A Great and Difficult Transformation
On adapting, whether we like it or not.
Here in the forested slopes of the Western Cascades we have what is called a “high severity low frequency” fire regime. This type of ecosystem is defined and shaped, right down to its oldest old growth, by infrequent wildfires that leave nothing except miles and miles and miles of scorched earth. In many cases, old growth stands (what remain of them) here in the Cascades sprouted in the aftermath of a high severity fire 400-1000 years ago, forged of nutrient-rich ash and plentiful sun in a landscape newly-void of canopy.
When you apply human emotions to places that have burnt in such a way, you might come up with words like “sad” or “devastating,” and you wouldn’t be wrong for that. I drove through the Riverside Fire burn scar (one of the 2020 Labor Day Fires) in the Clackamas River drainage a few week ago and cried the whole time at the sheer destruction—truly miles upon miles of blackened earth, as far as the eye could see. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot of places after they’ve burned. As I continued to drive deeper into the burn scar, there was a slow recognition that this place once loved for its verdant greenery, crystalline pools and massive trees will never, in my lifetime, be what it once was, or how it exists in our memory.
For how sad it is to see a once-green landscape reduced to ashen, skeletal trees, it’s also also important to recognize that change—which can and often does look like total destruction—is part and parcel of the natural world, a fundamental tenet in every ecosystem on earth.
This brings me back to the concept of disturbance ecology, which I’ve written about here in the past. For a quick refresher: disturbances (like fires, floods, wind, insect/disease outbreaks, tornadoes etc) are physical forces that introduce stress into a system, and in many cases force the plants and animals in that landscape to adapt to that disturbance to ensure future survival. Native salmonids, for one example, tend to thrive in the dynamic conditions that result from disturbance—sediment from post-fire debris flows can create more complex, protective habitat for laying eggs, while pulses of woody debris further improve that habitat. More than anything, salmonids are the way they are because of disturbance, having co-evolved with their landscapes and thus adapted to the disturbances that shape them. They’re tough, adaptable little shits, in short.
It’s been weirdly helpful this week to think about our current political arena as having just experienced a high severity fire. Maybe in this metaphor we are the trout. Anyways, I had a Jill Stein supporter in my DMs a few weeks ago saying all manner of wild things, but in the course of doing so also mentioned that scorched earth is the only way to get the Democratic party to wake up. I hate to say it, but I kind of agreed with them on that. At that time I didn’t want to accept that scorched earth was the only path forward—that surely we could make the radical change we need to make in a Harris presidency. Yet now that we’re in it, walking amongst the potential ruins of the principles, rights and institutions we took for granted, I can see how this is an opportunity to rebuild radically, once we work through the collective grief/rage/whatever emotion you’re feeling this week.1
Now is a great time to stare with clear eyes at the deep, transformative change we are undergoing/about to undergo, and to recognize that we can no longer carry on ops normal. If you haven’t figured this out in the last eight years, let this be the moment that you resist the urge to slink into complacency or inaction; few other moments in American history have called us to action in such a hugely consequential way, and I don’t know what this looks like yet but it’s going to be very different from what we’ve come to expect of our lives. I envision a slow, deliberate revolution formed of sacrifice, time, conversation and engagement with our communities in ways that most of us don’t have the tools for—in ways that maybe were never exemplified to us by our parents or communities (though we all have a lot to learn from Black and Indigenous communities on the organizing and activism front). We’ll almost certainly need to shift our expectations of our lives, and commit more of our time and resources to building the communities and country and future I hope we are courageous enough to envision and fight for. We will probably need to stop calling each other morons long enough to craft a unified strategy. What I know for sure is that we are standing in a forest still smoking, and you want to know something? Seedlings that are planted immediately after high severity fire have a significantly lower mortality rate than those planted even a few months later. The sooner you plant, the better the results, the quicker the recovery. We have to start planting, people.
There is almost zero doubt that America will be unrecognizable to all of us in four years—for better or worse, and I am desperately and naively hoping it will be for the better. I hope that we don’t fall irreversibly into authoritarianism, hope that our democracy can ultimately prevail, hope that we didn’t trade the promise of cheaper consumer goods for basic rights and a functioning government. I’m prepared to be disappointed, but that doesn’t negate the ebb and flow of hope that I have no intent of losing.
Still, this country may never again look like it does in our memory. We are being forced into a great and difficult transformation, and transformation rarely comes cloaked in comfort and actions that fall in line with the status quo. More often, it leaves life as you know it in a smoking ruin, leaving you no choice but to spray it down and start anew. This is an opportunity, and defining it as such feels like a good starting point.
I’m not sure what we can do, but I hope that, together, we can envision a future that buoys us all—not just the privileged, not just those on one side of the political divide. There’s no doubt that we need to build a society more resilient to the hungry maw of Christian Nationalism. We need to avoid the trap of disillusionment. We, frankly, need to buck the f*ck up. We need to build skills and community and a society we’re proud of. We need to move forward knowing that this scorched earth can be fertile ground to nurture the seedlings of our discontent, if we allow it to be.
The obvious problem here is that this “wake up” will now be predicated on the suffering of women, the LGBTQ+ community, Palestinians, immigrants and Black and Indigenous people.
thanks for this.