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Fire in the West is expected, and not so long ago, it seemed something the West experienced more than anywhere else. Nationally, big fires were treated as another freak of western violence, like a grizzly bear attack, or another California quirk, like Esalen and avocados.

Now, the wildland fires flare up everywhere. There are fires in Algeria and Turkey, Amazonia and Indonesia, and France, Canada and Australia. Last year, even Greenland burned.

Fire seasons have lengthened, fires have gotten meaner and bigger, and fires have begun not just gorging on logging slash and prowling the mountainous backcountry but also burning right into and across towns. Three years ago in northern California, the Camp Fire broke out along the Feather River and, burning southwest, incinerated the town of Paradise. Now, the Dixie Fire, starting 20 miles north in the same drainage, is burning in the opposite direction, taking out the historic town of Greenville. The fires have us coming and going.

The causes have been analyzed and reanalyzed, like placer miners washing and rewashing tailings. Likewise, the solutions have been reworked and polished until they have become clichs, ready to spill into the culture wars.

The news media have fire season branded into their almanac of annual events. Scientific disciplines are publishing reports and data sets at an exponential rate. So far as understanding the fire scene, weve hit field capacity. What more can we say?

One trend is to go small and find meaning in the personal. But there is also an argument to go big and frame the story at a planetary scale that can shuffle all the survival memoirs, smoke palls that travel across the continent, melting ice packs, lost and disappearing species and sprawling frontiers of flame, in much the way we organize the swarm of starlight in a night sky into constellations.

Im a fire guy. I take fire not just as a random happening but as an emergent property thats intrinsic to life on Earth.

So I expect fires. All those savanna fires in Africa, the land-clearing fires in Brazil and Sumatra, the boreal blowouts in Siberia and British Columbia, the megafires in the Pacific Northwest all the flames we see.

But then there are fires that should be present and arent the fires that once renewed and stabilized most of the land all over our planet. These are the fires that humanity, with its species monopoly on combustion, deliberately set to make living landscapes into what the ancients termed a second nature.

But it was not enough. We wanted yet more power without the constraints of living landscapes that restricted what and when we could burn. We turned to fossil fuels to burn through day and night, winter and summer, drought and deluge. With our unbounded firepower, we remade second nature into a third nature, one organized around industrial combustion.

Our fires in living landscapes and those made with fossil fuels have been reshaping the Earth. The result is too much bad fire and too little good and way too much combustion overall.

Add up all those varieties of burning and we seem to be creating the fire equivalent of an Ice Age, with continental shifts in geography, radical changes in climate, rising sea level, a mass extinction and a planet whose air, water, soil and life are being refashioned at a breakneck pace.

Its said that every model fails, but some are useful. The same holds true for metaphors. What the concept of a planetary Fire Age a Pyrocene gives us is a sense of the scale of our fire-powered impact. It suggests how the parts might interact and who is responsible. It allows us to reimagine the issues and perhaps stand outside our entrenched perspectives.

What we have made if with unintended consequences we can unmake, though we should expect more unknown consequences.

We have a lot of fire in our future and a lot to learn about living with it.

Steve Pyne is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the author of The Pyrocene. How We Created an Age of Fire and What Happens Next.

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Writers on the Range: Our new age of fire - Steamboat Pilot and Today

In the seemingly endless battle to deny disfavored groups equal citizenship, Republican lawmakers around the country have repurposed an old tool to new and cruel effect. Theyve inverted private enforcement laws marshaled over the years to discipline fraudulent government contractors, racist or sexist bosses and toxic polluters to enable individuals to suppress the rights of their neighbors, classmates and colleagues. Most prominent among these new laws is SB 8, Texass heartbeat bill. The law bans abortions six weeks into a pregnancy, lets anyone bring a lawsuit against medical practitioners who violate the ban and provides cash bounties of at least $10,000 (plus legal fees and costs) to encourage such litigation.

SB 8 captured the nations attention this week when the Supreme Court refused to block its implementation, precisely because, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the other dissenting justices noted, it is enforced by private individuals, not the state.

