is smoky the bear real? (yes and no)

on the yes side: watching the bear give out candy and shake hands with three year-olds, i have to say, "for those little kids, the bear is real, like santa claus." and as with the northern visitor, i am convinced i will be protected and get everything for nothing. alas, it seems like all the adults with them believe the same. our belief in santa claus no longer seems to die.

unfortunately, when i watch an often reluctant firefighter climb into the bear suit and later out of it hot and sweaty, i have to admit to myself smoky is an illusion. i want him to be real, just as i want a powerful father figure to watch over and take care of me. i'm an american, after all, yearning for a powerful man or bear to save me. 

i do like the fact smoky is brown and an animal. i'm tired of white gods (and men) i can no longer believe in, who pick my pocket as i worship them.  and i agree illusions more real than reality.  THE AGE OF DENIAL is upon us. even numbers don't seem to work any more. i can tell you california fires five times as big as in 1972, i can tell you a town up the road burned down, 27,000 homeless, 85 dead. many simply will not believe the pictures and maps, not even if they see it with their own eyes.

and smoky is part of the problem. SMOKY SEES ALL. HE WILL PROTECT THE FOREST. PUT OUT ALL THE FIRES BY HIMSELF WITH NO MONEY FOR SUPPLIES. alas, washington finds the forests a nuisance and wishes they would go away. it is more fun to buy bombers and aircraft carriers. they pump up the economy. the woods simply demand funds and care. the forests can be ignored.

unfortunately, the forest service has had to go along with it, having nobody but smoky to speak for them. in this sense, smoky isn't real. he can attract the bare minimum of funds for fighting fires. too bad he doesn't really have a divine shovel to fight off the lightning bolts. he's not the superman he's made out to be. 

since i constantly promote the rebuilding of lookouts and a system with human eyes in the sky, i'll say what i see coming: BIGGER FIRES THAT CANNOT BE STOPPED, PERIOD. what i feel we need to do is SAVE LIVES. help escape routes to be found, put up a system of fire-sirens to warn everybody, to have both lookouts and cameras for early detection. give smoky more tools. stop believing in fantasies. 

romance of the forest? (gone)

i guess i'm just too old. when i was five, i ran around in the woods all day, BY MYSELF, even though we lived in western towns. my first books were about mountain men - jim bridger and kit carson - and legendary indians - black hawk and rain-in-the-face. our family camped out all over the united states, canada, and europe, exploring natural wonders. once i lay for hours in yellowstone park, waiting for a tiny geyser to explode, as it would do unpredictably once a day. 

this world is no longer available to today's kids. they're trapped in parental surveillance, not to mention city streets and asphalt. so they're attracted to the virtual world, to computers and hacking where they can travel the universe. they want to be astronauts, settlers on mars, have artificial-intelligence lovers who do everything they say, the outdoor to be lived represented by footprints on the moon. 

the forests, years ago, in the 19th century, the creation of a divine being. americans were the chosen  people, and this was god's country. at the same time they loved their machines, especially the railroads. the forests were sold to the railroads and they've huge domains today, with which they can do whatever they wish. with the cry, MANIFEST DESTINY, the united states has the right and duty to keep expanding, it rules us today with a huge army, navy, air force, and border guards. 

alas, that last, manifest destiny, means all our resources devoted to the reality, ownership, and conquest of the rest of the world. conservation groups have lost the power of mythology and memory to off-the-road vehicles, snow-mobiles, campers, and the logging industry, nobody is left to root for nature. thoreau and emerson kept the country going for a long time. now they are ghosts of the past. 

the power of myth has shifted from the natural world, to the imaginary heroics of technology. america has grown away from it's roots: 

i've often thought japan won wwII by inventing the off-the-road vehicles which rampage across our sand-dunes and deserts, and whose owners believe they have an eternal right-of-way. 

the symbol of american has become the cut stump. it definitely should be put on the flag. 

mismanagement of the forests? no, no funds

1 Billion Acres At Risk For Catastrophic Wildfires, U.S. Forest Service Warns

i started working for the forest service in 1962. it was my place of choice, since i was surrounded by many folks doing interesting work, all concerned with NURTURING  the forest, doing thorough fire prevention, checking all timber cut to make sure it followed guidelines and honestly recorded volume. biologists monitored streams, recreation people made sure the rules by users were not damaging, and so on. 

