MAGA’s mad at wildfires
I guess it was inevitable. You know, that Trump would demand that Canada take charge of its prevailing winds, and stop pestering the US with the dense smoke from the charred trees, burnt out First Nations reserves, and involuntary cremations that currently emanates from over 800 fires raging out of control in northern Ontario.
We were so busy calculating how many boxes of Kraft Dinner it would take to feed a family of five once we’d saved up enough for the skim milk and margarine—luxury items that we usually hoard for a celebratory blow-out meal on the day we allocate 80% of our freelance wages for rent—that we totally forgot to report to Elliott Lake with our Swiffers and cans of lemon Pledge, ready to tidy up and generally polish the several million hectares of boreal forest until they gleamed.
Republicans, or “bags of skin filled with garbage” as I affectionately call them, lost no time berating us for causing and mismanaging these fires (they seemed peeved that we hadn’t shut the fires down completely, a task which they insisted they’d assigned to us while they tackled the really demanding but necessary project of making brown people illegal).
But sweep that forest floor though we might, like thirty million Cinderellas on crack, it would be all for nothing; forest fires are actually part of Nature’s cycle, or at least used to be before global warming heated up your grandparents and newborn babies to the degree that you had to keep the curtains closed during the day lest they spontaeously combust.
After years of finger-wagging from Smoky the Bear, lecturing us about the dangers of careless camping, we’ve forgotten that, left alone, without humans to mess up the schedule, forests need fires. Forest fires happen at natural frequencies and themselves clear the forest floor from dead wood, leaf litter and the dense undergrowth that suppresses new growth.
Let’s nerd out on forest fires for a bit, shall we? Oh, go on, you know you want to.
Burning vegetation returns nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and minerals to the soil. Many plants and some animals have evolved to depend on periodic wildfires—that’s right. Fire is an ecological requirement rather than a unexpected hazard.
By continually creating patches of burned and unburned forest, fire increases biodiversity, unlike a uniform, unburned landscape. And in a natural cycle, stored carbon is released by fire, but with the stage set for new growth, that carbon will eventually be recaptured. Nature really is the original economy.
With fire suppression, land use and climate change altering these natural cycles, many landscapes now experience too little fire, with the resulting fuel build-up, or too much severe fire.
Canada has boreal forest, mostly evergreens, pines, spruce, that kind of thing. Nature provides for large canopy fires every sixty to 150 years, but humans, who always know best, have generated enough greenhouse gases to ensure that extreme fires have become a dreaded and dangerous yearly event. And recently we’ve been experiencing a heat dome that’s settled in, acting like a lid on a dehydrator, drying out grasses, shrubs, forest litter, until it’s tinder, just ready for a lightning strike—the primary ignition for wildfires. Once ignited, fires burn hotter, with more intense flame fronts and deeper consumption of organic soils. Firefighters, assuming there are any, face more dangerous fire behavior and working conditions: heat stress.
Another interesting fact: Canada is heating up at up to twice the global rate, in the Arctic and sub-Arctic up to three times. That’s because of Canada’s large landmass and high latitude. Warming is greater over land than over oceans because land has less heat capacity, and as snow and ice decline, more solar energy is absorbed, resulting in a feedback loop whereby the permafrost begins to melt.
That’s bad news, because the total carbon locked in permafrost soils is estimated to exceed the amount currently in the atmosphere, making ongoing thaw a significant long-term amplifier of warming. (That’s not even taking into account contaminants like mercury and heavy metals trapped in ice and frozen soils which then enter groundwater, lakes and rivers, threatening water quality and the food chain).
Further, as permafrost melts, formerly frozen organic material begins to be broken down by microbes, releasing CO2 and methane, or as otherwise known, greenhouse gases.
When a severe fire passes through tundra or boreal peatland, the insulating layers which protect permafrost—mosses, shrubs, trees, a spongy organic soil layer, and snowpack trapped by vegetation—is stripped away, allowing greater penetration of the heat. Fire chars, i.e., darkens, the ground, leaves soot and ash on the vegetation, exposes mineral soil. These darker surfaces absorb, rather than reflect, sunlight. Fire converts a cool buffered system into a vulnerable, heat-absorbing one.
