Fort McMurray, Alberta, summer 2016, a monster forest fire - nicknamed The Beast - consumed some 500,000 hectares of boreal forest, an area larger than the province of Prince Edward.
"The fire destroyed 2,400 structures, nearly 10 per cent of the city,
when it ripped through in May and forced more than 80,000 residents to
flee."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/alberta/the-fort-mcmurray-disaster-read-the-latest-weekend/article29930041/
Links to our articles on the Big Fire:
http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2016/05/future-climate-alberta-jumps-gun.html
http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2016/05/alberta-forest-fire-update-monster-is.html
http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2016/05/alberta-forest-fire-update-monster-is.html
A year, nearly, has passed since The Beast passed through Alberta, enough time to begin to register some of its long term effects. Since calamitous fires like the Beast will become more common in a greenhouse gas warmed world, we can begin, if not to measure, at least to appreciate what some of the costs of continued fossil fuel use will be.
externalized cost: Fundamentally, cost externalization occurs when a company transfers some
of its moral responsibilities as costs to the community directly or as
degradation to the environment. For example, railroads and airlines
transfer the cost of fuel, noise, and terminal infrastructure to the
community. Airlines and auto manufacturers transfer the cost of degraded
air quality to the community and the environment. By externalizing to
the community or the environment, many true costs become lost in
analysis because the true cost is non-quantifiable and neither the
community nor the environment have effective advocates to recoup the
damages. A major modern theme in the relationship of business to society
is the society's ability (or inability) to resist this kind of externalization. In its extreme, society collapses as business realizes
its profits. (Wikipedia: cost externalizing)
In effect, the long term human and environmental costs of present and future Fort McMurray-type fires are the externalized costs of employing fossil fuels to power our industrial lifestyles. The continually rising costs of these "negative externalities" pose vital questions to industrial society:
1- are the benefits of our modern lifestyles worth the cost?
2- are their other ways - renewable energy, for example - to obtain the benefits of modernity while avoiding the rising externalized costs whose impacts we are finally beginning to appreciate?
What then will some of the future costs of continued fossil fuel use be? What can we expect?
For openers, the brave, self-sacrificing men who physically and emotionally over-extended themselves fighting The Beast are (probably) damaged for life:
"The University of Alberta study found one in five of the 355
firefighters surveyed reported persistent respiratory issues including
coughing, breathlessness, wheezing and chest tightness. And they're battling more than just physical ailments — mental-health issues affect 1 in 6."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fort-mcmurray-wildfire-firefighter-study-1.4073284
While it is still too early to tell what the long term impacts of the Fort McMurray fire will be, the earlier Slave Lake fire of 2011 may offer some insights:
"Coutts said the Slave Lake fire hit his department hard — half the
firefighters quit within the subsequent two years, and many reported
ongoing respiratory issues."
Imagine! Fifty percent felt obliged to quit their profession because of psychological and / or physical aftereffects. These are the kind of human - and social - costs we should expect on our greenhouse gas warmed future earth. Think of all the money invested in training those fire fighters and all their experience lost. Then there are long term public health costs, to be borne primarily by the taxpayer (not the fossil fuel corporations or their "officers"). Consider also the human costs of post-traumatic stress disorder and broken health: self-medication, drug and alcohol abuse, broken families.. A vast out-rippling of hidden costs and suffering resulting from our collective addiction to fossil fuels. Are the benefits really worth the costs? (Especially as these costs will escalate dramatically in the coming decades..)
'At the end of the day, you're basically trading a piece of your life away to help people.'
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/fort-mcmurray-wildfire-firefighter-study-1.4073284
At least researchers on post-traumatic stress disorder are making some money from the fire (but the taxpayers still foot the bill..)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/one-million-dollars-ptsd-fort-mcmurray-wildfire-1.4073187
"I'm not a professor, I'm just someone learning to deal with mental illness" - climate changed induced mental illness.. (see video link in above article)
Jacques Barzun and Henry F Graff: The Modern Researcher (Harcourt, Brace and World, NY, 1970), page 172, on the nature of causality:
"The historical researcher is thus led to adopt a practical distinction about causality that has already commended itself to workers in physical science. They draw attention to the difference between causation that occurs in a long chain of events of various kinds and causation within a closed system. An example of the first is: the forming of a cloud, the darkening of the sun to earth dwellers, the lowering of temperature, people putting on coats, a thunderstorm bursting, a person taking refuge under a tree and being struck by lightning and killed. This chain of 'causes' is miscellaneous and each event in it unpredictable, not because it is not determined, but because it occurs outside any controlled or controllable limits. As against this, in the physics laboratory, an elastic body of known stresses and strains goes through a series of evolving states; at any moment a single definite distribution of measured stress and strains is the effect of the previous moment, which may therefore be regarded as its complete cause, as the cause.
