by Patrick Ruckert
September 14, 2020
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20200915-The-West-is-on-Fire-1.pdf?_t=1600217937
While no one alive today has experienced the devastating and deadly wildfires now sweeping the Western states, especially California, Oregon and Washington, the story that dominates the news is that these fires are both unprecedented and caused by global warming, is far from the truth. In fact, these fires bring to the forefront the bankruptcy of the entire argument that all the disasters of nature are caused by mankind’s activity, the industrial economy and overpopulation. What can really be burned to the ground now is that entire Malthusian idea.
Natural disasters, either imposed on mankind, or even sparked by mankind (like wildfires), have been with us forever. What the affects on society they will have is determined by our choice. Do we build the infrastructure and the in-depth, redundant capability, to prevent or mitigate the affects of such developments.
As Lyndon LaRouche has always demonstrated, it is the unleashing of the creative powers of us human beings in creating an “artificial environment” as opposed to the one given to us by “nature.” That is how mankind has always refused to be the subject of nature, but always striven to put nature more and more under the control of man.
And as the great Ukrainian-Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky demonstrated, rather than man merely adjusting to “nature,” man is not only created by nature, but is nature’s most perfect creation, in that, unlike the rest of nature, man is a willfully creative force in the universe. That creative power has given the human species the power to adjust nature to accord with man-kind’s needs and well-being; to reshape nature’s processes by increasing man’s understanding of the principles of the universe, which are really only known to man by the effects of his action on that universe.
That is how mankind knows the future—because he creates it from his imagination, an imagination that brings into being that which never before existed.
We will return to the idea that we should accept the idea that mankind can only adjust to what the environment gives us with reports on how, not only did professional foresters and others, had warned for decades that forest practices and environmentalist policies would lead to exactly the disaster we are now experiencing, but provided, in great detail also, how that vulnerability could be largely eliminated. Had those recommendations been the operational policy decades ago, the fires today would have been only a manageable disturbance.
