My latest essay for the Minnesota Reformer, “As flames rise, true progress beckons,” is out today. This column continues last week’s exploration of the natural world in an industrial landscape.
Go back far enough and you realize that words don’t always mean what we think they do.
Call someone a “nimrod” today and they’re likely to take offense. They’d list synonyms like “moron,” “idiot” and “dummy.” But “Nimrod” was a name of a great hunter described in the Bible. For centuries, being compared to Nimrod, or called “a nimrod” referred to one’s hunting prowess.
Only when Bugs Bunny came along and used the term sarcastically against Elmer Fudd did millions of youngsters in the middle 20th century assign a new, opposing definition to the word.
We can add the word, “progressive” to this category. Progressive was once a much more generic term for political policies that advanced society. If you wanted to build a railroad in 1865 or a coal fired power plant in 1890, you were a progressive. However, the term became more specific when Progressive Era political, church and social leaders applied the term to a broad swath of policies that corrected the early, horrifying flaws of the Industrial Age. After World War I snuffed out that movement, the word carried on in that spirit, attaching itself to later and present left-of-center movements.
My essay today highlights this distinction and re-applies it to our times, another period of great change that amazes and terrifies in tandem.
This second piece, like the first one published July 25, reviews “Fire Weather: A True Story From a Hotter World” by John Vaillant (Knopf, 2024). Vaillant’s book mostly describes the 2016 wildfire that destroyed a large portion of Fort MacMurray, Alberta, a bitumen oil extraction town on the edge of Canada’s expansive boreal forest.
Here’s a taste of that review:
“On the surface, the book stands as a thrilling tale of horror and heroism as firefighters evacuated the city of 88,000 in the face of a supercharged wildfire. Despite the destruction of more than 2,400 homes, there were no fatalities.
But the real strength of “Fire Weather” is the textured analysis of history. Technically, the fire started in 2016. And yet, the first sparks flew decades earlier when human thirst for petroleum products became insatiable. Vaillant sets this scene without ignoring the ways people have benefited from the extraction of oil.”
I can’t *make* anyone care about reducing oil’s grip on society. In many ways, I’m just as scared of the potential changes, and their costs, as the Facebook users who click “laughy face” whenever I talk about renewable energy. I’m extremely rural. Though comfortably middle class, I don’t have tens of thousands to burn on new equipment, vehicles and electrical systems. But we will never make progress — in the real sense — without addressing the costs of doing nothing. The status quo racks up a bigger bill each year. This will not stop until we intervene.
Read more in today’s Minnesota Reformer.
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