Gutting Roe v. Wade, especially in this backdoor fashion, is a staggering blow to equality in America. And in fact, the president of Floridas State Senate just promised to introduce a copycat bill in the coming legislative session. But the subversion of private enforcement laws to restrict individual rights goes far beyond abortion. Since the beginning of this year, Tennessee has authorized students and teachers to sue schools that allow transgender students to use the restrooms that match their gender identity; Florida has followed suit, with a law that allows students to sue schools that permit transgender girls to play on girls sports teams.

Additional bills are in the works across several jurisdictions authorizing parents to sue schools if teachers or outside speakers mention the principles of critical race theory. And theres every reason to expect that red states will push private enforcement further to election monitoring and perhaps even immigration enforcement. Its only a matter of time before these states decide to empower individuals to bring suits for injunctive relief and damages against people who engage in activities like handing out water to minority voters waiting in hourslong lines to vote. States could similarly deputize anyone to sue employers or landlords of undocumented persons, pushing Dreamers who are currently protected by DACA out of work and into the streets.

These laws dont just tee up a lot of new and nettlesome lawsuits; theyre part of a campaign to make us forget what rights really are. Up until now, the law usually conferred rights on people who were seeking to exercise personal autonomy over their bodies, their words or their votes. This new breed of private enforcement laws inverts that paradigm, giving rights to people who are merely offended by what they see, hear or imagine.

This reassignment lacks any foundation in our constitutional traditions (except those built on theories of subordination, such as Jim Crow). Instead, its the product of what might be labeled populist outrage discourse everything from Tucker Carlson monologues to the irate grocery store customers who assert their inalienable right to shop maskless, even if doing so violates the wishes of the proprietor and endangers those around them.

The financial incentives to enforce laws like SB 8 will provide crucial support for groups who are already waging todays culture wars. In essence, the states are manufacturing and subsidizing a community of grievance activists. Their work will provide headlines for allies in the right-wing press to stoke the divisions that are necessary for a minoritarian political party whose only other chief contribution is tax cuts for the ultrawealthy to maintain an active and enthusiastic base.

Still more troubling, the new private enforcement laws endorse what amounts to a civilized form of vigilantism. Recent years have seen an alarming number of vigilante threats or acts against immigrants seeking asylum, Black Lives Matters protesters and voting rights drives. (Meanwhile, support for such political violence has also risen.)

We dont mean to sensationalize suits under these new laws by tying them to disturbing incidents such as the attempted kidnapping of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan. But enforcement of the new laws will require intensive and intrusive surveillance of neighbors and colleagues.

Consider a website set up to facilitate enforcement of SB 8. Before it was targeted by hackers, prolifewhistleblower.com invited users to upload evidence that SB 8 was being violated, while guaranteeing users anonymity an open invitation to use the kind of guerrilla investigative tactics that have already been deployed against abortion providers across many states.

Its tempting to think that its better for doctors (not to mention teachers, coaches and, in time, voters) to be dragged into court rather than to be assaulted on the street, but this is a false dichotomy. The new laws encourage aggressive surveillance while functionally chilling fundamental expressions of personal autonomy.

Perhaps though, whats good for the goose will be good for the gander, and blue states will use these same tools to suppress rights they dislike. Massachusetts could authorize citizens to seek damages from houses of worship that refuse to follow Covid safety protocols; California could give citizens the right to sue neighbors who recklessly keep guns in their homes; New York could even encourage private lawsuits against big corporate donors who exercise disproportionate sway over politicians.

But setting aside our own personal discomfort with using litigation to stoke culture wars and, possibly, invite violence, lets be real: This intensely politicized and extremely conservative Supreme Court is never going to allow such laws to take effect. Its not the best use of Democrats time and energy to try.

Whats more, there is something deeply undemocratic and embarrassingly revealing about a political party that maintains power by fomenting and subsidizing discord, whether in the streets or in the courtroom. For Trumps G.O.P., however, the strategy is irresistible. In an era where fomenting and even monetizing social, cultural and racial grievances is crucial to the G.O.P.s survival, SB 8 is just the tip of the iceberg.