Are you hyperventilating yet?
I’m giving you this top-level info about the role of wildfire in the ecosystem to point out just how hare-brained (and apologies to all the hares, but seriously) the snippy Republican letter to Mark Carney is, and how this new wave of nastier, knee-jerk Canada bashing is nothing really to do with forest fires. It’s everything to do with normalizing an eye-rolling, impatient response to assumed Canadian incompetence (incompetence in this case meaning anything that stands in the way of whatever Trump decides to get mad about while taking his morning Big Mac).
It is, of course, the world’s duty to fall in line. No alternative viewpoint is valid; whatever leaves Trump’s mouth is the truth du jour. We see now that Carney has achieved full Trudeau-dom, for, as you would have expected, the honeymoon is over. He’s the new hapless butt of open-season bullying, and by proxy, all Canada and all Canadians (we’re nasty, remember?). If it wasn’t wildfire smoke, it would be anything else, because this is about demeaning and diminishing us as people and a nation until the only obvious solution is annexation.
Just check out the Republican rhetoric: they have “lost patience”—no more indulgent daddy, it’s off to bed without dinner. What most sticks in my craw is: “With sovereignty comes responsibility”, which implies that our national sovereignty is simply a fiction indulged by the Oval Office, or maybe something gifted to us when Republicans are in a good mood, but when that hockey puck breaks a window, we’ll be standing in the corner until we learn to behave. No sovereignty for you, little missy maple leaf!
Just seeing the word “responsibility” within a kilometer of a Republican makes me want to vomit, considering their leader hasn’t performed a responsible act, or uttered a responsible sentence, in living memory. He reeks of self-indulgent hissy-fits, and we’ve had the misfortune to inhale his bad breath, the methane emanation of a dying man consumed with free-floating hatred, whose guts of oozing, decaying permafrost are subsiding and collapsing into fetid, stagnant ponds.
Recently, while listening to Yuval Noah Harari being interviewed, I had an awakening, which is what can happen when you listen to someone so morally fierce and intellectually uncompromising. (He’s gay, of course, which gives him that extra edge, that keen perspective of the outsider who is always watching the animals who play at being human).
With the interviewer offering that Trump was, at least, authentic, he did not hesitate.
“Authenticity is for your therapist,” he countered. “Leaders should instead be responsible.”
To paraphrase the elaboration of his thesis:
We acknowledge that, as imperfect beings, every last one of us has thoughts that are reprehensible to one degree or another, prejudices that we would hesitate to air in public for shame, acts that have not been our best acts. The authentic man, Trump in this case, spews these without filtering and revels in our admiration for his authenticity; but this is not admirable. As leader, you need that filter.
As leader, you realize that people are watching and listening to you, that they are making you their role model. To lead, to bring together, to unite, you must filter out those less than admirable thoughts, the words that hurt and divide, the actions that confuse and imply that it’s ok to hate, fine to cheat and demean. You, as a leader, are planting seeds in the minds of your followers, and those seeds will nourish them or poison them. Leaders must be responsible.
Trump is the world’s most powerful and most profoundly irresponsible leader.
This is the man who is President only for those who kiss his ass, who wants an all-white America. This is the man without integrity, who cheats on his taxes, who cheats on his real estate deals, who cheats on his wife, and thus plants the seed in the minds of his followers that that’s what you do.
This is the man who incites a riot with brazen lies, then pardons the criminals who have been judged in a court of law. Thus, there is no need to follow the law, and lawlessness will be rewarded.
