Beyond the river corridor, though, things were stark and unfamiliar.

In one hot, windy day last August, fire had dramatically changed this place. Flames ripped across this piece of the river canyon, killing almost every tree in their path and exposing the bare, naked soil beneath. Called the August Complex, it was the largest fire in recorded history, burning more than a million acres of forestland and woodland.

This town, Forest Glen, marked the northern edge of the blaze. It may be one of the smallest towns in California—with only 10 permanent residents—but it has always had a palpable personality, a spirit. When I drove through it that day, taking in the transformation, my eyes welled with tears over the loss. My own hometown, Hayfork, is slightly bigger and 21 miles away, but the grief has rippled out like a stone dropped in water. Mortality is heavy in hand here.

I am on the cusp of 40 years old—only 6 more months until I turn that corner. One thing they don’t tell you about turning 40 is that everyone around you starts dying around then, especially if you are lucky enough to come from a community of loving adults—your parents, their friends, the “aunties” and “uncles” who have known you since birth. One day you’re a kid and they’re looking after you, and the next day you’re 39 and a half, and they’re disappearing, one by one.

After sitting by the river that day, I wound over the mountains and dropped into the valley of my hometown—one of the two largest valleys in the Klamath Mountains, framed on all sides by signs of past fire: snag patches and dead trees, clusters of thick wildflowers, open oak woodlands and meadows, barren ridgetops. This place, my home, has so many fire stories to tell. And my stories are layered there, too, simultaneously dead and alive, just like the fire footprints that surround them.

As in many recent years, the 2020 fire season was record breaking. More than 4.2 million acres burned in California, and smoke blackened the sky, even here by the ocean. Fires burned through coastal redwood forests and scorched giant sequoias in the Sierra Nevada, testing the evolutionary adaptations that have carried some of those trees through thousands of years of fire. Recent reports from Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks tell us that 10 percent of the world’s mature giant sequoia trees died in last year’s Castle Fire, and that species was not the only one to suffer losses. With each severe fire season, we lose old pumpkin pines, ancient oaks, and beloved stands of mixed conifer and hardwood, in addition to the structures and other built features that also define home for us.

The loss of familiar landscapes, of specific trees or viewsheds, is the deepest kind of loss—not unlike losing a home or a family member. People are a product of place, and when we lose our sense of place, we lose our identity.

Dave Daley, a Butte County rancher, put words to this deep grief last year, after the Bear Fire burned through his mountain cattle range on the Plumas National Forest:

The fire destroyed our cattle range, our cattle, and even worse our family legacy. Someone asked my daughter if I had lost our family home. She told them “No, that would be replaceable. This is not!” I would gladly sleep in my truck for the rest of my life to have our mountains back.

I am enveloped by overwhelming sadness and grief, and then anger. I’m angry at everyone, and no one. Grieving for things lost that will never be the same. I wake myself weeping almost soundlessly…it is hard to stop.

Such losses have manifested over more than a century of mismanagement and bad politics—and maybe most importantly, an increasing disconnect between people and place.

Before European settlement in California, scientists estimate that at least 4.5 million acres burned every year across the state. That’s right—California used to see more fire every year than what we saw in last year’s “historic” fire season.

Though it’s difficult to parse out historical ignition patterns, we know that Native Californians contributed in significant ways to California’s fire regimes, actively shaping landscapes with fire to sustain their cultures and livelihoods. Some fire scientists estimate that Native Americans may have intentionally burned up to 2 million acres a year. Research from the Sierra Nevada tells us that during periods where people were most actively managing their landscapes, and using fire as a tool, climate fluctuations like drought and extreme temperatures were less likely to influence how fires burned.

However, in the early 1900s, this practice of cultural burning was criminalized when federal and state officials initiated an era of fire suppression. The stated goal was to save trees—to protect forests from the very process that had shaped and maintained them through time. Yet we know now those losses weren’t avoided; rather, by removing fire, the losses were stalled, accentuated. It’s clear that the fires that burn now are making up for generations of missed fire. The more we’ve rejected fire as the natural—and human—process that it is, the more volatile it has become.