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Opinion | SB 8 Is Only the Beginning - The New York Times

Some 70 million US citizens are Roman Catholics, about 22 per cent of the total population. In the 2020 elections the Catholic vote was split half and half between Trump and Biden, but only 44 per cent of white Catholics voted for Biden. Some 20 million Americans identify as Latino Catholics (about 55 per cent of the overall Hispanic population) and of these Hispanic Catholics the vote was 67 per cent for Biden, 26 per cent for Trump. Thanks to voter registration activists such as Stacey Abrams and Black Lives Matter, the black vote, especially in states like Georgia, came out in force. It was even more pro-Biden than the Hispanic (polls indicated that in some states 90 per cent of black female votes were going to Biden). American voters are racially split and the Biden presidency relies on minority voter turnout.

These figures alone illustrate the problem for a white Catholic President who asserts his Catholic identity. Ethnicity and origins play an important role in determining voting behaviour, but three other features of the contemporary USA give Biden cause for concern. The first is that as a Catholic President he must position himself in relation to national politics riven by culture wars, turbo-charged by the Republican Party. The Tea Party movement, with its mixture of Right-wing populism, shrink-the-federal state, anti-Washington activism plus anti-immigrant policies, emerged in 2009. Trumps drive for white supremacy, support for racist voter suppression, and rhetorical championing of favourite evangelical Christian themes, particularly opposition to abortion laws and same-sex marriage, made these goals seem politically achievable, but only by the Republican Party.

The second concern for a Catholic President is that the culture wars have seeped into the US Catholic Conference of Bishops. The American Church was already polarised between a strict traditionalist social conservatism with an in-built bias towards Republican politics, even in its Trump extremes, and a liberalism committed to social justice, at ease in the Democratic Party. Biden faces, and has always faced, strictures from a minority of conservative bishops about his political position on abortion and to a lesser degree his attitude towards gay and divorced people receiving the Eucharist. Obviously the President doesnt believe what we believe about the sacredness of human life, Archbishop Joseph Naumann, head of the Catholic bishops Pro-Life Committee told The Atlantic. We can safely assume that he was not referring to President Trumps acceleration of the use of the death penalty during his last days in office.

The Democratic Party does not pick radicals for their presidential candidates; that is why they rejected Bernie Sanders and chose the centrist Biden. Anyone who read Pope Franciss encyclical Fratelli Tutti would see that the pontiff is politically a prophetic radical thinker, who has more in common with Bernie Sanders than the President. But the Republicans perceive Biden as an ally of Pope Francis, who is himself under fire, and they have succeeded in placing the President firmly on the enemy side of the culture wars in a Church that is herself divided, nationally and racially as well as globally.

As Massimo Faggioli points out in his recent book Joe Biden and Catholicism in the United States, Bidens own Catholicism pious, un-intellectual, and compassionate reflects the openness to the world of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council. The Council document Gaudium et Spes (Joy and Hope), issued on 7 December 1965, the day the Council ended, begins thus: The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. The problem for Biden, who would endorse these words, is that since the 1970s the Council and its documents have been subtly, and not so subtly, undermined, re-interpreted and politicised by conservative Catholics. When the social conservatives in the American Church looked outwards, they saw Obama as the leader of a militant secular modernisation and an overweening federal state, with Biden as his misguided Catholic apprentice. And for many, their enemies enemy, Donald Trump, became, at least electorally, their friend.

The third concern for Biden is that this polarisation within the American Church has contributed significantly to division within the global Church that came of age with the appointment of an Argentinian, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, as the first non-European Pope. The cardinals chose a Pope from the global South, further shifting the centre-periphery model of a Eurocentric Church towards a more networked, less command and control Church, a process described in my Global Catholicism: towards a networked Church (Hurst, 2012). Rome remained pre-eminent but the Curial bureaucracy surrounding the Pope found itself downgraded and under serious pressure to reform. The large American Church, traditionally punching well below its weight, assumed more significance, especially when Archbishop Carlo Mario Vigan, Vatican ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2016, led a virulent attack in 2018 on Pope Francis, alleging homosexual conspiracies and Vatican cover-ups of sexual abuse. Vigan, a former chief of Vatican Curial personnel, was able to draw on his wide range of personal contacts in his attempts to create a movement to marginalise and smear the Pope. He failed, but the tension within the divided American Church remains.