in the past twenty years all those workers disappeared. the auto shops were closed, so repairs had to contracted out, expensively. road crews vanished, those who used to clear the brush from back roads, grade them. now culverts collapsing , roads overgrown, making it difficult for even the new, bigger fire engines to reach flames from lightning. the planting crews no longer plant trees, the nurseries where thousands of seedlings grown closed and vacant.

the recreation staff has dwindled to perhaps one person per forest. visitors pretty much free to do what they want, despite the regulations.  90% of the people  the fire people doing prevention vanished. to back this up, here's a quote from a retired fire guy on facebook:


Mark A. Brown As you said, prevention is the key. In the 70s I was a prevention patrolman with a 200 gal tank and 500' of hose. Our district, Clackamas District on the south end of Mt. Hood Nat'l Forest, was divided into five patrol routes which covered all of the district. Each route was covered by a patrolman each and every day. Every lake on the district was walked, every campsite and heavy use off-site camps were covered each and every day, they also met with the public, instructed on fire safety, posted fire safety signs, etc. I drove around the district last summer and never saw a single forest service truck at all. The whole district seems abandoned. The old Ripplebrook Ranger Station is now a convenience store. The Clackamas District and Estacada District combined into one and is administered from Estacada. With no presence showing, people are doing whatever they want up there it seems.


thus, it's not just a matter of what i've seen with my own eyes.

the forest service has been gutted by washington. look at this mandala of government expenditures. can you see how little is being spent on food and agriculture, see that little sliver at the top?

services once provided through the department of agriculture to the forest serve gone. so can the forest service be condemned? only smoky the bear acts as a constituency attracting the public. and fires consume so much money the service falls in the donut hole at certain point, thereafter required to use management funds, leaving even less for everyday use. 

and lookouts have been drastically reduced in number. once eight lookouts peered into the half a million acres i now cover by myself. and even where last year we had world disaster starting on our forest, the CAMPFIRE, 27,000 homeless, 87 dead, the fire fund for our district reduced. gone are the days when having big fires would mean more money in the budget for next year.

i love this picture of smoky the bear. what can he see, hiding behind a house at ground level?

   

                                       


this is the reality. compare it with what lookouts have always been able to see:

the forests divested of guardians, certainly not observed by the public. the shell remains, as the forests die from the ground up. we're picking cherries from a dying tree, and i don't think our grandchildren will thank us for it. 

                                                        

things not thought through (fire and technology)

                                                              my drone experience

the hair on the back of my neck rises, every time i read about what is happening with fire around the world. alas, a huge percentage of americans do not believe global warming actually happening. of course, more and more violent weather will get their attention. let the west coast have more tornadoes and the seas in Louisiana rise.....

a friend said to me years ago, IT'S A MATTER OF OUR TECHNOLOGY STAYING AHEAD OF OUR STUPIDITY.  unfortunately, technology has become our stupidity. we seem unable to judge the consequences of the same.  on a DC10 incident from wikipedia:

Tanker 910 experienced its first serious aviation incident on June 25, 2007. While on its third run over the White Fire in the Kern County mountains near Tehachapi, California, the aircraft was in a left bank while turning from base to final approach. It encountered sinking air, the left wing dropped, and the aircraft descended 100–200 feet (30–61 m) lower than expected.^[14][32] The left wing struck several trees before pilots were able to power out of the descent. The aircraft climbed to altitude for a controllability check and to dump its load of retardant, then returned to its base in Victorville, California where it made an emergency landing and was grounded pending an investigation, inspection, and repairs.^[14][32][33]

a commentator on facebook says he's just waiting for one to crash, the plane very clumsy for what it's being used for. i maintain they can't be used much in the mountains and are a waste of money. 

let's see, what about drones? they seem to be all over fire sites, as the wonder drug! well, what about drones crashing into other aircraft? every time a drone appears near a fire, operations closed down. can they really be managed? i grant they could have a use to check out smokes already spotted. can they operate in smoky conditions and high heat? how many people will it take to monitor them? if they crash, what kind of a fire will they cause? can they fly in high winds?

most americans think global warming fake news. unfortunately, the affects are upon us. here's from an article on fire-fighting in spain:

‘Traditionally we could predict the fire behaviour and the direction of the fire but under those conditions and those moments it’s not possible,’ said Marc Castellnou, president of the Spanish independent wildfire prevention group Pau Costa Foundation.