The distinctive feature of the first kind of causality is that there is no restriction on the events that may be related. It is open to the observer's insight to select, not causes in sense number two, but conditions that belong to the chain and have the merit of interesting him and his audience. It is for them to judge whether the resulting narrative is intelligible, consonant with the experience of the race, and useful in orienting the mind amid the welter of facts."
During the heyday of scientific (or "scientistic") thinking, some thinkers believed that all knowledge of the world could be reduced to logic and mathematics. Some believed that the evolution of society was a deterministic, rule-driven process whose "Laws" could be derived through empirical study and logical analysis (Karl Marx). Today such ideas strike us as quaint or dangerous (note 1) It was even dreamed for a while that history would become a branch of science!
The Modern Researcher is described as "the classic manual on all aspects of research and writing". It is that and more, one of those inspired "sui generis" - one of a kind, hard to characterize works. Not just a "how-to" manual on the use of index cards to keep notes, the authors also explore fascinating "philosophical" questions on the nature and goals of research and verification or on the nature of causality and truth.
In the above quote, what Bazrun and Graff are suggesting is, to my way of thinking, much more radical, than it first appears. It is instructive that they use the term "narrative" to describe what history is. The criteria used to evaluate history's story - "interesting", "intelligible", "consonant" with individual or collective experience, and "useful" (itself subjective, depending upon whose use) seem more "aesthetic" than "scientific" in nature. No longer is history seen as the description of something "objective", "out there" (which is how science views its work) but rather as an artistic endeavor of creating something new and vital from the raw, dead data that chronology provides. Thus, say the authors, each generation must create its own history anew. The work of the historian is never finished then..
But more interestingly - more disturbing, too - if history is more akin to art, literature and myth than to science, math or logic, what are the criteria with which to judge history? What distinguishes good from bad history?
The authors' words - originally penned sixty years ago - were perhaps a bit ahead of their time. Today, as dissatisfaction with science and its accomplishments grows, it is obvious that people are turning to "mythic representations" of the world. A crude form of the "Golden Age" - to which we must return to be saved - is echoed in Donald Trump's campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again!" The rising tide of ecological disasters taps into that potent Judeo-Christian Archetype, the End Days (Apocalypse). Sometimes, the Apocalypse is reduced to mere justification for the status quo. American fundamentalist "christians" claim that these disasters are "Signs" of the End Days. Environmentalist activists are then accused of doing Satan's work since God has planned for earth's near destruction. An interesting perversion and corruption of a religious myth if there ever was one! God made responsible for human stupidity and greed.. Blasphemy, I say!
http://transparencycanada.blogspot.ca/2016/07/book-review-toward-buddhist-ecology.html
notes:
1- historical determinism / fatalism / fascism: studies by clinical psychologists of fascist and fascist sympathizers during and immediately after World War II revealed that "authoritarians" tend to see the world in black / white, stereotypic ways, often with a rejection of the idea of free will and self-determination. (Authoritarian thinkers are found, generally, at both extremes of the political spectrum: Stalinist communists were as "fascist" ans authoritarian as any nazis.) Part of the worldview of the fascist or authoritarian usually involves
- Substitution and
Stereotypy -- superstition, cliché, categorization and fatalistic determinism (for
example, the Nazi ideology's cult of "racial determinism", one does
what one does because one's ancestors came from a certain part of the
world).
See, for example, http://www.cepsr.com/clanek.php?ID=328
Such world views are dangerous because they lead to false - or, at best - oversimplified - causal connections between events between, for example, being a bad person and being Jewish (Nazis), Muslim (islamophobes) or Mexican (Donald Trump during the 2016 US Presidential Election).
robbed
of their childhood? Not much happiness there (probably not much
curiosity or sense of wonder either..) Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth
League).
