Conflagration

If fire is an apt metaphor for any given species, humans are in some trouble. Fire is a verb-noun combination that has mixed connotations, depending on its intensity and fuel source. Squirrels seem to find cars and hard winters often enough to keep burning pretty steadily, and mammoths were classically drenched by people. Even locusts seem to see their burning in check – there are only so many fields within hopping distance from any horde. Ants are always burning medium-hot underground; a little bit like lava but mostly without the eruptions. But humans are an electrical fire and a grease fire bundled up together. Every landscape, food source, underground mineral – none can escape the leaping, searing incineration of the wildfire of the eon. No amount of rain can slow this burn. Humans are on track to pull a 2020 California fire season on the whole world, and it’s not just the trees that are going to burn. It’s a little confusing there, because humans are the analogous fires that started the California fires, and those are actual fires. Keep up. Maybe the human fire will run out of fuel. But, Malthus has not been even close to right yet. It’s appropriate then that the climate change be a heating up. Humans’ literal and metaphorical flames are licking at the atmosphere, daring the great vacuum of space to try to cool them down. Space does not seem to be obliging and the sun doesn’t seem to be getting any further away. What would a forestry manager do with a blaze on such a scale? Well, clearly some of the fires are too intense to even fly helicopters over with suppressant. So it’s a matter of digging ditches and creating blockades to try to keep the fire from spreading too much more (looking at you, American firestorm). Containment is the measure. This fire is probably about zero percent contained today. Humans certainly wouldn’t want to contain their fire one hundred percent – that would be the end of the line. Maybe 30% containment is a reasonable goal. The flames will probably lick out to any flammable materials in the solar system within the next two hundred years if the fire doesn’t totally burn itself out. So building better fireplaces (more effective corporate regulation, for example), preventing fire’s spread where it doesn’t belong (ocean pollution), and turning down the heat across the map (economic ungrowth as a positive goal) would be good places to start. Maybe fire isn’t an apt metaphor, but I’m not ready to give up and pronounce us a disease.