While these fires are rare, when one strikes it can generate 100,000 kilowatts of energy per metre. In firefighting terms, this is 10 times what a firefighter can handle, but even at 4,000 kilowatts, firefighters cannot go near the flames and require aerial support. ‘The old way of fighting fires by sending firefighters – that’s gone,’ Castellnou said.

‘This change has been cooking for a long time, but the first time we realised something wrong was happening were the years 2009 and 2012,’ he said, referring to the Black Saturday bushfires in the Australian state of Victoria that killed 173 people and wildfires in Spain, Portugal, Chile and California, US. Many in the fire community initially thought these were just abnormal events, he says.

But then wildfires in Chile and Portugal in 2017 indicated that those weren’t simply extreme years. ‘That was the new normal arriving. 2018 has confirmed that,’ he said, referring to the deadly wildfires in Greece and in California.

VIOLENT WEATHER: this the main result of global warming. without the big picture being addressed, locals will be at the mercy of high winds and hurricanes, tornadoes and drought. if technology can't fix the source, it certainly won't where we live. i believe we need a return to staffed lookouts all over the country. this won't solve the problem, but it might buy us time until people can be herded into spaceships and dispatched from the planet. 

PENNSYLVANIA REINTRODUCES FIRE TOWERS:  

NICHOLAS A. TONNELLI ON FLICKR/CREATIVE COMMONS 2.0Ricketts Glen State Park is the site of one of the fire towers Pennsylvania may replace.

More than six decades after transitioning to newer methods, Pennsylvania is returning to a tried-and-true approach toward combating forest fires: fire towers. The state plans to replace up to 25 existing towers and to build two new ones by summer 2017. Fire wardens and volunteers will staff the towers during the height of fire season, typically March through May.

                                                the only people using their brains

has washington abandoned the forest service? (pretty much)

poor smoky, carrying 27 national forests on his back, the only constituency the forest service has. in washington conservationists fight the playmate groups - hunters, fishermen, off-the-road vehicle drivers, snowmobile people, and so on,  the forests advertised as playgrounds. if i'm asked what has changed since 1962, i have to say the end of people working in the field. no road and planting crews, no fish and wildlife experts, firefighting prevention reduced to almost nothing. 

here's a comment i received on facebook: 

Mark A. Brown As you said, prevention is the key. In the 70s I was a prevention patrolman with a 200 gal tank and 500' of hose. Our district, Clackamas District on the south end of Mt. Hood Nat'l Forest, was divided into five patrol routes which covered all of the district. Each route was covered by a patrolman each and every day. Every lake on the district was walked, every campsite and heavy use off-site camps were covered each and every day, they also met with the public, instructed on fire safety, posted fire safety signs, etc. I drove around the district last summer and never saw a single forest service truck at all. The whole district seems abandoned. The old Ripplebrook Ranger Station is now a convenience store. The Clackamas District and Estacada District combined into one and is administered from Estacada. With no presence showing, people are doing whatever they want up there it seems.

so the evidence goes beyond what i've seen with my own eyes!

since i haven't mentioned my first love, lookouts, here goes. this forest once had 26 lookouts, now effectively five. the fact was: two lookouts could see a smoke and where their compass readings crossed, there was the smoke, pinpointed. the system work well. alas, 21 lookouts eliminated, and a dependence on a helicopter which  often isn't here, deployed to fires on other forests, days at a time.

eight lookouts used to overlook my area, half a million acres, now there's only me. in a way, i don't mind. lookouts tend to compete with each other and i don't have to worry about that. alas, it is rather lonesome. and to figure out where a smoke's at can be pretty challenging. if the helicopter not on base, crews on the ground will take a lot longer. that can have some devastating consequences. the flames can go from the size of a match to hundred foot flames in high winds absurdly quickly. 

