The Fire Next Time

 Fire Season?

Up in the woods of northern Minnesota the snow is almost gone. The lake ice is soft, the creeks and rivers opening up. It's all early. Take a look at a webcam in Ely, just south of the Boundary Waters canoe area and the Canadian border. Mostly bare grass and soil in the open. Its the same across most of Minnesota. There has been one real snow all winter in Minneapolis. My fellow motorcyclists are out and riding. The rinks are shut, the ice fishing done, the skiers and snow-boarders frustrated, the snowmobilers humiliated, the children without a sled. Perhaps a big, wet snow will still be coming, but don't bet on it. There are several days of light rain / flurries in the forecast for the Cities so there's that.

Fort McMurray, Canada fire - 2016

Instead 'ice rescues' have strained the budgets of northern counties. One ridiculous event saw dozens stranded on a floating ice shelf that detached from the lake shore. Heavy pickups venturing out on lakes have taken an ice dive. Contractors who plow by the event are unpaid, except for the smart ones that demanded money up front. City budgets for sand and plow truck gasoline stand full, while heating bills are lower. Every day in March is predicted to be above freezing, in the 40s and 50s. Minnesota was 2.7F (1.5C) hotter this winter, breaking every record. The Great Lakes are at a 1.2% ice coverage now, with a winter average this year of 5.6%. That's it.

Chris Hedges has an excellent interview on Scheerpost about the tragic fire in Fort McMurray, northern Alberta in May, 2016. Fort McMurray is near the wasteland of the toxic tar sands' 'oil' project, which is a massive bitumen strip mine, the biggest carbon bomb in north America. The woods around town caught on fire due to a long, dry drought and burnt down most of the city. You don't hear much about it now. Every wooded area in north America that has not had heavy snow this year – and there are many in the center and east of North America - will face this same fire problem in the spring, summer and fall. In fact the forecast for 2024 is for a hotter, drier year. Now check the wind speeds and you've got a problem.

So what are your fire preparations if you live or spend time in the woods, even if you are in a town? Or if you are downwind from choking fires? What happens if the roads are blocked by fire, fallen trees, power lines or traffic? If there is a body of water, can you get onto it quickly? Do you have powerful hoses to water down your building? A metal roof? Have you thinned the small trees around your exurban or 'wild-urban interface' structure? Is there gasoline or propane stored in your house, apartment, garage or side building? Is your home a carbon bomb waiting to go off: tar shingles, vinyl siding and windows, floor laminates, a gas stove, furnace and water heater, plastic water pipes, carbon-woven textiles & carpets, or full of plastic products? No?

Texas Panhandle 2024.  Not just the cows burned

What is happening is that fires, drought, tornadoes, hurricanes, storms, ground-water depletion and flooding are causing insurance rates to rise steeply in areas like Florida and California, and this is spreading across the country. The Fort McMurray fire cost $6B in insurance costs, the largest in Canadian history. Much of that was covered by the Canadian taxpayer – the government – as private 'insurance' only went so far. In the U.S. small and medium insurers go bankrupt on a semi-regular basis as disasters overwhelm their capital. Others no longer even offer insurance in some places or raise rates so high people have to move or go unprotected. If your structure is heavily damaged or destroyed, there is no going back in that situation. Well, there is always the land left to put up a tent.

So the dark 'spark' for a social revolution looks more and more like it will be the capitalist carbon industry. Carbon extends beyond oil, gas or coal to house construction, cement making, artificial fertilizer, the plastics and rubber industry, insecticides, many retail products and packaging, road surfaces, meat, fish and dairy, even drugs and cosmetics – just about every sector of the economy. (https://energyneresources.com/blog/list-of-products-made-from-petroleum) Present-day capitalism is mostly based on carbon. The hidden exploitation of surplus value produced by every worker is less obvious, though visibly seen in the growing inequality throughout the world. Environmental disasters are more obvious. The rise of authoritarianism is the outgrowth of this capitalist inequality and it's class structure, much as some just want to blame 'bad' people. You want 'democracy?' Capital is actually incompatible with it.

Green capitalism is inadequate to deal with the dominant, market-driven carbon force. The environmental crisis is the most obvious fact that reveals capital functions only for profit, no matter what impact it has on the community or on nature. At the same time the 'pleasure,' comfort and ease of carbon is a massive weight for stasis, as our social lives will be completely different after the main sources of carbon are slowed and reduced to a minimum. Just look at the many who can't reduce meat consumption because of 'taste.'  The market is keyed to the mass carbon dynamic and it can't change. Nor can its political parties and its '2-Party System,' which in the U.S. are both capitalist - something also true in most of the world. This is the reason no 'COP #' run by governments controlled by capital will ever make a real difference.

A transitional program for eco-socialism is the solution that will actually 'work.' The problem is that many people seek pleasure primarily and will object to their lives being made more difficult in the ways of consumerism. Even though after a transition they will be better off in all the ways that matter most – work, health, housing, family, time, education, environment, social health, peace, creativity, psychology, retirement, crime - some things will become more difficult or unavailable. “Fully-automated luxury communism” is a mirage, though it does hint at something in the future.

Heat Map of the U.S. this Winter

Every product will be evaluated for its environmental, health and social impact, as many buildings, products and foods produced now are junk, while replacements are still aborning. Jobs that are useless will disappear. High-end products for the wealthy – yachts, jets, sports cars, multiple homes, expensive jewelry - will disappear. Wasteful adult 'toys' will disappear or be limited. Society will become more rational and less impulsive, with less fetishes, less violence, less mental illness, less nonsense, less bullshit. Yet this will probably happen only after a long period of environmental disasters, human migration and bloody conflict as defenders of the social order lay waste to any forces that oppose them. In that context consumerist mania will be far weaker and the least of our problems. A 'fire sale' will see to that.

Meanwhile we have to adjust, 'adapt' and deal with the shattering impacts. Enjoy the warm winter if you are not an outdoor enthusiast because the payback is coming. Farmers will be experiencing drought. Fires are in the offing. Smoke will fill the air. Houses will burn and animals will die, as they did in Texas. The world will change and not yet for the better.

P.S. - The Guardian on the recent Texas fire in the cattle-filled Panhandle: Texas Panhandle Fire

P.P.S. - 3/18 Star Tribune on Superior National Forest wildfire risk this year in MN - https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/other/lack-of-snow-intensifies-wildfire-risk-in-superior-national-forest/ar-BB1k2z8D

More:  MinnPost on fire risk in MN, WI, MI, NE - https://www.minnpost.com/other-nonprofit-media/2024/03/from-minnesota-to-nebraska-midwest-states-face-early-wildfire-season/

May Day Books has many volumes on the environmental crisis, from Left and liberal angles.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms: “Collapse" (Diamond); "Native Tongue" (Hiaasen); "Tar Sands," "Climate Emergency," "Planning Green Growth," "The Robbery of Nature" (Foster); "We're Doomed," "Reflections on the Environment and Consumerism," "Vanishing Face of Gaia" (Lovelock); "Anthropocene or Capitalocene?" "A Redder Shade of Green," "How to Blow Up a Pipeline" (Malm); "The Sixth Extinction," "x," "Mad Max - Fury Road."  

The Cultural Marxist

March 17, 2024