You said post-apocalypse
Jul. 13th, 2023 12:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormbut this is apocalypse itself:
the air the colour of creamsicles
thick as porridge
obscuring the mountains
and even nearby cars.
this is apocalypse itself:
ash sifting down
whitening my truck in the mornings
and snowing on my hair
as I water my garden.
this is apocalypse itself:
eyes stinging over the dubious
air sucking through my mask
and the hammer of annihilated trees
hitting my lungs with every door opened.
this is apocalypse itself
as it is in story
as it is in song
as it is in paintings:
sun orange through an orange sky at noon
fire everywhere
and only dust underfoot.
***
Thoughts on looking at an evacuation alert near my home
So many years we didn't even realize we weren't winning
Secure in our delusion as a dominant species.
We thought we could control the trees because we could cut them down
Thought we could control the water because we could put up dams
Thought we had dominion over animals because we could kill them.
On our maps everything was known, and was ours.
We make new maps now.
Where once we had roads, boundaries, ownership by this or that person
Now we have lands we have surrendered.
Orange and red crawl across the roads, across forests, obscuring them
From our ways of controlling. They seize back control
With each lick of flame, each curl of smoke, pushing and pushing
Until our maps give way.
There be monsters, the maps say,
As they did before, this land is no man's. Fire, drought, flood:
Now who controls the trees by killing? Who holds back the water from falling? Who devours the animals?
We surrender to the supremacy of the monsters
As we once did
So we do again
And again
And again
With our new maps washed in red.
the air the colour of creamsicles
thick as porridge
obscuring the mountains
and even nearby cars.
this is apocalypse itself:
ash sifting down
whitening my truck in the mornings
and snowing on my hair
as I water my garden.
this is apocalypse itself:
eyes stinging over the dubious
air sucking through my mask
and the hammer of annihilated trees
hitting my lungs with every door opened.
this is apocalypse itself
as it is in story
as it is in song
as it is in paintings:
sun orange through an orange sky at noon
fire everywhere
and only dust underfoot.
***
Thoughts on looking at an evacuation alert near my home
So many years we didn't even realize we weren't winning
Secure in our delusion as a dominant species.
We thought we could control the trees because we could cut them down
Thought we could control the water because we could put up dams
Thought we had dominion over animals because we could kill them.
On our maps everything was known, and was ours.
We make new maps now.
Where once we had roads, boundaries, ownership by this or that person
Now we have lands we have surrendered.
Orange and red crawl across the roads, across forests, obscuring them
From our ways of controlling. They seize back control
With each lick of flame, each curl of smoke, pushing and pushing
Until our maps give way.
There be monsters, the maps say,
As they did before, this land is no man's. Fire, drought, flood:
Now who controls the trees by killing? Who holds back the water from falling? Who devours the animals?
We surrender to the supremacy of the monsters
As we once did
So we do again
And again
And again
With our new maps washed in red.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-14 06:00 pm (UTC)i can also report real hope from the other side of having survived decades of bad fire seasons - we've been having "worst ever fires" roughly annually in this region since at least 2001 - the Horseshoe Fire in the Apache Sitegreaves NF in Arizona, which coated Albuquerque (~300 miles away) in ash for weeks - it was a terrible fire, and at the time the worst one Arizona had ever seen. i drive through that old burn scar almost every year when i visit my mom. and, it's forested again. it's not the same forest at all. the third- or fourth-growth post-logging ponderosa overstory will probably never come back, as climate change has made those hills too warm to comfortably accomodate a thick ponderosa forest. but - it's full of elder, gambol oak, locust, scrub oak, juniper, pinon and wildlife of so many kinds - it's green and growing, and more biodiverse than it was when it burned.
it takes a long time, and it hurts to watch. in the burn scar of the enormous 2013 Thompson Ridge fire in the Jemez Mountains here in NM, the aspen forest is simply gone; everything *but* aspens is returning. again with the too-warm now. but the *forest* as an entity is healing really well, strong and healthy and biodiverse and full of wildlife.
it took every one of those ten years for it to feel like that. i feel for your forests.
no subject
Date: 2023-07-15 02:48 am (UTC)Our forestry practices up here (until the pine beetle and salvage logging) were theoretically modelled on natural burns: clearcuts were supposed to mimic fires on the landscape, creating a patchwork and renewing the land while we kept big fires away. Our cut level was based on the natural disturbance cycle of each specific ecosystem: does it come back frequently, or not? How big? So I've been working within that framework of patchwork renewal (and the natural disturbance regime had some pretty big patches! Unlike ponderosa forests which historically are evolved for lots of smaller underfires, this area was adapted to burn absolutely to the ground in big swathes, which is why we did big clearcuts here). I've seen what a cut or a burn looks like after one year, five years, ten years (which is about how long it takes young pines to get over your head here), twenty years, forty years, even sixty years though those are scarce because we haven't been logging here all that long. I do assessments for the species that live in disturbances and on edges. My emotions aren't about aesthetics or the really common sense that forests should be unchanging.
As a forester it's my professional responsibility to keep on top of climate modelling. We decide which trees to plant where based on future climates already. I know those forests will never be the same because I've seen both cautious and extreme predictions for them. In many places we're already fighting to have trees return at all rather than grasslands. And that's not what most of my emotions are about either.
As a forester I've been made aware of the long-range fire forecasts for the sub-boreal and the boreal they shade into, these forests I live in that circle the top of the world and are largely the same here, on the other side of the continent, and across a big strip of Russia. When the biggest fire year since 1950 was in 2018, and this year has already surpassed that-- I know it isn't going away. When we look at management and tracking of species that need undisturbed areas, those species are going away. Extinction is hard, but it's not really what the fire evokes in me either.
Humanity's recent history is based on a very stable environment and climate -- recent as in, within the last couple generations. We've managed to build a system that relies on that stability, and it's gone. Like a small population with a genetic bottleneck, it looks like it's alive but it's just an illusion. Like the spotted owl or the northern goshawk, most folks think that if a little of the form is there the substance must also be.
It is not. There's no foundation. And these fires will get bigger, on average, over the decades. They'll burn more land, on average, each year. There's no climate modelling that refutes that. We're trying to turn to controlled burning which was the technology the indigenous folks used here to stop megafires when megafauna stopped eating the vegetation after the ice age, but that does require a species change and may not work for very long.
We see, for instance, metasequoia everywhere in the fossil record and then it was gone to a small pocket of china. It's not unlikely the boreal and sub-boreal will meet that fate, and that's sad, because I love them and they span the world. But.
All that said, and it is all important, to me apocalypse is a human construct applied primarily to human interactions with the environment, whether that environment is plants or microbes or temperature. It's an ending, whether or not we scrabble through and survive. And we are at that end. We just don't want to believe it yet.
...this writing is my personal view and does not reflect the views of my employer or any body with which I am affiliated. :P
no subject
Date: 2023-07-15 06:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-07-15 05:23 pm (UTC)yes! and thank you for clarifying, too! i understood that i had touched an interest on which you have a lot of knowledge to share! I'll reply in more depth later - I'm away from the computer for a couple days now