A Distant Mirror

A Distant Mirror is a book by historian Barbara Tuchman: it tells the story of Europe in the 14th Century. During this period Europeans experienced the Hundred Years War, the Black Death, a series of papal wars in Italy, and the Great Schism that set up two rival popes. These events kept the continent in continual turmoil and disrupted or challenged the political, economic, military, social, religious, cultural, and intellectual lives of western Europeans. After 400 years and the deaths of many; the results were simply better-entrenched monarchs, the death of Knighthood and the advent of the longbow (that replaced crossbows), gunpowder, firearms and cannons.

By Jim Beers

I remembered this excellent book as I read an e-mail from Australia yesterday.
Six days ago I distributed a Letter to Washington Post titled, "Environmental Paradoxes as National Pankruptcy and Dishonest Propaganda".This “Letter” was a critique of two articles distributed by that newspaper that blamed catastrophic wildfires on global warming while attempting to justify more, indeed unlimited, federal funding to simultaneously reduce more human uses of renewable natural resources (Wilderness, Roadless, et al) and increase firefighting budgets. The paradox of closing more and more government-owned and controlled lands (45%,55%, more?) to proactive natural resource management tools like timber and range management (thereby creating even more fire-fuel generation and accumulation) while attempting to justify endless amounts of firefighting dollars from an already vastly overdrawn US Treasury apparently eluded both the authors and the newspaper.

Five days after the above “Letter” was distributed I received the e-mail and attachment following this article. The Australian author of the e-mail had read the “Letter” on a website and kindly offered a report of a colleague’s speech presented in Perth, Australia four months ago (April 2015). The issue is a gaggle of urban/green Australians with no experience with but strong emotional opposition to previous renewable natural resource management plus politicians that like Dorian Gray keep a Picture in their attic to cover their actions (sound familiar?) creating future firestorms for others. Fire-fuel reduction efforts for both human safety and property protection have been blackballed as well as forest/grassland management for certain species and uses that offer both national economic benefits and revenue to sustain the necessary resource management programs. Forest/fire-fuel management has evidently been expunged from the vocabulary and government responsibility list much like words, phrases, concept and historic figures have been in the US. The colleague (an “aged professional forester”) was trying his best to explain how the forest fire situation was steadily becoming more and more dangerous to human life and property due to the abandonment of regular fire-fuel reduction programs.

Shades of US Wilderness/Roadless Declarations plus all the Access /Managed Timber and Range/and other land use and management Closures! All the “usual (unprovable and easy-to-blame) suspects” are roaming Australia as well as the US, like “global warming” and “houses surrounded by dense, long-unburnt bush, adjoining a long-unburnt national park”. Just as in the US, he says, “blaming global warming for bushfires is ducking an inconvenient truth. Our bushfire problem in WA (i.e. Western Australia) is the result of mismanagement, of flawed policy and incompetent governance, not climate change.”

“Incompetent governance”, “mismanagement”, “flawed policy”? Why he must be talking about the US! Just like those speaking the loudest and most insistently in this country about government-caused cataclysms such as wolves, grizzly bears, property taking without compensation, and other abuses clothed in high-falutin environmental bombast to disguise their basis in ignorance dressed up as science to implement their anti-human and anti-developed-world agendas.

Why the “colleague” even (like “old” foresters and wildlife biologists in the US) tries to educate the general public as in:

“There was a period in the early days of WA forest and bushfire history, back in the 1930s and 1940s, when it was thought that bushfires could be expunged from the face of the earth. All it would take was a good fire brigade – every time a fire started, you rushed out, bells clanging, and put it out.

This actually is a good approach in a city, or in most farming country. But not in the bush. It took thirty years, from the early-1920s to the mid-1950s to demonstrate the two great flaws in this approach when it comes to forest fires. Firstly, firefighters cannot be everywhere at all times and there will never be enough of them. In a lightning storm you can get dozens of fires starting almost simultaneously, many kilometres apart [1]. The second flaw is that even if the fire brigade could be everywhere at once, no human firefighters can extinguish a forest fire on a bad day burning in heavy bushland fuels. You might just as well try to put out an atom bomb.”

Substitute “forest” for “bush” and “miles” for kilometres” and this could have been spoken in Portland as well as in Perth. I have heard similar things said as I waited to speak myself about wolves, state’s rights and our rogue federal government.

 

Barbara Tuchman’s book about the 14^th century and all its turbulence treated Europe as an entity with many interlocking parts. I think we should start thinking of ourselves (US and Canada) as one with not only Europeans fighting environmentalism and animal rights: I suggest we look to and follow Australia as well. Just as Europe is steadily being re-infested with the wolves they went to so much expense and effort to exterminate centuries ago; Australia is experiencing (like us and Europe) “ostrich-government” wherein political leaders bury their heads in the sand regarding the consequences of their pandering for votes and support from those with ideas about how others should live while they have no dog in the fight themselves. Catastrophic fires, caricatured dingos and wolves, and a woefully ignorant and susceptible-to-blather general public no more educated sufficiently to understand truth based on experience than am I to critique a “paper” on the dietary needs of Martians make a deadly stew for not only individuals and families but national existence as well. Additionally, Australians have had their guns and gun rights taken away as our own US President would do in a New York second given an opening. There is no doubt much we can learn from working more closely with Australian colleagues.

 

They are truly A Distant Mirror worth watching in these perilous times. Like the 14^th Century and even 1914 and 1940, few people imagined what unfettered governments accumulating power could lead to beyond their “flawed policies”, “mismanagement” and “incompetence”. We are seeing more such clues every day and we ignore them at our own and our children’s peril.

 

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Jim Beers is a retired US Fish andWildlife Service Wildlife Biologist, Special Agent, Refuge Manager, Wetlands Biologist, and Congressional Fellow. He was stationed in North Dakota, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York City, and Washington DC. He also served as a US Navy Line Officer in the western Pacific and on Adak, Alaska in the Aleutian Islands. He has worked for the Utah Fish & Game, Minneapolis Police Department, and as a Security Supervisor in Washington, DC. He testified three times before Congress; twice regarding the theft by the US Fish andWildlife Service of $45 to 60 Million from State fish and wildlife funds and once in opposition to expanding Federal Invasive Species authority. He resides in Eagan, Minnesota with his wife of many decades.

 

Jim Beers is available to speak or for consulting. You can receive future articles by sending a request with your e-mail address to: jimbeers7@comcast.net