Ok, but work
Aug. 30th, 2023 09:43 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI think I'm figuring out that work right now is really emotionally intense.
It's an intense fire season in North America. I'd say historic, but it's actually ahistoric: this is the worst on record by a significant amount for both area and intensity of fires. I've been talking for years about global warming to ecosystem change and now the tactical-level science is coming out: "regeneration failure" (the forest doesn't recover into a forest, or at least not a similarly-functioning ecosystem) is influenced in the short term by the intensity of fires, so if we can keep the intensity of fires low we can keep our forests closer to how they were for a little while longer, until climate change more fully catches up with species range.
I'm never sure that's a great goal, to preserve what was there. On the other hand humans have a terrible track record of deliberately intervening in ecosystems. Our culture is particularly bad: two that came into conversation this morning were "stream cleaning" (straightening a stream and removing all woody debris from it to help salmon populations, turns out that's counterproductive) and national parks (removing indigenous people, preventing indigenous practices, and doing fire suppression all to make a "natural" state which it turns out creates megafires and other large-disturbance issues). On the other hand we cannot pretend we have not and are not intervening in everything -- that's why it's the anthropocene -- and so we have a responsibility to do those interventions in as thoughtful, research-driven, and future-based ways as possible.
We cannot do nothing, that's not in our power, so throwing up our hands and pretending that what we normally do is "nothing" and that anything we haven't done before is overreach is disingenuous. So I think we need to be very active and do deliberate interventions, but carefully and at hopefully non-disastrous scale.
In this context I'm one of a handful of land managers with jurisdiction over one of the larger chunks of actively and structurally/deliberately managed land there is. Canada has a huge proportion of "crown land", land managed by the state. It is of course complicated: there are many players, including indigenous people who are having their rights slowly re-enshrined; settlers who also live on the landscape; government groups of many kinds, including those tasked with increasing carbon, wildlife, firesmarting, biodiversity, recreation, and housing; large and small industry; people who have never been to this area or to the country but who feel strongly about management in different ways; and groups that overlap those categories.
(I am sitting in my chair at the office at work and trying to formula this while the room literally feels like it's spinning around me, I may have to come back to it).
The state's inclination is to move cautiously and to include careful discussion and many stakeholders, possibly now leaning towards finding ways to prioritize indigenous input, and it's a big slow machine. Indigenous inclination is varied, since these are varied groups of people with varied types of governance and varying opinions, much like any group, but culture, power, comfort, and safety play into their motivations. Settlers on the landscape are also varied but tend to fall into two groups: transients and people with deep attachment, though those groups aren't exactly always separate, and many of them value access to the land. Industry has a variety of hands but at heart is driven by shareholder value over the short term, usually quarterly. People who aren't from here quite honestly I'm pretty bitter about some days, but esthetics and simplicity of narrative play into their desires.
My personal, western-educated and paganism-animism-informed preferences don't significantly align with many of those folks pre-discussion. I sit much more in the rewilding and novel ecosystems camp than most typical environmentalists, but I'm also much more cautious and less one-size-fits-all than many of the new tech-based environmentalists or industry. I'm significantly more pro-science than some indigenous groups, and pretty much more pro-humans-on-the-landscape (including indigenous and settlers) than nearly anyone. But I'm also deeply in favour of the kind of education and contact indigenous folks promote. And there's a bunch more I could say there.
But in the end my formal job is to consider perspectives and align with the laws. The laws are somewhat contradictory, for instance now that we've adopted UNDRIP there's active contradiction between typical practice, legislation, and direction from folks with various forms of enshrined and/or functional power. Making anything harder for anyone with power is frowned upon but can be done with care and skill.
It all makes me wish I could still think and write clearly. It might be worth figuring out accommodations for speech-to-text at work if I actually want to dig into this.
