This Girl is on Fire
“Man is not adapted to live in a mirror-lined box, generating his own electric light and sending for selected images from outside when he needs them. Darkness and bad smell are all that can come from that. We need a vast world, and it must be a world that does not need us; a world constantly capable of surprising us, a world we did not program, since only such a world is the proper object of wonder. “ ~Madge Midgley
I couldn’t bring myself to post this essay on actual Earth Day because it’s such a day chock full of utter empty performative bullshit. Hey you Earth Hater you! You’re not recycling HARD ENOUGH! You must Buy MORE things so you have MORE to recycle!!!!! C’mon!!!! GET WITH IT!!!! DO YOUR PART, MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Actually, real bullshit would be fine, because actual bullshit can at least decompose and feed the soil IF given the right conditions to do so (but sadly we mostly don’t create such conditions, wah wah). But Earth Day is like some high falootin’ patented Bill Gates made-in-a-lab synthetic bullshit substitute that claims to have no foul smell but the “cutting edge” technology used to produce it will further prove that “human ingenuity” can always find increasingly convoluted “green” and “sustainable” ways to dig our own grave as well as the mass graves of countless other lifeforms. It’s like, Dude (and it is dudes), just STOP FRIGGIN’ DIGGING!!!!!!!!!!
THIS GIRL IS ON FIRE
No, not me. HER.
I just realized that Alicia Keys accidentally wrote a third person narrative on global warming from the perspective of Mother Earth with her ballad ‘Girl on Fire’…...
She’s just a girl and she’s on fire
Hotter than a fantasy,
lonely like a highway
This hot mess of a fantasy of ours — this capitalistic, colonizing, consumerist, competitive, cutthroat, individualistic, industrialized, infinite growth fantasy life we lead, this wet dream of the one percent….it has lit Her at both ends, and if she dares fight back then this fantasy culture deems her a threat and ties Her down like Dumbo’s mother, using chains we made from the very ore we ripped from Her body! Such cruel irony. Heh, maybe that’s why it’s called IRONy.
She’s shackled but not blindfolded, and is made to watch on as this culture tortures Her children, decimates Her coral reefs and rain forests, blows up Her mountain tops and ocean floors, wipes out Her Buffalo and Passenger Pigeons, threatens Her Prairie Dogs (down to only 1% of their original population) and White Rhinos (only two individual rhinos are left, and both are female).
She cannot take much more.
She pissed.
But Her anger is lost on us dummies. We ignore Her outbursts like an unruly child.
As Her temper rises so does Her temperature. And Her fever will never ever break as long as we prevent Her from fighting this nasty ghastly infection brought on by this hot viral fantasy of ours.
“Hey there”, you might be saying, “you are really anthropomorphizing the heck out of her, er, I mean the Earth, not HER….see, now you got ME doing it too!”
NOPE. I’m not.
She is the one who anthropomorphized us in the first place, She is the source. We are made in HER image. What we think of as human attributes are actually pretty universal. Humans don’t have a monopoly on the energy that can manifest as emotion, as thought, as love, as rage, as jealousy, as cooperation, as consciousness, as birdwatching……
If anything, civilization has de-anthropomorphized us, made us LESS human, LESS able to express our species’ unique take on what it means to be an Earthling. And if we are to rescue what is left of our shrinking cowering humanity, what is left of our affinity with Her, then we must start digging ourselves out from the rubble of all this generational trauma and corporate brainwashing and political corruption and empty promises and short term solutions and guilt and single use plastic and spent syringes and crushing isolation and lonely highways….highways that replaced the well worn paths we once walked along with Her, on Her body….back when our destination WAS Her (not friggin’ Mars! If we just wait long enough then Earth will look as lifeless as that red planet).
Like a neglected lover, She asks Herself “Why don’t they want to touch me anymore?”
She got both feet on the ground
And she’s burning it down
Ohhhh oh oh oh oh
She got her head in the clouds
And she’s not backing down
This girl is on fire
Rarely do the bare soles of our feet make direct contact with Her anymore. She can’t understand why we would go to all the trouble of extracting materials from Her body just to refine them into footwear and pavement and flooring that deny both us and Her that essential mother/child skin-to-skin contact needed for proper long term bonding. All these barriers act as condoms for our very souls, greatly diminishing the pleasures of making love with Life itself, reducing our sensation of what it means to be alive, to be Earthlings….all because we’ve been scared into thinking we could catch something gross from Her if we don’t use “protection”. But this protection puts SO MUCH in the gravest of danger!