on that note i would like to mention, after 56 seasons i have no benefits, no retirement, and work for minimum wage, having to supply my own vehicle and gas, no mean feat, as lookout roads are notoriously bad. how does this relate to cutbacks? for 35 years i received pay for my lunch break. last summer, from their majesty in washington, that was eliminated, cutting my pay 12.5 percent (thanks for the pat on the back) and leaving a half a million acres unwatched when the wind comes up and the temperature rises. SO MUCH FOR LOOKOUTS BEING EXPENSIVE. 

i do want to say, i love the job and the people i work with, forest service folks the best, one of the things that's kept me going. as i'm reaching my dotage, i feel it my responsibility to say something. the forest has always been the enemy of civilization. and what we call 'civilized' is getting the upper hand. meditate on the desert lands of north africa and the remnants of their great roman and greek cities. they lost their forests and sacrificed their lives.

                              

                                                                                                                                                                                                          THE MYTHOLOGICAL HISTORY OF FORESTS

are we still living in fantasy land, when it comes to fire

                                                              Bunker Hill, my first lookout

i've been posting a lot of fire information on Facebook: fires in alaska, greece, spain, norther alberta, etc. doing this bit of research interesting. for example, 169 lookouts in california on the national register, the vast majority unused. a 30 year fireman argued they aren't needed everywhere. i think that remains to be seen. 

of course, in 2004 the california division of forestry decided they weren't needed anywhere. one of those is still standing, still unstaffed, above the 27,000 charred homes of the campfire in paradise, california, where almost a hundred people died. it was labeled as one of the 'unnecessary lookouts'. sure the smoke showed pretty quickly a fire was afoot, but nobody was there to tell residents how fast it was burning and where.

the lookout job is not just to first see a fire, it's to confirm or deny reports from the cellphones riding the roads, to say where exactly the fire is and how fast it's growing, what the wind is doing. this monitoring is as important if not more so than the first say. this certainly would have been true in paradise. they did have a camera on the tower, the alarm turned off due to it giving too many false alarms. 

one thing is: the nature of fire is changing, becoming hotter and more unpredictable. the campfire burned at 1,200 degrees, the temperature it takes to  incinerate bodies. no wonder they had trouble identifying the dead. when i come to work now, driving from chico, i go above the canyon where the the campfire started. the first time it gave me a chill. thousands of acres look like the sahara. everything torched, the ground bare. i've seen a lot of fires, but never one that devastating.  

and seeing one young firefighter started the ongoing conflagration in canada, i looked up the number of arson fires in california. they average about 8000 a year. al-queda has asked for fire to be used as a weapon. terror incidents in the u.s., other than 9/ll, wildcat strikes by individuals. alas, seeing what one person in alberta could do, that's not exactly re-assuring. 

in 2004 the california division of forestry closed all their lookouts, all 77 of them, saying it would save lots of money. two years later they started leasing huge DC10 airplanes, 5 million dollars a season plus 5,5000 dollars an hour. ONE PLANE AT THAT PRICE WOULD HAVE RUN THEIR LOOKOUT SYSTEM FOR SIX YEARS. what a boondoggle, basically meant to impress the public and the media. these planes have very limited use in the mountains, unable to fly low in canyons. 

and the latest news about what the state is doing to update their fire protection mainly includes buying more expensive planes, not a word about lookouts, despite the growth of more huge conflagrations, the biggest ever just last year, a half a million acres. we've had big fires on this forest, but they didn't affect people. three years ago a local arsonist lit 24 fires and almost burned down the town of quincy. had the winds come up, it would have been the first campfire in the news. 

unfortunately, if nothing happens dramatically this year, all will be forgotten until more people get killed. even this year, on this forest, where the campfire started, the fire budget has been cut. yes, i think we're still living in a fantasy land where technology expected to save us from disaster and despite the evidence of global warming. 

the military as a fantastic form of socialism (for some)

                                                  HE WAS EXECUTED LATER. 