But I'm not sure how much I do or can dig into it. I'm more aware of what the next fifty years will look like on the landscape than almost anyone, but it's just as difficult for me as it is for anyone else to live with that knowledge of change. Your personal relationships are very likely to outlive your relationships to the ecosystems you know, though some level of normalizing will help shield you from awareness of that. If there's a set of ecosystem relationships you're attached to, especially the further north you live (warming happens faster at high latitudes, though actual change has some breakpoints around tradewinds, glaciation, and ocean currents) you'll be saying goodbye to them instead of them saying goodbye to you. If you're buried there your ghost will be resting with their ghosts, not in the landscape eternal you might perceive it to be.
And I am a part of the landscape. I don't know that many people have this same sense. I know the Christian separation of animals and humans, the concept of dominion and even stewardship woven into our society, it runs deep. Maybe I lie closer to the indigeonus concept of the land as kin, but also I think of myself, as I think many sciencey people do, as (one of) the land's ways of knowing itself. I am itself, an expression of the land as much as any mountain or tree.
"Climate grief" is a term that gets a lot of press recently, and sure, the fact that things are changing can be a cause for grief. Lots of people are in very legitimate fear and many of us will die for reasons in varying places on the "act of god" to "no social support" spectrum. Those things are important to the human part of me but I'm not sure how much I live in the human part of me.
What I feel is more like jumping out of a plane with a parachute and something between mother and child in my arms. Threshold- it's easy for me, life linked to it as it is, to cradle and comfort and protect and learn to the best of my ability in that situation. But when I'm holding a sort of diffuse whole of the Stuart Nechako forest district, well, that's a lot. Doing it civilly in the full sense of the word, within the constraint of law and in partnership with so many different perspectives from commodity to spiritual ownership, well.
It might have been better to do when I was younger, and believed more in people's shared values, and when I had more energy to change the world.
It's an intense fire season in North America. I'd say historic, but it's actually ahistoric: this is the worst on record by a significant amount for both area and intensity of fires. I've been talking for years about global warming to ecosystem change and now the tactical-level science is coming out: "regeneration failure" (the forest doesn't recover into a forest, or at least not a similarly-functioning ecosystem) is influenced in the short term by the intensity of fires, so if we can keep the intensity of fires low we can keep our forests closer to how they were for a little while longer, until climate change more fully catches up with species range.
I'm never sure that's a great goal, to preserve what was there. On the other hand humans have a terrible track record of deliberately intervening in ecosystems. Our culture is particularly bad: two that came into conversation this morning were "stream cleaning" (straightening a stream and removing all woody debris from it to help salmon populations, turns out that's counterproductive) and national parks (removing indigenous people, preventing indigenous practices, and doing fire suppression all to make a "natural" state which it turns out creates megafires and other large-disturbance issues). On the other hand we cannot pretend we have not and are not intervening in everything -- that's why it's the anthropocene -- and so we have a responsibility to do those interventions in as thoughtful, research-driven, and future-based ways as possible.
We cannot do nothing, that's not in our power, so throwing up our hands and pretending that what we normally do is "nothing" and that anything we haven't done before is overreach is disingenuous. So I think we need to be very active and do deliberate interventions, but carefully and at hopefully non-disastrous scale.
In this context I'm one of a handful of land managers with jurisdiction over one of the larger chunks of actively and structurally/deliberately managed land there is. Canada has a huge proportion of "crown land", land managed by the state. It is of course complicated: there are many players, including indigenous people who are having their rights slowly re-enshrined; settlers who also live on the landscape; government groups of many kinds, including those tasked with increasing carbon, wildlife, firesmarting, biodiversity, recreation, and housing; large and small industry; people who have never been to this area or to the country but who feel strongly about management in different ways; and groups that overlap those categories.
(I am sitting in my chair at the office at work and trying to formula this while the room literally feels like it's spinning around me, I may have to come back to it).
