We didn't start the fire....

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/04/28/wildfires/index.html

A headline news piece that I'm sure will be tattooed over television screens at seven o'clock eastern standard time this evening. But the crisis with this situation lies not with natural ignition (assuming is was not human caused, although the theory would still hold up) of an area which threatens the lives of many people, but why in the world people would reside in a place which naturally burns.

The town of Sierra Madre, California lies at the base of Mount Wilson, about 20 miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles. On the edge of the Angeles National forest, 1000 people working or living in the area have been displaced by this raging beast of nature. But the reality of the situation is another example of human beings placing themselves within harms way of natural cyclic occurrences. Like many other cities formed from the urban sprawl and the subsequent white flight of the residents of Los Angeles, people are now living in places where natural "disasters" are frequent.

Lets be very honest with ourselves: these are not disasters. If you live in the city of Sacramento, California, you must understand that you are in a flood plain of two different rivers. If you live in San Francisco, you must understand that you live on the fault line of two tectonic plates and they are constantly moving and friction is caused. We have settled in places where natural cycles of the earth are a threat to the way we currently live. Now there are very few places, if any, where one could be considered completely safe from natural threats to human life. But there are places where the likelihood of "disaster" is much greater than others, and places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New Orleans are on the top of that list for this country.

We can already see a reaction to this type of environment if we look at the city of Venice in Italy. Venice was poorly planned and the city was built in a marshland that could not sustain the weight of human housing. Along with other problems such as odor and high costs of maintenance, people are now leaving the city for good and the possibility that the area will be completely abandoned is fairly probable.

This leads to the most prevalent and controversial discussion of similar decision that will need to be made about one of the cities within our border: the previously mentioned city of New Orleans. As many of us now know, New Orleans exists between the Mississippi River and Lake Ponchartrain, and is kept dry by failing levees which were unfortunately breached during the summer of 2005. But the reality is that the city is below the sea levels of these two bodies of water, and it is sinking.

As my friend Jon is laboring with blood, sweat and tears (read his account http://notafirefly.blogspot.com/) to try and aid in the rebuilding process, the question becomes whether or not is reasonable to rebuild an area that is going to be hit by "disaster" again. There is not a question of if, but rather one of when.

Is rebuilding New Orleans an example of restoring a historic city which hundreds of thousands call home or a reconstruction of dominos set to topple by the hands of the natural surroundings in which the city was built?

" We gotta be prepared in this day and age, we gotta
be prepared for whatever comes the fuck at us." ~Immortal Technique

Shouting in a crowded room

Food crisis, health crisis, environmental crisis, economic crisis, political crisis.

A short shuffle through any on-line or print news source will no doubt reveal one of these phrases within the multiples of diet plans and American Idol losers. This country has lost one of the pillars upon which it was founded crumble: stability. Job security is a joke, buying a home is delaying an inevitable foreclosure, and even those retirement funds, whether from the governmental taxes you've paid all of your life or the one that an ever-rising stock market promises, is unstable as a Cincinnati Bengal criminal record.


We no longer have the ability to rely on either the economic system that dominates American society or the government that is run by it. We can no longer trust the industries which advertise their control over society while overusing and polluting the environment which we require to live. We can no longer go haphazardly through the day with the illusory concept that our current behaviors are sustainable and atrocities and against humanity do not exist. We are ceasing to evolve as citizens and living longer as ignoramuses.


Actions cannot begin until consciousness is achieved. "I, the person" must become "We, the people". This is me shouting in a crowded room and there is a major fire that you can see but are not aware of.