For the past 100 years the US Forest Service has maintained a policy of “fire suppression” to “protect human life, property, and at risk land and resources.”
The unintended consequence of this interdiction policy has been to deprive forests and wild-lands of the beneficial role that fire provides in maintaining the long-term health and integrity of ecological systems. This beneficial role, simply put, is the elimination of weak, superfluous and undesirable elements accumulated within the system as a natural product of growth and competition.
The suppression of fire, eventually, not only compromises the vitality of the forest’s natural immune system, it also produces the conditions most amiable to absolute catastrophe.
Generally speaking, a wild-fire “sweeps through” an area eliminating debris collected on the forest floor and the less-healthy constituents of the ecological system that lack the necessary vitality to survive a vigorous challenge to their integrity, but leaves healthy, mature trees standing. In turn, the healthy trees thrive, produce quality offspring and the cycle repeats itself.
Historically, as a general rule, wild fires rarely achieved the intensity required to produce “crowning fires.” A crowning fire is characterized by an intensity of heat sufficient to destroy everything in its path.
Crowning fires occur in areas that either have an inordinate amount of debris (fuel) accumulated on the forest floor to feed the fire once started or an unusually high proportion of unhealthy trees in a given stand. An active crowning fire sounds like a war zone, as mature trees are completely engulfed in flames, they literally erupt into a blaze of fire, thus contributing even more heat to the raging inferno. Rather than “sweeping through” an area on the forest floor, the fire becomes utterly destructive of everything in its path.
The unintended consequence of the US Forest Service policy of fire suppression is a dramatic increase in the number and intensity of fires, resulting in unprecedented levels of resource destruction, deteriorating forests, and exasperating the conditions that ensure this trend will continue well into the foreseeable future. We are presently in a cycle where each successive year sets new records for resource destruction, with no end in sight.
For the past 30 years the US Federal Reserve has utilized “monetary policy” to “manage” the “corrections” that are an integral part of the economic cycle. An economy is a complex system just as wild-lands are complex ecological systems. The unintended consequence of the Federal Reserve’s interdiction in the economic cycle in the form of monetary policy is evidenced by the deterioration of the integrity and vitality of the constituents of the economic system; producers and consumers alike.
Our government may continue its policy of “stimulating the economy” through tax cuts and spending, or trying to “help” home owners, and “preserve” jobs, and “rescuing” institutions that are “too big to fail” and buying “toxic” assets, but none of this will produce a healthy economy, nor will it eliminate the requirement of dealing with the eventual consequences of such policy.
Like it or not, the big burn is coming, and if we hope to survive it intact, we had better deal with it now rather than later.
Related Reading
- The Origin of Financial Crises: Central Banks, Credit Bubbles, and the Efficient Market Fallacy
- Agenda for a New Economy
- The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
- When Corporations Rule the World
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