During last year’s devastating Slater Fire, Bill Tripp, the deputy director of eco-cultural revitalization for the Karuk Tribe, wrote a powerful op-ed reflecting on his people’s connection with fire, and the federal and state policies and practices that continue to this day to threaten their ecology and culture. Just as the land was taken from the Karuk people, so too was their relationship with fire. Bill explained that Karuk people were shot for burning, even as recently as the 1930s, and he lamented the way that fire continues to be misunderstood and mismanaged:

Fire itself is sacred. It renews life. It shades rivers and cools the water’s temperature. It clears brush and makes for sufficient food for large animals. It changes the molecular structure of traditional food and fiber resources making them nutrient dense and more pliable. Fire does so much more than western science currently understands.

Dominant society has missed the mark this last century or so, trying to make static what is so naturally dynamic. We suppressed fire in the name of the trees, but we forgot about the people and the plants and the landscapes that needed fire, as vital as rain or sunshine or snow. Fire can be deadly, but at its core it’s a force of life—refreshing and renewing.

Now it’s early summer, and those of us who work in fire are bracing for yet another record-breaking season. With a backdrop of extreme heat, drought, and unusually dry vegetation, it’s hard to imagine a different outcome. Fire season feels a lot like turning 40: You’re not sure what—or who—the next loss will be, but you know it’s coming. And knowing doesn’t mean you’re ready.

In my work, I focus on bringing fire back. As a fire advisor, I work with individual landowners, tribes and cultural practitioners, community groups, and agencies to build capacity for prescribed fire—to set intentional fires that provide ecological and social benefits, reducing fire hazard but also restoring wildlife habitat and biodiversity, eradicating invasive species, and restoring landscape and community resilience. The idea is to rebuild the relationship between people and fire, and to empower the kinds of change that might bring us back into balance.

Red catchfly flowering among burnt logs in Forest Glen. Native cultures in California understood that fire renews life. This knowledge influences innovative policies that hope to harness fire to promote healthy ecosystems. Courtesy of Lenya Quinn-Davidson.

One of my biggest priorities is to foster innovation and inclusivity in fire management—to bring new, and often oppressed, perspectives and ideas to these increasingly wicked problems. Diversity begets creativity. To this end, I work with partners to create opportunities for under-represented groups in fire, with a focus on women. Much of my work in this arena is through the Women-in-Fire Training Exchange (WTREX), which is international in scope. Here in California, I also work with local communities to bring fire back as a land management tool, and to promote policies that support and elevate those efforts. I have found that people are desperate for positive connections, both with each other and with fire, and this work is the perfect venue to fill some of those gaps.

Recent years have seen an uprising around prescribed fire—a movement—as we Californians explore and reclaim our role in this fire-adapted state. Community-based burn cooperatives have sprung up across the state, providing training, resources, and inspiration for landowners, volunteer fire departments, and community members. Legislators, too, are working to tackle some of the major barriers to prescribed fire, like liability. We are seeing more commitment, both institutional and financial, by our federal and state agencies, as they try to grow and improve their prescribed fire programs. After more than a decade of working on these issues, I am more heartened than ever by the interest and momentum around prescribed fire. We’re finally seeing that we can choose to fight fire, or we can carry it with us.

When I was a kid, my dad talked about a death dream he’d had. He was falling from a cliff, but unlike most dreams where you awaken before you hit bottom, in this dream my dad actually hit the ground and died. He said it was an explosion of color, bright and warm and welcoming. It wasn’t an end, but the beginning of something different. When he died some years later, I was comforted by that story. I still think of it now, as time brings mortality increasingly into focus.

As I hiked out of Forest Glen that day, I looked across the river and saw a pool of orange in a draw behind a boulder: a thicket of wild tiger lilies. Up the trail, nestled in the blackened logs, were bright red catchflies and clusters of fresh, oily poison oak leaves. In that moment, I knew this place wasn’t dead; it was different than I knew, but it was still alive—growing, changing.

It occurred to me that our landscapes are likely closest to death when we freeze them in time—when our need for the familiar interrupts their need for process, when we inadvertently choose big losses by avoiding all the small ones. The changes in Forest Glen didn’t happen in one day last summer; rather, they’d been brewing over more than a century of fire suppression and forest management. Maybe our job now is to gain a bigger perspective—to learn to love process rather than just place. And maybe 40 is my next small fire, an opportunity to refresh and renew, to unleash new parts of myself as I let go of others. I think I’m ready.

