California: The Hellfire This Time

“The world is getting old and I will have to make it new again.”
--what the Great Spirit said to the Paiute medicine man Wovoka during his Ghost Dance vision on New Years Day 1889.

The most disturbing aspect of the California wildfires is not so much the awful devastation and material loss caused by the fires but the fact that these fires have become an all too common occurrence in the Golden State as well as other western states in the continental U.S.

The decrease in rainfall caused by global warming; the over-development of the West as a whole has depleted the natural resources of the West far past the tipping point in terms of spawning environmental and meteorological disasters. Each year wildfires keep getting more and destructive and the lack of water in the region threatens the ecological existence of the entire region.

It’s sad to see people complaining about the lack of fuel for their cars when they should be more worried about water to drink and water to replenish the parched earth. Humanity lived for millennia without using gasoline and we can live for millennia still if we have the moral courage to resort to alternative energy sources which will not compound the global warming trend. Alternative energy sources are out there but corporate greed roadblocks all attempts to provide the general public with those alternatives.

Meanwhile the world’s supply of drinking water grows more and more scarce. As I said before humanity can live without gasoline but it cannot live without water. Water is life and when there is no water then life ends. The droughts in the West have destroyed forests, vegetation, and rivers. When fires erupt either through natural or human means then the devastation is made even worse. If anything it should be the mission of state and the Federal government to practice new policies which protect existing aquifers in America and seeks to find new sources of drinking water for the American people—and the world.

We sowed the seeds of this catastrophe and now we are reaping the whirlwind—the hellfire this time.