Biden can expect more moral support from the current Pope than from his two papal predecessors, but it is support that may come with a political cost. The President finds himself at the intersection of an unholy set of inter-related and interlocking pressures notably the tens of millions of Catholics who voted for Trump, ignoring his four years of attempted destruction of democracy. President and Pope are singing from the same hymn sheet over the climate crisis, sharing a compassionate openness towards gay sexuality, and a commitment to the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, notably to Mass in the vernacular. In America the Latin Mass had become something of a Right-wing cause, supported by several bishops, among whom Cardinal Raymond Burke, formerly Archbishop of St. Louis, is the most prominent. These divisions within Catholicism mirror the divisions within the nation which President Biden has the enormous task of healing. He cannot look to the American Church to be part of the solution.

Bidens leadership as Commander-in-Chief during the tragedies of defeat and hasty evacuation in Afghanistan has done nothing to heal divisions in a shamed nation. Even though his new thinking about US military intervention will have found approval in Rome, he has received no accolades and derived little inspiration from the American Catholic hierarchy. It is high time they ended censorious and curmudgeonly criticism. They should show more concern for the future of democracy and the task of national healing that awaits Joe Biden, who is only the second Catholic to become President.

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American Catholics, Joe Biden and the bishops - TheArticle

Crickets culture wars can call a truce. There is something traditionalists and progressives agree on, and rather surprisingly its about the Hundred. Now the all-important final scores are in and were talking bums-on-seats and eyes-on-screen, not who hit most sixes or which weird-named franchise triumphed there is consensus on a single, indisputable fact. The tournament was A Good Thing for womens cricket.

For the hardcore sceptics, the grudging concession that the Hundred has been a gamechanger for women will not outweigh the collective trauma the competition has cost them. The undeniable benefits the womens game has derived from the format the increase in viewership, prestige, standards of pay and quality of play are all very well, but theyve still come at the cost of the future doom of the real game. What matters for the men matters most, because theirs is the Test arena, and theirs are the broadcasting millions, and theirs is the glory, for ever and ever, amen.

Still, back to the Good Thing: the womens side of the Hundred saw record attendances, unprecedented ticket sales and viewing figures in the millions. And one of its most successful elements, the double-header format, was simply a happy accident: a shrinking of logistics and ambitions caused by Covid protocols and shortfalls.

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Had a global pandemic not intervened, the womens and mens matches would have been staged separately, rather than played one after the other with a single ticket buying a seat to both. We cant be sure that the womens tournament would have enjoyed the same popularity if their matches had been relegated to other lets face it, smaller grounds. But we can be pretty certain there would have been a different atmosphere at the mens games.

There were clear indications of that in the first mens match at the Oval, the only one staged as a stand-alone. Far from being a family-friendly environment, that game was played against a beery, blokey backdrop recognisable to anyone whos been to a T20 finals day: the kind that numerous fans have shied from taking their kids to; the kind that the Hundred was, indeed, created to combat.

As it was, one of the most revealing outcomes as the tournament progressed was that the increased female presence at matches had a real and pleasurable impact on the fans experience. It would come up repeatedly in peoples conversations, an encouraging thing to hear: encouraging, moving and a little amusing, the kind of mix you feel when your friend finally discovers Parks and Recreation on Netflix and messages you how awesome it is a decade after you first told them to give it a try.

It turns out that transforming a sports stadium from a mostly male environment into a genuinely mixed one really can improve your day. That lowering the average testosterone level of a crowd will lessen its tendency towards antisocial behaviour, will reduce its inclination to drink too much and get a bit lairy and yell stupid, off-colour things that seem hilariously funny at the time. That it keeps at bay primal bursts of tribalistic aggression that we wouldnt allow anywhere else but find acceptable and even faintly praiseworthy when theyre construed as sporting passion or team loyalty.

This isnt news, of course, not really. Plenty of us knew that gender-balanced crowds dont ruin a sporting atmosphere by making it generally, you know, nicer. Anyone whos been to the tennis, or scored tickets to the London Olympics. All those whove attended womens football matches, or womens rugby games, or professional netball. The 24,000 people who went to the 2017 Womens World Cup final at Lords, and came away saying it was the best atmosphere they had encountered at a cricket match.

