After a long reticence, I wrote a little thing: "As Ovid notes, this “time is pure, having placated the dead/When the days devoted to the departed are over.” Ancestors, death, purging and purification, borders were the Imperial Romans' February ritual themes.

"If “wilderness” is an invention, so too is wildfire: the product of a view of nature as something external to society. The destructiveness of today’s fires “obliges us to revise knowledge calibrated to conditions that no longer exist.” " www.thedriftmag.com/a-note-from-...

And here is some great longform reporting from a year ago--which makes it exponentially truer, I guess. The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Some essential reading—first-hand reportage of the fires du jour in California in context. Human actions and choices have made this catastrophe as harmful as it is, and California is a microcosm of the macrocosm in the technofascist oligarchy. The cruelty is the point. substack.com/@sarahfalkne...