After the Fire: A Parable

The fire is upon us. What grows back amidst the ash is up to us.

Photo by Pablo Martinez on Unsplash

A forest, teetering on the edge for a generation, burns to the ground. We knew that the forest was unwell—that we’d taken it for granted and rarely considered its needs. But this—collapse—this seemed impossible. But it’s here, and so are we.

A generation ago, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich came into the forest and marveled at the possibilities contained in its white ashes, with their grooved bark and wide canopies. In these homes for caterpillars and woodpeckers, voles and owls, the men saw the timber they needed to make baseball bats. But instead of swinging for the fences, they aimed at their fellow Americans. Crack. Whack. Smack.

After 9/11, we built a bat factory. Most of these bats were bound for the Middle East, where we tried to sell the local people on the joys of baseball by hitting them with our bats. It didn’t work. Back at home, more sophisticated forest management practices siphoned nutrients from the soil and diverted them to the bat-making ashes and the most established oaks—the one percent that needed no help—leaving the rest of the ecosystem with less. Through mycelium networks and reciprocity, the remaining forest made do, but in a weakened state.

Gail force winds met the next cadre of foresters as they arrived. They saw old trees lurching, their branches snapping, their trunks creaking. Instead of letting them become nurse logs for the next generation, they put a TARP over them, nursing them back to health while the nutrient-starved soil suffered. As these giants reasserted themselves, they forgot about the help they’d received, and stretched out their canopies, crowding out the sun for the seedlings that were struggling to grow. The foresters tried their damndest, introducing earthworms and beetles, clearing away some of the underbrush, but the forest became febrile, and the white ash stand continued to shrink as the pile of bats grew.

The next guy came with a simple cure—burn it all down. Replace it with a big, beautiful building cast in his own orange image, with a few oaks in the yard—not as splendid or important as the building, but with more space and less competition than before. Brush fires burned, but enough of the forestry team stuck around to keep the flames small. Yet after a generation of nutrient siphoning, those acts of arson destabilized the root network that kept the forest alive. The place was dying.

The next group diagnosed the problem and got to work restoring the soil, planting native species that’d gone missing, implementing solutions on a forest—but not human—timescale. In a society demanding instant gratification and quick results, the deep work below the surface was unseen, and so it was untrusted. We returned the arsonist to power.

He came back as his fully unbounded self, Agent Orange. After firing the foresters, he committed the ecocide he’d long dreamed of, exfoliating the land, poisoning the soils, eradicating animal life, and building monuments to himself. He reveled in the destruction. Having defoliated the place, he dropped a match to watch it burn—and burn it does.

Agent Orange will eventually exit the stage: the question for us, is what will we do in the ashes?

The hopeful version of this story—the one that I want to believe—follows the classic arc of rebirth. For while fire destroys, it also purifies and cleanses.

There are seeds underground—fire poppies and fireweeds—waiting for the embers to die out so that they can germinate and spring forth from the ash, enlivening the landscape in a shock of orange and pink. Beautiful and unexpected; healing and replenishing the soil with their beauty.

If we’re lucky, the fire will also coax a cone no bigger than a lime into opening its scales and releasing a few hundred cornflake-sized seeds into a nest of ash. Most of these seeds will turn to food, but a few will tuck into the uncrowded ash and begin to sprout roots. If all goes according to plan, they will grow for thousands of years, stretching over 300 feet into the air and spanning 25 feet across the trunk. Anchoring the landscape, creating shelter and habitat, inspiring awe, these are the giant sequoia.

We have the curse and opportunity of living through a hinge point in history. The fire is upon us; the seeds are in the ground. What grows back amidst the ash is up to us.