And how torturous it must be for Her that the machines we use (again, machines made from Her OWN BODY) to extract these raw materials — that we then turn into unnecessary protective gear — are powered by the relentless grave robbing of Her fossilized kin. It’s the ultimate game of ‘Stop Hitting Yourself, Stop Hitting Yourself’ that we’re playing with Her.
How did we ever become such bullies?
Looks like a girl, but she’s a flame
So bright, she can burn your eyes
Better look the other way
You can try but you’ll never forget her name
She’s on top of the world
Hottest of the hottest girls say
Ohhhh oh oh oh
A common narrative you often hear from the most radical environmental circles is that climate change isn’t the biggest issue when it comes to the ecological crisis….they say that biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, pollution & toxicity are the main offenders. And this may be true….for now. But these things are all connected. More habitat loss will create more warming. There is no way around it, unprecedented warming is coming, even if — say it with me now….we stopped burning all fossil fuels today. There is just way too much CO2 already up there, and too many tipping points have already been crossed that will result in at least a 2 or 3 (or more!) degree temperature rise by the end of the century, rendering much of the planet too hot for much of Life to thrive. And every other day it seems scientists are telling us this warming is coming — just like nearly every guy I’ve had sex with — “faster than expected”. We’re informed that the ice caps are melting “ahead of schedule” as if the demise of Nature is some kind of 5 year business plan. We don’t have 5 years! David Bowie (RIP) warned us of this decades ago! But did we listen???? If we don’t listen to prime Ziggy Stardust Bowie then who WILL we ever listen to?????
The 2021 wildfire season in California is predicted to be even worse than last year’s record breaking season. This is because the ‘fuel-moisture content’, which measures the ratio of moisture to natural combustible material, is historically low.
Average fuel-moisture content in the wild is 137 percent; low is usually considered to be 115 percent. Right now, in 2021, the Northern California region is at 97 percent. Lower fuel-moisture content means higher flammability, and so higher chances of wildfires.
And guess what the fuck else? Research is showing that forests are not growing back like they used to after fires. Fire is supposed to help regenerate forests. Some trees actually need fire for their seeds to germinate. But now hotter weather and drier conditions are preventing some forests from growing back at all after a fire. An analysis of forests across the Rockies found that a third of the forests there had not come back since 2000.
Climate change has lengthened the dry season in the Amazon and rainfall has declined in certain areas there. The trees that prefer drier conditions are doing ok, but the majority of tree species there prefer wet humid conditions and simply cannot adapt to such rapid change and so are dying off.
Forests absorb around one-quarter of all human made carbon emissions annually, so the more that forests die back they will start to switch from storing carbon to emitting it, because dead trees release all the carbon they have accumulated and if new trees aren’t growing in their place to take up the carbon then you have a runaway crazytrain of heating coming down the line. {It’s insane that the actual Amazon could potentially become as dangerous as Amazon, who has opened up a record number of warehouses in southern California since the pandemic started which has been linked to a spike in pollution in that area which is affecting poor communities of color the most but that’s the price we must pay for the sick fantasy same day delivery. A fantasy where Jeff Bezos makes $191,000 an HOUR!….oh wait, that can’t be right because that’s criminally insane…Ah yes, I was indeed mistaken, he actually makes…let me see here………….$191,000……A FUCKING MINUTE!!!!!!!!! He is paid the median Amazon employee salary every NINE SECONDS.}
But listen, all this scientific research really is pointless if it does not lead to action, if it does not convince us to actually STOP complying with these systems run by sociopathic arsonists. At this point, most environmental analysis is basically just a bunch of untested rape kits. The incriminating data is collected and put on a shelf somewhere but no one is ever held accountable for all the raping, so much raping, the raping of Her…our friggin’ mother! Our mother is being raped and too many of us can’t even hear the rape whistle!
{Fun side fact: it’s “estimated” that there are at least 200,000 untested rape kits full of dusty semen just sitting on the shelves of police storage facilities all across this great great country of ours. Yet another reason to ABOLISH THE FUCKING POLICE FOREVER AND EVER AMEN. And if you lift the automatic Patriarchy filter that skews the numbers in its favor then I’m sure 200,000 is a grotesque underestimation}
Professor Stephen J Pyne has coined the term ‘Pyrocene’ to describe the era we have entered where fire will dominate Earth.
Stephen speaks of 3 kinds of fire (from his essay ‘The Planet is Burning’)….
