Are we learning anything?

The sky is very hazy and the acrid smell of smoke fills the air. I just happen to be in San Diego for several days, arriving not long after the wildfires began to spring up. http://www.nbcsandiego.com/slideshow/14396456/detail.htmlindex.html?currentSlide=3&taf=dgo

San Diego is the 7^th largest city in the US. I’ve been impressed by the outpouring of support residents have shown: taking supplies to Qualcomm Stadium where many evacuees are staying, donations to blood banks, cutbacks on electrical and cell phone use.

There are two things about this situation that I find to be very sad, though. One is that absent an emergency like this one, many of these residents would not be giving much thought to the needs of other people surrounding them. During a “normal” period, folks without homes, food, etc., would only be tended to by specific agencies or the few folks who do give thought to these people while the rest of us continue on in our lives.

Second, this area of the country has vegetation that thrives because of fire; as a local geologist pointed out, some of the plants must have fire/smoke to germinate seeds. However, in our haste to expand, new housing developments are built in areas populated by such vegetation. To protect these homes, regular burns are not typically allowed for fear they will get out of control. Because there are no regular burns, every few years, when conditions are just right, uncontrolled burns do take place, “destroying” thousands of acres of land, along with any dwellings placed on them. As the same geologist noted, the populace tends to learn things after events like earthquakes; building standards are changed, for example. But we don’t tend to change our ways after these wildfires.

I wonder when we will begin to realize that we live with nature and do not control it. We see in the litany of creation in Genesis 1 that God gave us dominion over the land, but as many have noted before, that word usually gets read as “domination.” Likewise, we’ve been taught to take care of the least of those among us, but we don’t often think about the needs of others until emergencies arise, and then only because we can really see ourselves in the faces of those being displaced. Somehow we manage not to see ourselves in the faces of the poor and needy on a regular basis.