This is the man who still, tirelessly, insists he won an election that he lost, redraws voting districts to disenfranchise those who would probably sooner die than support him. (I note that all the rampant voter fraud magically disappears when Trump wins, only to resurface again in a few weeks come the mid-terms. )
This is the President who ignores science, invents truth, terrorizes the marginalized and vulnerable, mocks the disadvantaged, the sick, the struggling. This is the man who turns the Oval Office into a ring-toss booth at the carnival, selling tawdry gold-plated merch, bibles and baseball caps and souvenir watches, who pumps and dumps cryptocurrency in order to maximize his and his family’s wealth. This is the man who called US servicemen and women “losers”.
This is the man who knows nothing of love, only lust; nothing of consent or self-control, only rape, nothing of tenderness, just pussy-grabs. This is the man who tells Stormy Daniels “she reminds him of his daughter.”
This is the man who longs to fuck underage girls, whose name appears in the Epstein files one million times.
And he’s lecturing Canadians, his pin-head acolytes in Michigan and Ohio are lecturing us, about “responsibility”?
Doug Ford, he of the mirthless smile and the deep pockets filled with bribes, was once again putting up a brave front. He’s called on Canadians to step up, and he’s had a little finger-wag at the Americans, reminding them all of what good neighbours should do.
So I’m quite happy to accept that his complete bungling of the wildfire response was just simple forgetfulness of something that happens, like clockwork, every single year at this time.
For “emergencies”, you see, find Ford at his very best. Not actually coping with the emergencies, please! that would interfere with his ruin-Toronto project and his tireless search for political donors and pocket-lining projects, no matter how ludicrous. No, by at his best, I mean his best at performing the role of concerned leader for the TV cameras, those performances that are meant to distract us from his incompetence, even as he broadcasts that incompetence.
For instance, as he praises the firefighters tackling the disaster, he mentions that he’s about to purchase some new helicopters for dousing water on the flames. But wait a minute. He’s just ordering those now? As the wildfire season reaches its first huge milestone, when the lack of staff and firefighters has necessitated calling in the troops?
And why are there not enough firefighters? Because that would cost money, thus cutting into Doug’s pocket-lining grift.
What Doug is hoping we won’t notice is that these wildfires don’t represent an emergency at all. Absolutely not. They don’t catch a person unawares. No, they are a recurring, predictable yearly event. So predictable, in fact, and so increasingly severe, that you’d think a leader like Doug would create something like an Ontario Wildfire Response Team, with leaders, and staff and firefighters and foresters and funding for evacuations, and social workers to deal with the traumatized communities, people who’ve lost everything. You’d think that, wouldn’t you?
You’d think that a real leader would set something up like that, so that far northern people wouldn’t be on the CBC, telling the reporter, “We feel totally abandoned here, with no one to help or even advise us what to do.”
You’d think that Doug would at least provide $270 to $300 million of funding, like he spent last year, instead of budgeting only $150 million for this year, just about half the amount. You’d think he’d have at least that common sense.
But then he wouldn’t be able to go on camera and perform the role of “concerned leader desperate for funds”, because he could easily have those funds. But being organized is boring. It’s not good theatre. Good theatre is performative incompetence, rushing about buying helicopters after you need them, bringing in the troops untrained in firefighting, rushing about looking busy, calling the too few firefighters salt of the earth or whatever homespun cliché occurs to his watery beer-brain.
Then, when the cameras switch off, he can get back to telling Toronto that bike lanes cause traffic jams, or informing us—”it’s gonna happen!”—that he intends to ram jets into a tiny rural-sized airport on a fragile, beloved island parkland because it’s for our own good, or proving that he indeed has the gall to rip up a beloved lakeside heritage park and uproot over 800 mature trees in order to erect a giant spa that no one wants. He can wag his finger at the Republicans who wrote that letter and remind them how WE didn’t hesitate to help Americans when you needed. It’s easy for him to say that, seeing as he didn’t provide the help.
I’ll share a little secret: when I woke up on Wednesday and saw the sulphur-yellow sky, spent Wednesday, then Thursday, gasping for breath in an eternal twilight of dense, acrid smoke, I had a crazy thought: Doug Ford’s found a way to asphyxiate everyone in Toronto.
We all knew he’d get his way, eventually.
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