The post The Fires California Grieves—And Needs appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

It was about 3 a.m. on Sunday, Sept. 27, and my husband Tom and I were asleep. My nose twitched and I thought, How odd to smell something burning. I assumed I was dreaming and kept my eyes closed.

Then I heard the wind through the open bedroom window: Whooooooosh, whoooooosh, whoooooosh!

I immediately opened my eyes—a burning scent and a boisterous wind do not a good combination make. I looked out the window and glimpsed the last thing I wanted to see: small embers falling in air. I recognized them as embers because they were orange. An intolerably pretty orange. A color not associated with the darkness of a normal night.

I didn’t yell, only because I didn’t want to accept what I recognized. But I did speak loudly enough to wake my husband: “Fire!” Later, I’d learn that the conflagration had a name—the Glass Fire—that it had started in our neighborhood, and that it was devastating tens of thousands of acres across Northern California’s Napa and Sonoma Valleys.

Tom jabbed the fire alarm buttons. We threw on yesterday’s clothes and rushed out of the bedroom. I stopped in front of the windows overlooking the courtyard when I saw flames perhaps 75 feet away. I was stunned. The hillside facing our house was on fire. Tom sprinted to the front door. He ran outside to turn on the fire suppression system’s sprinklers.

I forced myself to move, running to the basement to grab the cat carriers. We have three dogs and three cats. While the confused dogs remained by my heels, the fire alarm’s reverberating wailing din had sent the cats scurrying to various hiding places.

I looked, but I couldn’t find the cats. I opened the front door and found myself facing flames larger than they’d seemed moments before. I ran across the courtyard yelling for Tom, but the gray smoke filled my mouth, made me cough, and muffled my voice. I had to run back inside the house to breathe.

As I coughed, I mentally exhorted myself: Stay. Calm. Perhaps I would have panicked, but I faced three worried dogs I needed to evacuate: Ajax, Neo, and Nova.

I inhaled, pushed open the front door again, and ran back across the courtyard to the garage.

The flames looked even larger and, offensively, prettier. I backed the car out and pulled up to the front door. I screamed again for Tom—he later told me he’d been watering flames near one end of the house—and when I finally saw him, I shouted, “We have to leave!”

I kept the car running as we both rushed back into the house. Tom scooped up an empty cat carrier and began to look for Tarzan, Addie, and Suki. I was already holding another carrier when Tom suggested I take the dogs and go. He would stay to find the cats, and follow separately in his car.

I paused to look at him. This time, I didn’t just stay calm. I became cold. I assessed the risks while Tom searched the room. I’d turned 60 earlier in the month. Sixty is an interesting number of years—one hopes to live longer, but it also suffices as a full life. I realized that if I expired at that moment, I would have had a great run because of Tom’s contributions to our shared life.

If I left ahead of Tom, I might have a better chance of survival, but I didn’t prefer a life without him. Suddenly, I understood why couples who’d lived long lives together sometimes died in short succession.

Coldly and firmly, I announced, “I am not leaving without you.” I raised my voice and said it again, with a silent apology to the nearby dogs I presumably could save: “I won’t leave without you.”

But though I’d thought to apologize to the dogs, I really should have apologized to the cats whom Tom would not, on his own, have left behind. Forced to choose between his wife and three dogs on one hand and three cats on the other, however, he received a reason not to stay.

We rushed back into the courtyard. Tom helped put the dogs in my car, then ran to the garage to get his car and lead our drive down the winding, one-third-mile road from our house to the gate. As it turned out, I might not have been able to make it on my own. I couldn’t see through the gray, ashy haze. But I could see the dim yellow tail lights on Tom’s car and stuck to him like… well, like white cat fur on a black sweater.

Later, Tom told me he also couldn’t see through the smoke, which was why we crept forward at about one mile per hour despite desperately wanting to rush away. It would have been disastrous for our cars to veer off of the asphalt road cut into the mountain. Tom said he felt the car wheels nearly slip off the edge a few times. He made it down safely, partly through muscle memory and partly because he understood that those of us in the car behind him depended on him.

Tom led us through the gate, and we continued on to the parking lot of our local Safeway. He then told me he was going to return to the house to find the cats and show our fire suppression system to the firefighters, who had converged near our gate at the bottom of the mountain.

This time, I didn’t protest—he would be in the company of well-equipped firefighters. I also understood he needed to make another attempt; it was not in Tom’s character to give up easily.