The state's inclination is to move cautiously and to include careful discussion and many stakeholders, possibly now leaning towards finding ways to prioritize indigenous input, and it's a big slow machine. Indigenous inclination is varied, since these are varied groups of people with varied types of governance and varying opinions, much like any group, but culture, power, comfort, and safety play into their motivations. Settlers on the landscape are also varied but tend to fall into two groups: transients and people with deep attachment, though those groups aren't exactly always separate, and many of them value access to the land. Industry has a variety of hands but at heart is driven by shareholder value over the short term, usually quarterly. People who aren't from here quite honestly I'm pretty bitter about some days, but esthetics and simplicity of narrative play into their desires.
My personal, western-educated and paganism-animism-informed preferences don't significantly align with many of those folks pre-discussion. I sit much more in the rewilding and novel ecosystems camp than most typical environmentalists, but I'm also much more cautious and less one-size-fits-all than many of the new tech-based environmentalists or industry. I'm significantly more pro-science than some indigenous groups, and pretty much more pro-humans-on-the-landscape (including indigenous and settlers) than nearly anyone. But I'm also deeply in favour of the kind of education and contact indigenous folks promote. And there's a bunch more I could say there.
But in the end my formal job is to consider perspectives and align with the laws. The laws are somewhat contradictory, for instance now that we've adopted UNDRIP there's active contradiction between typical practice, legislation, and direction from folks with various forms of enshrined and/or functional power. Making anything harder for anyone with power is frowned upon but can be done with care and skill.
It all makes me wish I could still think and write clearly. It might be worth figuring out accommodations for speech-to-text at work if I actually want to dig into this.
But I'm not sure how much I do or can dig into it. I'm more aware of what the next fifty years will look like on the landscape than almost anyone, but it's just as difficult for me as it is for anyone else to live with that knowledge of change. Your personal relationships are very likely to outlive your relationships to the ecosystems you know, though some level of normalizing will help shield you from awareness of that. If there's a set of ecosystem relationships you're attached to, especially the further north you live (warming happens faster at high latitudes, though actual change has some breakpoints around tradewinds, glaciation, and ocean currents) you'll be saying goodbye to them instead of them saying goodbye to you. If you're buried there your ghost will be resting with their ghosts, not in the landscape eternal you might perceive it to be.
And I am a part of the landscape. I don't know that many people have this same sense. I know the Christian separation of animals and humans, the concept of dominion and even stewardship woven into our society, it runs deep. Maybe I lie closer to the indigeonus concept of the land as kin, but also I think of myself, as I think many sciencey people do, as (one of) the land's ways of knowing itself. I am itself, an expression of the land as much as any mountain or tree.
"Climate grief" is a term that gets a lot of press recently, and sure, the fact that things are changing can be a cause for grief. Lots of people are in very legitimate fear and many of us will die for reasons in varying places on the "act of god" to "no social support" spectrum. Those things are important to the human part of me but I'm not sure how much I live in the human part of me.
What I feel is more like jumping out of a plane with a parachute and something between mother and child in my arms. Threshold- it's easy for me, life linked to it as it is, to cradle and comfort and protect and learn to the best of my ability in that situation. But when I'm holding a sort of diffuse whole of the Stuart Nechako forest district, well, that's a lot. Doing it civilly in the full sense of the word, within the constraint of law and in partnership with so many different perspectives from commodity to spiritual ownership, well.
It might have been better to do when I was younger, and believed more in people's shared values, and when I had more energy to change the world.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-04 04:16 pm (UTC)i always figured maybe i'm drawn to the place because it will be the place of death for me, too. it makes as much sense as the other thoughts that maybe the affinity is about some genetic or ancestral memory or , just esthetics or a seed of imagery or language or story or anything else. so when you writ "if you're buried there your ghost will be resting with their ghosts" .. well..that touches on everything. i think i only ever fear that the funeral party drags on for all places endlessly. that's too terrible.
your role & part & home & life is precious ,and whatever sense one ever makes of ones experiencing of it all too
i don't actually know anything
deeply respect