On Societal Stupefaction

In a comment to a prior post, Dan asks:

The Metolius is my favorite area in Oregon; what you have written above makes me very sad. I love the Ponderosas. I have noticed the piles of slash along the Camp Sherman road and have been very perplexed that they have been just left there, for years now. So my question is what should or could be done to save this area? Would removing these slash piles make a significant difference? Who should be taking care of this: where could pressure be applied?

And Wes posits a similar question:

When you build your homes 20 ft below sea level on the Gulf Coast, or park your single-wide in a river bottom, or plant your dream mountain cabin in the woods with the canopy spacing measured in inches, you have no right to call what happens a disaster. Disasters are supposed to be unpredictable, and the only thing unpredictable about these situations is the exact date that you get your comeuppance.

How do we educate the public? Any ideas?

Both excellent and timely questions/comments have two essential parts:

1) How should we care for our landscapes?

2) How do we move the Body Politic in that direction?

The answer to the first question is relatively easy. Where possible, we should restore our landscapes to their historically correct, sustainable conditions. We need to reduce fuels so that fires, when they occur, do not kill everything and do not consume and alter entire ecosystems. Indeed, we should set the tending fires purposefully when our forests have been prepared to receive them.

The answer to the second question is extremely difficult. No doubt, we need to “educate the public,” and SOS Forests is a tiny step in that direction. Here at SOSF we are attempting to present the answers to Question One, in the hopes that Question Two will then take care of itself.

But that is unlikely to work. Our rhetoric is persuasive like rain upon the mountain; eventually we might erode the mantle of ignorance if we keep this up for a few hundred years. But the fire on the mountain is NOW, our heritage landscapes are being destroyed NOW, and in a few hundred years it will be too late to save anything. Indeed, too much has been lost already, few of our heritage landscapes remain in salvageable form, and to add to that frustration, our society and culture grow dumber by the year.

Our burgeoning cultural stupidity is created and enforced by socio-political authoritarianism. Political Correctness is the opposite of rational thinking. The Sheeple are dumbed down by the chronic imposition of irrationality as dogmatic truth.

And here is a dirty little secret: our intellectual descent is self-imposed. Individual people choose what to read, what to pay attention to, and what to think. No one is burning the books, but few (intelligent) books are read anymore. The general ability to read is widespread, but the practice is declining. The general ability to think rationally, logically, and critically is also widespread, but shrinks and decays from disuse.

In some ways we have entered another Dark Age, where superstition and mass hysteria have supplanted the higher forms of human intellect.

Despite this tragic devolution of our species, or possibly because of it, SOS Forests will continue to carry a lamp and to shine our feeble light into the growing darkness.

Here is a set of answers to the questions above. They are extracted from the testimony of Dr. W. Wallace Covington to Congress in 2002. Dr. Covington is Regents’ Professor of Forest Ecology at Northern Arizona University and Director of the NAU Ecological Restoration Institute. His full testimony is (here):

1. DESIGN TREATMENTS STARTING WITH SOLID SCIENCE AND SET STANDARDS FOR EFFECTIVENESS. Ideological issues have been impediments to advancing treatments. Research to date indicates that alternative fuel reduction treatments (e.g., diameter caps for thinning) have strikingly different consequences not just for fire behavior but also for biodiversity, wildlife habitat, tree vigor and forest health. Treatment design should be based on what the forest requires to maintain health and reduce catastrophic fire. Science-based guidelines should be developed and become the foundation for treatments. In addition, they should be the criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of treatments. Guidelines will help guide managers and provide a base of certainty to those that are distrustful of land management agencies. The standard should be clear—if a treatment does not permit the safe reintroduction of fire and simultaneously facilitate the restoration of the forest, it is not a solution.

2. REDUCE CONFLICT BY USING AN ADAPTIVE MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK TO DESIGN AND IMPLEMENT A SERIES OF TREATMENTS. We can wait no longer. Solutions to catastrophic wildfire must be tested and refined in a “learning while doing” mode. Two of the barriers preventing the implementation of landscape scale treatments are the unrealistic desire for scientific certainty and a fear that once an action is selected, it becomes a permanent precedent for future management. Scientific certainty will never exist and the past century of forest management demonstrates the need for applied research and active adaptation of management approaches using current knowledge. We should expand our environmental review process to provide approval of a series of iterative treatments, provided they are science based, actively monitored and committed to building from lessons learned and new information.

3. REBUILD PUBLIC TRUST IN LAND MANAGEMENT AGENCIES. SUPPORT A BROAD VARIETY OF PARTNERSHIP APPROACHES FOR PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTING RESTORATION-BASED FUEL TREATMENTS. The lack of trust that exists between some members of the public and land management agencies is the genesis for obstructionist actions. The only way to rebuild trust is to develop meaningful collaborations between the agencies, communities and the public. There are emerging models of various forms of collaborative partnerships working to reduce the threat of fire while restoring the forest for its full suite of values. Their success depends on respectful community collaboration, human and financial resources, and adequate scientific support to make well informed management decisions. Congress, federal agencies, universities, and non-governmental organizations must support these communities to help them achieve success.

Unfortunately, Dr. Covington’s words in 2002 were not understood and went unheeded, and last summer the Warm Fire destroyed 60,000 acres of the forest he has worked so hard for decades to restore.

We intend to return to that particular personal story soon. The tale has been written by a far, far better scribe than us. For reasons of propriety and integrity, we cannot say anymore about it at this time. When the whole story, as written by a literary master, is finally published, then we will be first to herald it.

But the notion that deep thinking and intellectualism can right our sinking ship is one we don’t have much hope for anymore. Something more tactile is needed, but we are unsure just what that might be.

It is tempting to hope that seared forests, homes, watersheds, and communities would be the tactile reality with the potential to wag the dog, but to date the incineration of our heritage and landscapes does not seem to have registered in the Mass Consciousness, clouded as it is with the post-modern stupefactions that mark our decadent and darkening era.