Tom later returned with the cats. It required half an hour to find them all. Addie had stowed away in a cabinet, Suki had burrowed in a closet, and Tarzan had hidden under bed cushions.

Tom also returned with the depressing news that while our primary residence was safe, our guesthouse had burned down. The “guest house” was actually a library that happened to contain a bed. In this library were critical components of my archives as a writer, poet, artist, editor, and publisher.

The author’s guest house before the Glass Fire. Courtesy of Eileen R. Tabios.

Here are some of the items that burned:

—two decades of notes for, and various false starts on, what will be my first novel, DoveLion, which will be released in 2021;

—about a thousand books, including inventory from Meritage Press, a literary and arts publisher I created in 2001;

—the entire series of The Asian Pacific American Journal, for which I was editor in the 1990s;

—nine personal diaries focused on encounters I had with poets and artists, including original work by some of them, like a bird drawing by the late poet Philip Lamantia, scribbled over lunch at a cafe near City Lights in San Francisco;

—drawings, small sculptures, and photographs from my poetry performance, and exhibitions related to my project “Poems For/From the Six Directions”; and

—copies of and correspondences for Black Lightning, a book I’d edited that is significant for being the first anthology of Asian American poets detailing and discussing the progress of poems from first to last drafts.

There was more, as well, in my library’s six floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and dozen four-foot-wide file cabinets. Recalling my library’s contents, I realize again that Tom has given me a great life, but so has another love: the love for, thereby the love of, poetry.

We (like other evacuees) have not yet found housing for the months ahead; it will take time to address the toxic aftermath of what’s burned and make our property livable again. We are temporarily in San Francisco. As I write, Tom is on the phone dealing with the insurance company and contractors for rebuilding. At our feet lie three sleeping dogs, and on the bed three sleeping cats.

The Glass Fire still burns, and our house—with even more books and archives—remains at risk. But looking around, my legs itching from wearing the same pair of jeans in which I fled the fires five days ago, I am moved by how much that has formed my life has been love—making me even more thankful and humbled to be alive. No wonder everything I write is fueled by love—a love that burns hotter than fire.

The post A Letter From Napa Valley, Where Love Burns Hotter Than Fire appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The deaths and damage of this year’s Wine Country wildfires are a historic disaster. They are also the product of an epic California success.

That triumph is the growth of the wine industry, which has come to dominate our state’s land, culture, and image. Indeed, it’s now outdated to refer to the burning stretches of Napa and Sonoma counties as California’s Wine Country. The truth is that the whole state is Wine Country. And these awful fires—and the hotter fires that are to come as the climate heats up—will only make it more so.

Californians frequently fight over water, but we famously connect through wine. It’s a passion and pursuit that binds together rural and urban, business and labor, Hollywood and Silicon Valley (both of whose stars dabble in it), and rich and poor (we produce both $3,499.97 Screaming Eagle varietals and the $2.99 Charles Shaw wines they sell at Trader Joe’s). Wine is at once an export that defines us to the world (only three nations on earth—France, Italy and Spain—produce more wine than we do), and our leading home remedy, the best available balm for a state that dramatically inspires the sweetest of dreams and the most bitter of disappointments.

California is a state of disaster, and where there is disaster, you will find wine close by. Over the past 40 years, wine has boomed not only in Northern California—from 25 Napa Valley wineries in 1975 to more than 400 in Napa and Sonoma counties—but also in the Central Coast, the Central Valley, the Sierra Foothills, and even Southern California’s the Inland Empire. Much of this growth has come at the edges of cities and towns, in the space between human development and our wilder lands.

These are the places where California’s wildfires rage, and so the success of wine has lured many more people to live in more risky places. This era’s giant blazes have hit all our wine countries. In addition to the awful scale and human carnage of the Napa and Sonoma fires, multiple wildfires this summer did damage to the Central Coast, including its vineyards and wineries. And the current fires are only the latest disaster that wine has endured in California. Wine, like a vampire, has taken what might be mortal blows, such as droughts and depressions and Prohibition, and kept coming back stronger.

The history of wine in California is a century older than the state itself, and touches almost all of our most revered figures. California’s saint, Junipero Serra, had vineyards planted in the missions he founded in the 18th century. Los Angeles was originally a wine country (“The City of Vines” was an L.A. nickname of the 19th century), and the Napa Valley’s origins as a wine producer coincide with the Gold Rush.