i was raised on army bases and i loved it. when i had to go into the coast guard reserve, i hated it! being a dependent we had our own schools, markets with much lower prices than on the outside, gas-stations with the same, universal health insurance for soldiers and their families. when we moved we got all our goods sent around the world and free housing.  what more can i want? 

well, well, freedom, i suppose. that's what one air force woman said: you get all these things and all you have to do is give up your freedom! that's what i felt when i entered the coast guard. this was during vietnam and i had to do something. guess what, i felt it was the experience of being a slave. no wonder people would rather be free than secure at such a cost.

okay, since it's the fourth of july and tanks rolling around washington at the behest of a wood-be dictator, it might be interesting to ask the price of freedom? our military has been very subservient to the civilian authorities, lucky for us, not always lucky for them. the civilians have often asked them to do disastrous and stupid things, like invading iraq and afghanistan. 

true, there  used to be a civilian military. the draft ended with vietnam and the protests. i remember a cartoon where a soldier said, a least i have job. and certainly the army is a good job for someone in poverty. they've raised the pay and provided more perks. the only drawback is getting shot to pieces or blown up. i don't know if he was a vet, but the other day i had a fellow come up with his three little kids. he had one arm and could only walk  very stiffly six inches at a time. 

"americans love their military". and we've gotten our wealth from fighting everybody else on the planet. the american revolution an uprising by those willing to fight essentially a civil war, the losers moving to canada. and every violent revolution has resulted in tighter restrictions on their population. on the whole we've kept our good name by willing to go to war at the drop of a hat. so celebrate spending half the wealth of the country on warships and stealth bombers. as long as the system works i don't expect anything to change. 

eureka! consciousness equals memory

like every dog-catcher, swimming coach, or nuclear scientist, i have asked myself the question: WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?  and wikipedia simply says, like every intelligent psychiatrist, NOBODY KNOWS. now that's a fine kettle of fish. what i live by everyday has a name but no reality! 

the university of california at santa cruz even has a phd program in 'the history of consciousness' and only one person has ever attained the degree, a famous black panther they dared not not graduate. i think that perfectly states the situation. 

of course, i could say consciousness is merely a matter of language, a chilean man a different man than a man of south australia. or i might venture: thought is simply due to gender, and no wonder men and women don't understand each other. but this hypotheses simply begs the question. we must have a simple equation like E+MC SQUARED.  einstein always said, make things simple but not too simple. even thoreau might sleep well at night on this supposition.

so, after reading a series of interviews by noted scientists, it's not surprising i stumbled upon the answer to what is consciousness. CONSCIOUSNESS EQUALS MEMORY. certainly i've been saying to myself, can it be this evident? yes, it can. even Goethe maintained: genius is looking at the obvious in a new way. and this is how i look at it. 

looking at the development of a child, touch to sight to actually losing a bit of this at five years old, i see the little elf transforming into a human being. this happens due to memory. the child learns a chair will always be a chair, even in the hands of a lion tamer, or a fly-swatter can also be used to punish a child, yet retain its original shape and purpose. the world around him, when she is awake, is an inventory of shapes, colors, smells, and so on. 


what about sleep, i ask? simple, i let go of all this knowledge, and an ice cube can become a kiss, a rock become a rocket, and all of it so believable i have to be paralyzed so i don't attempt to act out my dreams. yet, how do i  live in the awake world so i  don't become paralyzed by too much  knowledge? i day-dream. human beings, on average, let their minds wander thirty percent of the time. that's a lot. and in it floating thoughts collide, creating innovations, new fusions, patterns of escape. 

thus, consciousness is mitigated by a looseness, not quite as much as at night, but as much as waking from driving a car a thousand miles  without remembering a bit of the scenery. i am allowed a double life in a trance. that makes life interesting. on the other hand without the memory of the steering wheel present, i wouldn't arrive at my destination at all. 

our subject, WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS, depends on MEMORY,  and memory being the flotsam and jetsam with which i structure 'reality' every morning when i rise from bed. hopefully my discovery will make my name as common as EINSTEIN. if it's used to blow up worlds, it can also construct new visions  from the ashes. and this is what art tries to do.
“We are more ourselves in our dreams.”