Toxic Cultural Biases Must Challenged. Toxic Norms Must Be Dismantled.

Welcome back, readers!

Please remember to wear person protective equipment when the air quality is unhealthy. I wear an N95 during wildfire season and don’t feel the slightest bit ashamed. I’m keeping my young lungs as unpolluted and free of PM10 and PM2.5 (particulate matter 10 microns across or 2.5 microns across, respectively) as is technologically feasible. Remember: PM2.5 can lodge deep in our blood vessels, creating or exacerbating heart disease and other cardiovascular ailments. Protection from smoke and viruses, in one low-tech mask! Astonishing!

            It’s worth it to use this article as an opportunity to look at resource management through a cultural lens. Don’t get me wrong, science and capitalism have allowed us to exponentially advance while achieving average standards of living better than kings and queens experienced a hundred years ago. There are numerous benefits to learning using the scientific method, specifically that hypotheses can be tested, disproven, and refined as a result of observation and experimentation, and that scientific lines of inquiry can be conducted by anyone. Science and mathematics are not limited by language or nationality.

But here’s the catch: science is limited and narrow. It is an anthropocentric pedagogy that originated in Europe and is still currently dominated by men. Scientific studies can sometimes be biased because the scientists, the flawed human beings collecting, interpreting, and reporting data, are often operating in a larger system or cultural perspective that is itself biased. Similarly, capitalism’s fatal flaw is its extractive perspective toward all available resources, often over-consuming in its “efficiency” and producing massive amounts of waste when the resources cannot glean a profit.

Megafires are a timely example. For tens of thousands of years, indigenous peoples of these mountains (the Wintu, Chimariko, and Hupa, to name a few) viewed themselves as part of the landscape, working with nature to maximize ecological productivity. These peoples intentionally set small, controlled fires to keep the underbrush from growing too dense, increasing open meadow space for grazing ungulates and maintaining large, healthy carbon-sequestering trees with ample space between them. Fires were frequent and well-managed, informed with the knowledge that lightning strikes and resulting fires were commonplace.

The Gold Rush changed everything. Western thought trained European colonizers to look at the forest system as separate from humanity, a commodity, as land upon which to grow more lumber and paper products. When miners stampeded through these hills, they also massacred indigenous peoples. State-sanctioned militias wreaking terror and bloodshed, slaughtering the original inhabitants of this land. It’s estimated that only a few thousand Wintun people survive today, when there had been more than 100,000 living here.

With the native peoples shot nearly to extinction, forest managers and loggers at the turn of the century could abandon the practice of prescribed burning and allow the forest to grow thick, dense, and unruly. More trees to cut! More profit, of course! But now we can see the full effect of USFS mismanagement full-suppression tactics for the last 100-120 years, the result of our insatiable greed for timber, smothering the landscape. Our white ancestors were biased. They were so focused on drawing monetary value from the forests, so centered on inflicting a consumptive society’s desired outcomes in a futile effort to tame nature to serve our narrow needs, that we are now grappling with the massive, overwhelming consequences of ugly, genocidal, abusive history.

Some folks will scream out, “Critical Race Theory!” while reading this article, but I don’t care! Being unable to face the darkest chapters of our past, the crimes committed against disenfranchised groups, the terror and trauma inflicted, and being unable to learn to never repeat those atrocities only signals intellectual immaturity and emotional stunting. Just look at us now! Just look at the ridiculous, violent culture war compelling right-wing MAGA extremists to threaten civil war, threaten the lives of their fellow Americans. Those who ignore the past and refuse to consider systems in all of their complexity are the ones driving the machines and fires of mass death.

Nationalism is believing your country is by default the greatest. Patriotism is believing it could be.

I will never stop writing persuasively in pursuit of a more perfect union.