By the late 19th century, wine was a major California export. And while wine is often seen as an artisanal exception to California’s newer industries, it actually established the template for the culture and economy that produced aerospace, movies, and software: People from all over the world bring their ideas and technologies to California, where they spin them together into new products that are then exported back to the world.

Long before there were tech incubators and venture capitalists, Californians were innovating with wine. Alfred Tubbs traveled to France in the 1880s to get important vine cuttings. Back here, he was among the first to plant root stocks that were resistant to Phylloxera, the disease that once destroyed Europe’s vineyards. If the name sounds familiar, it’s because the Tubbs Fire—named for its suspected origin near Tubbs Lane in Calistoga—was one of the major blazes destroying wide swaths of the Wine Country last week.

California also popularized wine as it did so many other products. In the second half of the 20th century, Robert Mondavi made wine the drink of the middle class, replacing bourbon and scotch, and soon every nook and cranny of space had a few vines. Now many Californians make their own, growing the grapes in their yards and stomping on them in their garages.

California has privileged wine to a degree that might embarrass your local aristocrat. Our state is famous for its high taxes, but makes an exception for wine. Our taxes on alcohol, a legacy of a powerful 20th-century liquor lobby, are so much lower here that Californians have gotten used to getting great wine at low prices—a bit of the Golden State’s largesse in every bottle. (In California, a $10 bottle of wine is pretty good. In the rest of the country it’s pink supermarket swill.)

In the aftermath of the fires, wine’s exalted status may come under pressure. Before the blazes, there had been conflict between wineries and their local governments and residential neighbors. Wineries often see housing development as encroaching on their land. Homeowners and local governments have complained about the traffic and noise that comes with the thousands of winery events and the 24 million tourists who visit the Northern California Wine Country each year.

Perhaps the tragedy of the fires will inspire new collaborations and smart, resilient planning to buffer wineries and houses. But if the fires create more limits on where structures—be they wineries or houses—can be built, more conflict is inevitable. The wine industry could also see internal turmoil and ultimately consolidation, as newer or smaller players, facing the high costs of rebuilding and insurance, sell out to bigger players. But look for wine to emerge stronger and win most of the battles—Californians like their wine more than they like other people’s houses.

The Wine Country fires reflect the unpredictability and cruelty of nature—amplified by any number of human failings in managing our environment. The fires will rightfully force a reassessment of those failings, at least for a while.

But human beings only can handle so much misery, at least by themselves. Eventually, we gather with others and reach for the bottle. And then, as has been practice since an ancient supper described in the Gospel of Matthew, the wine “is poured out to forgive the sins of many.”

The post All California Is Wine Country—and the Wildfires Make It More So appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The images are gripping. Horizons glow with satanic reds squishing through black and bluish clouds, as though the sky itself were bruised and bleeding. Foregrounds bristle with scorched neighborhoods still drifting with smoke and streams of frightened refugees, a scene more commonly associated with war zones.

But we’ve seen this before. Big fires are big fires, and one pyrocumulus can look pretty much like another. Communities with homes burned to concrete slabs, molten hulks of what once were cars alongside roads, surrounding forests mottled with black and green— these are becoming commonplaces.

What strikes me most about those Fort McMurray images making their way down from western Canada is the mashup of foreground and background, the collision of free-burning flames with a fossil-fuel powered society. The first form of burning dates back to the early Devonian, when life first colonized the continents. The second tracks the Anthropocene, when humanity changed its combustion habits and wrenched the Earth into a new order. At places like Fort McMurray the deep past and the recent present of fire on Earth rush together with almost Shakespearean urgency.
 

***

 
The plot is old, the stage setting and cast of players updated.

Monster fires are no stranger in the boreal forest. It’s a fire-ravenous biota that burns in stand-replacing patches. This is not a landscape where misguided fire suppression has upset the rhythms of surface burning and catapulted flames into the canopy. They’ve always been in the canopy and everything has adapted accordingly. White and black spruce and jack pine and aspen experience exactly the kind of fire they require.

How big those patches get depends on how dry the fuel is, how brisk the winds, and how extensive the forest. In northern Alberta there is not much to break a full-throated wildfire. The Chinchaga fire started on June 1, 1950, and burned across northeastern British Columbia and most of Alberta until October 31, a total of 3 million acres.

