Today, my latest essay, “Children of the Slash Pile” ran in the Minnesota Reformer.
Here’s an excerpt:
Working people came in like aspens, regenerating what was destroyed, with no memory of what came before. Today, some of us enjoy the privilege of thinking we’ve always lived here.
In realizing this, we might better understand the culture descended from those immigrants. The land was here for us to use, we got what we could, and — truth be told — there are a lot more trees here now than there were when great-great granddad arrived. So, why complain?
But the impact of humans on the environment doesn’t happen all at once, and can’t be repaired with a wave of the hand. The forest is a living, breathing organism, the survivor of a parasitic infection: us.
It’s hard to see recent slash piles, tinder dry before the rains came, or look at the forest looming over our home in Itasca County, without thinking about a new book I read this year.
“Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” by John Vaillant (Knopf, 2024) is primarily an account of the Fort McMurray fire of 2016, when an unprecedented wildfire displaced 88,000 people and destroyed half a modern city. But the story doesn’t start with the fire, but rather the origin of the conditions that made the fire.
Read the rest in today’s Minnesota Reformer. This is the first of a two part look at Vaillant’s book and the relationship between our resource economy and climate woes.
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