“All fires take apart what photosynthesis puts together. But not all fires behave the same way. Three fires now exist, and they interact in a kind of three-body dynamic. The first fire is nature’s. It has existed since plants first colonised continents. It can be lumpy in space and time; it depends on lightning’s lottery to kindle suitable fuels. The second fire is humanity’s. It’s what humans have done as they moved from cooking food to cooking landscapes, and because it feeds on the same grasses, shrubs and woods as first-fire, the two fires compete for fuels: what one burns the other can’t, and neither can break beyond the ecological boundaries set by their biotic matrix. Second-fire can extend the domain and timing of burning — can recode the patches and pulses of fire on living landscapes. Third-fire transcends the others. It burns fossil biomass, a fuel which is outside the biotic box of the living world. Where third-fire flourishes, the others don’t, or can burn only in special preserves or as genuinely wild breakouts. After a period of transition, third-fire erases the others, leaving ecological messes behind. Because it doesn’t burn living landscapes, those combustibles grow and pile up and create conditions for more damaging burns; because it isn’t in a biotic box, its smoke can overwhelm local airsheds and its emissions can clog the global atmosphere.”
{Also have a listen to this excellent interview with Stephen on the Last Born in the Wilderness Podcast}
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery — isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski,
But apart from the 3 fires Stephen speaks of, there is a 4th fire, one much more elemental and without it the other fires take over and unchecked imbalances and chaos ensues. This 4th fire drives Life itself to….in the words of Jeff Goldblum in ‘Jurassic Park’, “find a way”…..a way to find meaning and purpose, to contribute to and strengthen the web of life.
Sadly the 4th fire has been reduced to mere embers.
As a little kid, all I wanted was to do was seek out and create beauty, as to feed this ember. Playing dress up. Making forts. Drawing. Gathering wildflowers and rocks and shells and arranging them, admiring them, beholding them. I did it without any overt instruction from others, but from the ember itself, an ember that was once a raging fire that humanity constantly tended to and was in awe of and yes harnessed but didn’t abuse……but now the cinders of this 4th fire are spread few and far between.
Too many of us stopped tending the 4th fire.
Too many of us have been convinced there is no value in doing so.
Too many of us are living fantasy lives that are quelling the real lives of those among us who still harbor the remaining embers.
Too many of us are afraid of what might happen if we turn once again to the 4th fire and let the 3rd fire burn out.
Too many of us simply don’t have the means to get off the hampster wheel of the 3rd fire because if we do we will be punished or even die….but we are going to die anyways if we DON’T get off this wretched ferris wheel of flames!
But fire’s ultimate goal is regeneration. Fire will bring about a return to beauty one way or another, with or without us.
We got our feet on the ground
And we’re burning it down
Ohhhh oh oh oh oh
Got our head in the clouds
And we’re not coming down
This girl is on fire
Our failure to burn to the ground these artificial industrial corporate systems only allows this rampant raging fire called industrial civilization to grow and spread.
The embers of the 4th fire want desperately to be fed so they can burn through all this built up unnatural synthetic kindling we’ve created, but those in power are dead set on a controlled burn. They scream “Theater!” in a crowded fire, telling us to remain calm and peaceful and not to “revert” to violence as they themselves violently set fire to more and more ecosystems, to more and more sections of the theater…starting with the cheap seats…all while boarding up the emergency exits and distracting us with evermore glowing screens of captivating artificial light — which mimics the real light, the real fires: the stars, the candles, the hearths, the campfires and flickering flames we once gathered around, the flames that fed us. The electrified light we see by at night is not our fire, it is the zombie ghost of an original fire, one that already did it’s time here, one that burned long ago and was buried under the weight of Her. But we won’t let it rest.
We are being starved to death by these oppressive arsonist systems we live under and we do not seem to have the ability to turn our starvation into a deliberate fasting. We must find a way to abstain. To use less. To do less. To share. To help one another get off this dreadful treadmill and then beat the shit out of it, a la this scene from ‘Office Space’…
Imagine a world where you would never ever need a printer ever again for any reason whatsoever, ever. Or a treadmill, or a computer, or a cell phone, or a soda stream machine, or bottled water, or a car (of ANY kind). Seems like a pretty ridiculous thing to imagine considering that humans lived, and lived WELL, without these things for like hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, ALL OTHER ANIMALS (and some humans) are somehow living without these things right the fuck now.
But the arsonists in charge tell us that in order to stop the Pyrocene from getting out of control we must start even MORE fires. High profile arsonists like Elon Musk (whose name sounds like a cheap cologne for cyborgs) push for an “electrification” of cars and a “greening” of the electrical grid, nevermind that a whole slew of mineral deposits will be dragged from their final resting places and made to serve this insatiable arsonist culture. To replace all current cars with electric ones would require an unfathomable amount of mining for copper, nickel, graphite, cobalt, and lithium just to name a few. Contrary to popular belief, this mining would not be done effortlessly by fairies, Keebler Elves, Oompa Loompas, or any kind of magical creature. It will be done using heavy machinery that will further destroy ecosystems, often using exploited human labor.
