How is the weather where you are? 👀

High 30's again today. Half the country is on fire. Haven't seen a blue sky in two days for the smoke. Full moon tonight like a dirty, weak filament bulb in a dungeon. 

* Edited at 11.12.2019, 6:02 AM ET *

@Brown @brad fires are part of the Australian ecosystem. A lot of our plants actually need fires to release seeds for germination (Banksias, blackboys) and they are called pyrophytes. It's really just Global warming causing all the chaos. Irregular rainfall and longer hot seasons have resulted in disastrous fire conditions.




I think Bunya pines are pyros too, but they don't need fire to germinate. The pods weigh a tonne, and the tree is huge, so it's a good ideas not to walk under one during nut season or that might just be the story of you so to speak. Guy up the road had his horse killed by one a few years back now.

It's a bit different in Aus Brad. Like, our landscape literally needs fire in order to self propagate. Blackboy seeds will not be released onto the ground unless the plant catches fire. 
There's a line in the Tao Te ching written by Laozi that reads 'Do you want to improve the world? I do not think it can be done. If you tamper with it, you will ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you will lose it'.

And that sums it all up really. Fires were a part of Biorhythm in Australia long before not just white people, but even indigenous people arrived here. The Aborigines didn't make cricket parks, and shopping centers, and introduce highly flammable exotic species with no fire resistance (most Australian trees will not be killed by fire, they can weather it because they evolved alongside it). They didn't drop cigarettes and break glass that acts as a magnifying class and creates spot fires, they didn't use explosive chemicals, fuels, materials. They didn't start fires with petrol out of pyromania and/or a wish to see everything burn. They didn't create residential estates on fire pathways. 

They didn't actually live in any one place. They were nomads that followed the seasons and the food they brought in different areas. The last thing an indigenous person could have understood was the concept of a fence around a house where the occupants just lived all the time. That would have seemed insane to them. And they would have been right, because although that works in somewhere like England, with its lush beautiful grasslands, soils and consistent rainfall, it's a terrible way to live in a place like Australia. The English did what they knew how to do. It didn't work then, it doesn't now. Aboriginal people had no concept of English property rights. The idea that you could own the Earth in perpetuity seemed absolutely ******* bat**** to them. They were shot for spearing sheep in the early days, but settlers were allowed to hunt and shoot Kangaroos on the same land. They couldn't understand the difference, and why would they have been able to?


So basically, the fires have always been here, but we changed the landscape and set things up in such a way that it devastates us. We're a casualty of our own making. We like to outsource blame when we're the architects of this entire ****show; it's not the fires ******* us, we built a sandcastle at the low tide and blame the moon for knocking it down.


That's what we do--at least in this country. We assess everything through the lens of our needs, wants and expectations and everything else can got to hell, ins't real, or is a third-party consideration. While we're choking and burning to death, no less.

* Edited at 11.12.2019, 8:48 PM ET *