Watching the fires burning down from the Hollywood Hills all the way down to the ocean, burning down everything ever built, on the hills, in the valleys, miles and miles of forested land that used to be home only to forest animals, now is home to nothing.
The reason is that people cut down areas of forest to build houses. Hundreds of thousands of people, in hundreds of thousands of houses, on hundreds of thousands of acres, on every flat spot they could find or create with an earth mover.
Then they complained when mountain lions and coyotes ate their pet dogs and cats and bears invaded their homes and ripped up their garbage cans and gardens, seeking the food that used to grow where those houses now stand. Now there’s no bears, mountain lions or coyotes, many of the pets have burned to death and the gardens are gone with the houses. But look on the bright side, there’s no wild animals to complain about anymore.
These people all wanted to live surrounded by the beauty of nature, so they ripped out big holes in those natural surroundings to stick their houses into, and left all the trees and brush standing on the sharp ridge peaks and places they couldn’t built on, and then high winds came along which tore down the power lines to their expensive homes, and those sent arcs of electricity into the ground, and set fire to the dry grass and brush.
Now the beauty of nature is gone along with the homes and power lines and everything else.
This is the result of greed, ignorance, stupidity, laziness, corruption, trust in authority, incompetence…. everything that makes city living and human governance a disaster no matter where on Earth it is.
Humans are stupid. They breed without thought to the consequences. Then they build where they could never live if they were dependent for their survival on the bounty of nature. Then they sob and lament when fires, floods, landslides, volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis destroy their homes and wipe out their populations, even as they decry the loss of another animal species through extinction at the hand of man.
Yeah, I’m one of those people. I don’t like my species very much because unlike most of them, I’m intelligent enough to realize just how bad we are at taking care of our planet. We don’t take care of our planet. We try, we give it lip service, Save The Whales, Save The Baby Harp Seals, we document the massive amount of plastic trash in the ocean, how awful it is, and do nothing about it.
So, NO, I don’t feel sorry for any of them. I live in a fire danger area too, I’ve had to evacuate my home twice in the past 12 years of living here and may live to see it burn down yet. That’s just how it is. No place is really safe but all the safest places cost far too much for me to afford, and if my home burns down, I’ll come back after the fire and build a new home. One thing I won’t do is cry about it, and I’m not going to kill myself to lessen the population problem. What I have done and will continue to do is point out that we have a population problem.
Because if enough people whisper, the sound becomes a roar and gets heard.