Aerial view of Syncrude Aurora tar sands mine in the Boreal forest north of Fort McMurray.

Ok, so I just donated money to the Red Cross to help out victims of the current wild fires in and around Fort McMurray, but I do so with large reservations. First, there are parts of the Red Cross that have a track record for behaving badly with donated money, and I have a general distrust of large charities, given the level of funds that get plowed back into fund raising and administration, executive salaries being one of the most egregious fouls. I also find it difficult to conceive that our society is built upon such weak links that we have to appeal to people’s empathy to get us to pony up for emergency backstops when this should be a proud function of the common polity through our agent, the government. Sadly, we have too many governments that act as captured read pools for the privileged and who blithely spend money on destruction, administrative waste and subsidies to their sponsors, who even then manage to cook up little schemes such as those highlighted by the KPMG affair and the recent release of the Panama Papers to salt away large swaths of unearned wealth where the common polity can’t touch it and where it can do no good for the general citizenry, as would be the case where we had adequate (or better) resources to fight fires, and to ensure the safety of all those affected by disasters of this, or any, nature.

There is also some (guilty) delicious irony in the location and circumstances of these fires, though, particularly in the face of scientific probity and the more flagrant roadblock of denialism, to actually draw a causal link between the carbon generated by the mining of the Athabaskan Tar Sands and the record hot and dry weather currently contributing to the propagation of hellish levels of forest fire activity. It’s hard to fault those residents of Fort Mac who are the victims of the burn: who turns down the kind of remuneration that oil patchers have been making for the last however many years? But where is the reinvestment resulting from the wealth generated in Canada’s short stint and an Energy Superpower? Not in Canada, mostly, having been shipped out to Shanghai and Houston (Texas, not BC).

As usual, the people in question, in this case the residents of Fort Mac, along with the competent authorities, seem to have made a good job of getting all and sundry out of the place alive, and generally in good health and spirits, if we’re to believe reports in the media (another question entirely, and what else are they hiding under cover of the fire stories?). This speaks to preparation, calm, competence and cooperation, often the operating mode in disasters, per Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built In Hell. The conversation about mutual aid needs to be part of our everyday discourse, particularly when we consider how vulnerable we are to all manner of cataclysms, and any safety net structures we can put in place, along with the attitude adjustment that should accompany that building, will likely stand us in terribly good stead as we get further into a destabilized climate and into the destabilized society that has been occasioned by the plundering of the greedy over, in particular, the last forty years.

(I may have used this before, due to its Karmic implications. Sorry.)