And yet its fair to say that until recently the presence of more women in cricket grounds or indeed any stadiums has rarely been a priority. On the sporting hierarchy of needs, its always been up at the esoteric top end, along with self-actualisation and human transcendence. Even we women who followed sport long before the men who ran it bothered to add us to the Venn diagrams in their marketing presentations accepted that we were entering a mans world. And if we didnt like the way some men behaved, we knew where we could go.

Macho posturing and a faintly edgy atmosphere have been endemic to the stadium experience for decades. Fans have kidded themselves that it simply goes with the territory. Most accept it as the price they pay for following the teams they love. Some those who like the idea of war minus the shooting will argue that its part of the purpose of spectator sport, an outlet for men and women (but primarily men) to express the full range of their emotions and work out their anger issues.

I know a number of devoted football fans male and female who gave up going to games because they couldnt bear the oppressive and often hostile environment of the walk to the station afterwards, the train rides home. The thought of that used to make me sad and furious but I could not see it changing.

Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps the more fans experience what its like to watch sport in a more gender-equal environment, the higher it will appear on their wishlist. Perhaps well learn that a positive outcome for women players, supporters, or newcomers can be the best thing for everyone in the long run. Perhaps well allow that it might even be worth some momentary rearrangement and experimentation in the mens game. After all, weve long put up with our own discomfort.

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The summer of cricket proved mixed crowds can improve the fan experience - The Guardian

Who is that on Fox Channel 32 in Chicago, doing such a great job explaining the controversy about religious exemptions to vaccine mandates? I think its our own Heidi Schlumpf.

Yesterday, I called attention to an article in Politico that looked at the future of organized labor. Here is a second one that is more finely tuned: Noam Scheiber at The New York Times captures the fact that the choices facing labor do not break down neatly into opposing camps, one aiming to stay the course and the other seeking reform. Liz Shuler, who was elected president of the AFL-CIO on Friday, and Fred Redmond, who was elected secretary-treasurer, are as committed to organizing as anyone but also recognize the need to win legislative victories in Congress.

NASA has a new sea level change interactive map that allows you to see what the agency predicts will be sea level rise caused by climate change. Most East Coast cities will see just shy of one meter rise, enough to radically change the landscape in Miami, New York, Boston and cities in between.

If thinking about the devastating effects of climate change depresses you, and it is hard not to be depressed by it, researchers at the University of British Columbia-Okanagan conducted studies that show cuddling your dog will cheer you up. Dog owners everywhere are saying Well, duh! But, it is good to know that science backs up our intuitions. The Hill has the story.

At The Conversation, Ryan Gilfeather argues that we might not be as divided by the culture wars as it seems, and points to the fourth century as an example. I admit that, at first blush, I thought the argument was a stretch, but as I read on, I found myself at least hoping Gilfeather is right.

Relatedly, in The Washington Post, E.J. Dionne recalls James Davison Hunters early description of the culture wars, and Alan Wolfes argument that the different sides in the culture wars really exist within each of us. I wish I had E.J.s eternal optimism, but I dont. I think it is as likely that we cant put the centripetal Humpty Dumpty forces in our culture back together again as that we can. I hope I am wrong and E.J. is right.

If Democrats want to recognize how unpopular some of their cultural ideas are, they have only to look to school board races around the country. The push against all kinds of diversity education is wrong-headed, of course, but it is happening. Elites in media and politics have no idea how badly their ideas play outside their own circles, especially when Fox News and other conservative media are a thousand times better than the left at reducing complicated issues to nasty sound bites designed to drive voters in a particular direction. The New Republic takes a look at the school board fights going on right now.

On the other hand, in California, we may be seeing the first wave of the pro-choice tsunami that is coming to our nation. Politico reports that in the states gubernatorial recall contest, incumbent Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom is emphasizing the ways a Republican could restrict access to abortion in an effort to retain his job. Normally, in off-year special elections, all of the energy has been with pro-life voters, but as the prospect of Roe v. Wade getting overturned comes into focus, look for that energy to equalize and, later, to shift.

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Links: Critical race theory, culture wars and dog cuddling - National Catholic Reporter