a piece of financial data subject to the whims of securities market. But to what extent do we actually own that land? Out lives are but a blip compared to the relentless stretch of the natural world. Which, in my eyes, makes us stewards of the particular plot we inhabit. I say that as a cold, hard piece of analysis rather than a dippy “save the earth” statement. We just happen to have the acumen to quantify the value of our property and readily take advantage of that value if the needle happens to point up or down.
Our relationship to climate change or global warming is no different. We tend to view our actions with respect to the environment as benevolent or harmful. People who act green and take steps to think about the climate are helping (that means you, Nobel Al Gore); those who could care less are ignorant of the damage they reap. But is it really “us versus the environment”? Are we really on the same plane as equals? We seem to think that we have a choice to decimate the world around us, or not; as if we or the environment will survive. But it’s really “us versus us” since the primary beneficiaries of a sustainable environment are members of the same race that can read this column. Mother nature and the greater reality outside of our human affairs will march on for eons, recovering, expanding and existing on its own regardless of what happens to us.
No law posits that existence is supposed to be easy. For many millennia it was not. And while this abstract analysis isn’t going to help the defenseless citizens in our midst displaced by this natural disaster, events like this give us some perspective and put us in our place. At this very moment, The 5 Freeway between San Diego and Los Angeles is closed because of the fires. That’s a good reminder that we are at the mercy of the world around us, not the other way around. We live in a dangerous place, and at our roots, we are still just trying to survive.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on October 25, 2007. Read the original PDF.