.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

When we lived in NJ, we had a house near the woods.

Sometimes deer would come out of there, or maybe raccoons. Before it rained, we would sit on the front porch under the overhang and watch the trees blow as the storm approached.

There was never any interaction with nature that seemed threatening, but living in Southern California, now that the fire season and its catastrophic consequences have again surrounded us, I wonder anew why we choose to live in a such a hostile place.

If I had a California house in the mountains or next to undeveloped open space, I would worry about snakes and lions, mudslides and of course, fires. Those strange houses, the ones that are built with steel fencing and sit on terraced slopes, in a hostile arrangement with the natural world… that isn’t for me. I don’t drive through Orange County or Santa Clarita and envy people who live in communities where thousands of units were erected in months by developers who tamed and destroyed the very wildness they claim to respect.

The people who serve and protect and lay their lives on the line so that millions can live in air-conditioned stucco boxes with three car garages in the midst of aridity, are their lives less important than the Range-Rovers and TVs and stuffed animals they are sworn to defend?
There is a criminal waste of resources to allow and insure that development is possible anywhere. And a moral lapse in seeing fireman perish fighting the inevitable.

And now that the fires are back, the very fragility of the human experiment in the Golden State is back in the news. We are the uninvited guests in these parts, and no matter how many rivers we encase in concrete, or how many fireproof roofs are built, and whatever brush is cut back, the arsonist and the falling power line, and lightning itself will ignite the fury that is nature and we will run away from paradise, quicker than we arrived.