Nor is a burning city a novelty. In North America the wave of settlement in the 18th and 19th centuries paralleled a wave of fire. The surrounding lands were disturbed, and frequently alight with both controlled and uncontrolled fires. The towns were built of wood—basically, reconstituted forests. The same conditions that propelled fires through the landscape pushed them through towns.

Only a century ago did those urban conflagrations finally quell as urbanites turned to less combustible materials; fire codes and zoning regulations organized buildings in ways that discouraged spreading flames; fire services acquired the mechanical muscle to halt blazes early; and the wave of settlement flattened. Over the past century it’s taken earthquakes or wars to overcome these reforms in modern cityscapes, and unleash widespread conflagrations.

Meanwhile, a broadly rural scene morphed and polarized into an urban frontier of wildlands and cities that faced one another without intervening buffers. The middle, working landscapes, like the middle, working classes, shriveled at the expense of the favored extremes. In 1986 the term wildland-urban interface appeared. It was a clumsy, dumb phrase, but it referred to a dumb problem. Watching houses, and then communities burn was like watching polio or plague return. This was a problem we had solved, then forgot to—or chose not to—continue the vaccinations and hygiene that had halted their terrors.

Initially, the problem appeared a California pathology. But it soon broke out of quarantine and has spread across western North America. The prevailing narrative held that the problem was stupid Westerners building houses where there were fires. Most of the vulnerable communities, however, are in the Southeastern U.S., and if climate change modelers are correct, we will see the fires moving to where the houses are. That will make it a national narrative. In truth, the problem is international, each country with its own quirky combination of fire-quickening factors. Mediterranean France, Portugal, Greece, South Africa, and Australia are experiencing similar outbreaks. North America has no monopoly over catastrophic conflagrations.

It’s tempting to appeal to climate change as the common cause. Yet the burning bush and scorched town are joined not just by global climate change, but by a global economy, and a global commitment to fossil-fuel firepower. That makes the issue both more pervasive and, paradoxically, more amenable to treatment. It means that, while there is one grand prime mover, there are many levers and gears. Fire is a reaction that takes its character from its context. It’s a driverless car barreling down the road, synthesizing everything around it.

The enduring images of the Fort Mac fire may, in fact, be its cars. Car-propelled flight, cars stranded for lack of gas, cars melted in garages, evacuation convoys halted due to 60 meter flames, relief convoys laden with gasoline. It isn’t only what comes out of the tailpipe that matters, but how those vehicles have organized human life in the boreal. The engagement (or not) with the surrounding bush. The kind of land use that cars encourage. The kind of industry that must develop to support those cars. The kind of city that such an industry needs to sustain it. The oil sand industry that has shaped the contours of modern Fort McMurray is in turn shaped by the internal-combusting society it feeds.

So there are really two fires burning around and into Fort McMurray. One burns living landscapes. The other burns lithic landscapes, which is to say, biomass buried and turned to stone in the geologic past. The two fires compete: one or the other triumphs. At any place the transition may take years, even decades, but where the industrial world persists its closed combustion will substitute for or suppress the open flames of ecosystems. The wholesale transition from the realm of living fire to that of lithic fire may stand as a working definition of the Anthropocene. Once parted they rarely meet.

At Fort McMurray they have collided with unblinking brutality. Wild fire burned away controlled fire. The old fires have forced the power plants behind the new ones to shut down and their labor force to flee. It’s like watching an open pit mine consume the town that excavates it. It’s tempting to regard the incident as a one-off, a freak of a remote landscape and a historical moment. But those collisions are becoming more frequent.

That’s not the deep worry, however. The deep horror is that the two fires may be moving from competition into collusion. They are creating positive feedback of a sort that makes more fire. Those images of fire on fire are the raw footage of a planetary phase change, what might end up as a geologic era we could call the Pyrocene. They will continue until, as Shakespeare put it, they “consume the thing that feeds their fury.”

Disaster is not always tragedy, and Fort McMurray and the industrial complex behind it may well escape lethal consequences. So if Shakespeare seems too elevated, consider Edna St Vincent Millay.

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

We have in truth been burning both ends of our combustion candle, and if its light seems more lurid than lovely, there are yet texts to be read in the awful splendor of its illumination.

The post Canada’s Fort McMurray Wildfire Highlights the Trouble with Fighting Fire with Fire appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.