Then some fucknut Billionaire will come along and propose a new fangled technology that will put out all the horrific fires started by all that “green energy” production, but of course that will in turn ignite even more fires elsewhere. We HAVE to just STOP. We can’t put it off any longer. But these ding dongs will never give up their culture of stalling, a culture that has made them so very rich and powerful. They will never stop proudly proclaiming that by (insert some abstract far off date here that removes us from the NOW and sidesteps taking any real responsibility) we will achieve zero fires, zero emissions, zero cow farts, zero calories, zero all things bad.
Fantasy.
There is no way to get ahead by way of this sheer madness, no way to ever ever catch up. Every proposed solution just adds more fuel to the fires. There is no magic bullet, because bullets only do harm, we need to stop making bullets, period. We must see Civilization for the ponzi scheme it is. There is no way to “green” a death camp. To announce that half of all new cars will be electric by 2030 (As Biden has said) is like Hitler announcing that the gas chambers will eventually be powered by renewable energy someday. JUST SHUT THAT SHIT DOWN, PRONTO.
It’s like they say — you have to spend money to make money, right?
Oooooorrrrr…..you can get rid of the absurd, unfair, unjust, imaginary, reality-obscuring concept of money altogether. Our entire existence and survival within these madcapped systems we are trapped in is centered around “saving money”. And this leaves little to no culture for saving Nature, or saving ourselves from these systems, or saving the oceans, the forests, the wetlands, the insects, the endangered Palawan Bearded Pig — threatened with extinction because of fucking PALM OIL. The fuck.
Imagine if instead of seeing how much stuff we can get, we were focused on how much biodiversity we could help create. Imagine instead of having a credit score we had a Nature score (newsflash: everyone’s Nature credit is in the toilet, partly because of toilets and our entire crappy — pun intented — waste water treatment systems). Instead of monetary debt, imagine we had a society based on paying our debt back to Nature and to those most victimized and exploited by this taker culture. Just imagine.
Are you imagining?????
Everybody stares, as she goes by
Cause they can see the flame that’s in her eyes
Watch her when she’s lighting up the night
Nobody knows that she’s a lonely girl
And it’s a lonely world
But she gonna let it burn baby, burn baby
This girl is on fire
Thanks to Industrial Civilization, She truly is such a lonely girl. Just since 1970 alone over 68% of wildlife populations have been obliterated by this fantasy culture we worship. Since the dawn of civilization, somewhere around 10,000 years ago, half of all plants have been wiped out! HALF! We have been emptying Her out of all Her closest and dearest friends while filling Her up with cloned fantasy versions of them: forever fields of genetically modified monocrops and lawn turf. And there’s our fantasy fauna…the ones we’ve domesticated to serve only us and not Her. 94% of all land mammals are now comprised of us and our slave animals (mostly cows) who mostly aren’t permitted to even give Her the time of day because they are confined and forced to eat the fantasy grains. Two thirds of all birds on Earth are now domesticated poultry…mostly chickens. The wild jungle fowl that we bred chickens from had a vastly different relationship with Her than the chicken who lives its short tortured life in a dark cage….even the chicken that is “allowed” access to a prison yard still knows nothing of freedom compared to it’s ancient wild self. Civilization is turning Her lands into one big prison yard and She isn’t even permitted any visitation rights.
And our own humanity has been largely emptied out too, replaced with helpless lifeless sterile watered down versions of ourselves that mistreat and ignore Her (unless we want something from Her).
Playing with fire used to be a good thing, now it’s a negative phrase we use for danger (so much of our modern industrial language pulls this switcheroo as to control and domesticate us, to make us look upon nature as scary and yucky….the word bullshit for example that I mentioned earlier — Ecologically speaking, bullshit is black gold! We should be using that word to describe life giving regenerative things!).
That 3rd fire that Stephen J Pyne described, that fossil fueled conquest driven fire has greatly skewed and corrupted our relationship with the essence of fire. We used to walk with fire. But this hot fantasy we’re trapped in is both a flame retardant and a blow torch. As this fantasy world heats up, mending our estranged broken relationship with fire (and with nearly EVERYTHING and EVERYONE) will be essential in bringing us back from the precipice of unimaginable loss….if that is even possible at this point. Without a return to reciprocity we are about to find out how something so hot and crowded can feel so cold and lonely.
