Life and Leadership Lessons from Fire and Forests: Personal and Cultural Benefits of Overcoming Ecological Ignorance

Forest wisdom is dangerous, like all ecological and spiritual wisdom. Likewise with the lessons of fire. Both ecological and spiritual wisdom have become particularly dangerous to structures of power, but they also threaten our ego. Fair warning.?

Forests and fire both offer an abundance of lessons that we all need right now—most especially aspiring leaders in business, nonprofit work, and in the culture overall—and we’ll consider just a few of them, some in the form of factual revelations that may surprise you. If you have an interest in ecology and ecoliteracy, sustainability and sustainable development, leadership and true innovation, or understanding the meaning of life and fulfilling your greatest potential, this short essay could offer significant help.?

These lessons require extensive study. The most important things don’t fit in a nutshell or in LinkedIn articles and posts. But, with all the talk of “sustainability” and “leadership” here and elsewhere, forests and wildfires offer us a clear set of object lessons in human ignorance, as well as a subtle and profound set of teachings about how to dispel human ignorance and begin to act with greater wisdom. These teachings can heal the culture and the climate at the same time.?

These lessons involve mutual empowerment: Any leader or sincere seeker of insight who studies the lessons of forests and fires can thereby become empowered to think and know, to live and love, in a better way; this in turn will empower the ecologies we all depend on.?

But none of this works if we don’t prepare ourselves for the fact that the great danger of wisdom comes from the threat it presents to our ego and to any insanity in our culture. We have to find the courage to know things we currently won’t let ourselves think—things some part of us wants to avoid thinking.?

A few of the elements of dangerous wisdom we’ll consider come from the wisdom traditions, but most of them come from the work of Chad T. Hanson, a forest ecologist who serves as director of the John Muir Project. Hanson published a book of his scientific findings called, Smokescreen: Debunking Wildfire Myths to Save Our Forests and Our Climate (University of Kentucky Press, 2021). The book reads like a gripping ecological whodunit.?

I can’t recommend this book highly enough, no matter where you live or what impact wildfires have on you. Not only do we all depend on forest ecologies, but we can all learn a lot about ecology, and become that much saner in the process, if we study Hanson’s book from the perspective of a holistic philosophy of life.?

Without further ado, let’s consider some forest and fire revelations, and then distill some life and leadership lessons from them. Keep in mind that we endeavor here to look directly at human insanity, while trying to sense a wisdom that can dispel that insanity:?

1) The highest level of logging and clear-cutting doesn’t happen in Brazil or China. It happens in the U.S. Citizens of the U.S. thus collude in the biggest deforestation effort on the planet. Given that significant deforestation in other parts of the world happen because of the American way of life, our collusion extends far beyond our borders.?

2) Our collusion means we pay for it. The U.S. Forest Service should change its name to something more accurate, such as The U.S. Logging Service. This government institution funds itself in part by selling off trees that belong to all of us, and we all pay for the logistical support.?

3) The costs to us all are hard to accurately sum, because it’s hard to see long-term costs, or to see what can at first appear like indirect costs. More direct costs might add up to a billion dollars per year, but indirect costs could be astronomical when we consider how degrading forests affects our health and the health of the conditions of life.?

For instance, an intact forest left to manage itself sequesters carbon and offers countless benefits to us, but logging as generally practiced steals away those benefits, replacing them with costs to our physical, mental, spiritual, and even economic well-being. The costs will rise as the Forest Service pursues a foolish agenda of increasing logging, and ecologies continue to degrade.?

Warning: They now want to log 80% of our forests.?

4) In general (though not of necessity), logging happens on the basis of unskillful thinking and even overtly bad science—most especially so with logging related to fires (e.g., “thinning,” “post-fire logging,” and other “forest management” tactics). That means we not only get repeatedly robbed and face increasing health risks, but we’re also being misinformed (perhaps lied to) as part of the justification for these harms. Coupled with the above, this means we all pay to be misinformed and to have our health compromised.?

5) An intact forest is not only a mighty act of peace (a nod to Diana Beresford-Kroeger), but also an act of wisdom, love, and beauty. We can learn more from forests than we realize, and we depend on them more profoundly than we currently understand.?

6) Fire is a creative force. It is part of the thinking of forests. So are bark beetles, whom we love to blame for killing trees. Forests think differently than human beings, and human thinking cannot fulfill its potential until it becomes more like forest thinking.?

We can learn this thinking directly from forests and other ecologies (which also think like forests . . . human beings are the weirdos here—and no act of ignorance comes without consequences). This is part of the process of reindigenizing ourselves, so we can live in attunement with spiritual and ecological realities.?

7) Many forests are adapted to fire. Trying to take away fire from those forests makes as much sense as trying to take away rain from rainforest ecologies. Calling them “adapted” to fire restates the point above for emphasis; it means they think with fire—and they think with beetles, bears, beavers, woodpeckers, wild bees, and fungi. This in turn indicates that human beings are disrupting the skillful thinking of the world as we interfere with fire and extinguish species that participate in the thinking of the world. Reindigenizing means renouncing this disruption and returning ourselves to skillful participation.?

8) We have less fire today than we should. We need more fire. And we need to leave burned areas to recover on their own, because the presence of burned areas indicate the presence of creative forest thinking.?

9) We need to learn how to skillfully live in fire ecologies. Our homes don’t have to burn. We can live with fire, learning its lessons, which include a reverence for life, a deep gratitude for all that life provides, and a recognition of the need for renunciation and rejuvenation. Learning to live with fire goes together with learning to live with wildness and with all our relations in the vast and wondrous community of life.?

10) Forest Service policies and corporate logging activity put our homes, our lives, and the whole community of life at greater risk. The forest isn’t at fault—we are.?

11) In the past 10,000 years, we have lost enough forests to cover an area twice the size of the U.S.[1] Not only do we have less forest, but bad science has led us to believe that the forests we lost were less dense than the ones we have. Not so. We have lost both quantity and density of forests.?

12) Dense forests can resist fire better than “thinned” forests, and having more forests means having more medicine and food, more shade and cooling, better water regulation and less drought, and more sanctuary, wonder, and joy.?

13) We need to forget “planting” “trees” and start tending forests and other whole ecologies, ideally with a sense of reverence for life. Climate and weather dictate fire severity (together with overall forest health), and the more logging we do, the more we create the conditions for devastating fires.?

14) There is no such thing as an “overgrown forest”. It’s a nonsense concept, ecologically speaking. Forests self-manage, and they in turn help manage Earth as a holistic system.?

15) Forests do not need us to manage them, but we do need to learn to live skillfully with them. The problem is not that some hippie tree-huggers interfered with solid American forest management. No. Rather, the problem is that some foolish humans thought they could manage something that exceeds their cleverness and their consciousness. The ignorant should not dictate to the wise. Forests are our elders. They have managed themselves for hundreds of millions of years. That’s an incredible scale, which allowed them to evolve ways of thinking that transcend the human ego.?

To help us begin to get at the life and leadership lessons, let’s highlight at least one crucial truth: Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, forests incorporated fire into their thinking. That can seem like a strange suggestion. But here we venture into the kind of revelations that could transform the entire culture, and can begin to have a positive impact on our lives.?

I so often return to Gregory Bateson’s diagnosis of our situation, because he put it so succinctly. He said that the major problems of the world arise because of the difference between the way human beings think and the way nature actually functions. That’s the diagnosis: We cause the problems in our lives and in our world by means of our way of thinking—our style of consciousness, which constitutes all our ideas, words, and actions.?

We may consider ourselves rational, but if our manner of thinking differs from the functioning of nature, then our best thinking will lead to more problems. That’s not easy to fully grok.?

Once we begin to understand this, Bateson’s course of treatment makes sense, even if we don’t know how to follow it: To avoid further (and perhaps unspeakable) tragedy, we need to learn to think in a new way—to think the way nature works.?

That gives us the single biggest life and leadership lesson of the past 10,000 years: We need to learn to think the way nature works, which includes learning to think with fire and with forests, with bees and flowers, whales and plankton, mountains and wolves.?

This amounts to something far more subtle and profound than we at first allow, and presents significant challenges to leaders in countless domains and citizens in all walks of life. It has become all the rage to talk about “systems thinking”. That’s not going to cut it.?

“Systems thinking” usually happens in the same style of consciousness as the thinking that degraded our ecologies in the first place, and so it will not heal them properly. In practice, “systems thinking” means complicated notions about systems. It is not the skillful thinking of systems.?

We can find an easy illustration of the thinking of forests by considering the black-backed woodpecker, which Hanson has studied extensively. Why is the black-backed woodpecker black-backed? Because evolution is a mental process, as Bateson would say, and the thinking involved includes fire. Make sense??

A black-backed woodpecker needs burnt snags. A snag is a “dead” tree. A snag forest is an area that used to be the kind of thing we expect to see when we look at a forest. Fire and drought can create patches of snag forest.?

Wood-boring beetles prefer recently burned trees. They are drawn to both the heat and smoke of a fire. They don’t have a psychopathic desire to kill healthy trees. Beetles will flock to a fire, and begin boring into the snags as soon as possible.?

Woodpeckers who eat those larvae spend a lot of time facing the black surface of a burnt tree (think of all those Zen students facing a wall right now). When the birds are still, as Hanson discovered first-hand, their black-feathered backs blend in perfectly with the charred wood.?

A single black-backed woodpecker might eat over 13,000 larvae. Not only that, but the males will each make 2 or 3 nest cavities in those snags, and the female will only choose one of them. The others become nests for beings who depend on the woodpeckers to do that work for them.?

Hanson gives many fascinating details of this and other features of snag forests, old-growth forests, and the relationships between the two. One could go on and on just detailing the life in a burn patch. Burn patches tend to function as temporary biodiversity hotspots, with greater diversity than old-growth forest. Just like us, forests are dynamic, living ecologies.?

The word “ecology” should help us understand some of our insanity with respect to forests. “Ecology” means the study of home. We live here. Earth is our home for now. Our ecologies are our homes. Sustainability has to mean a homecoming, or it will only lead to further degradation.?

We will need joyful perseverance to unpack all the lessons of forests and fire, and put them to the most practical use. For now, as a way to continue learning, let me encourage you to read Hanson’s book, Smokescreen. You can also listen to an interview with him. I’ll put links in the comments section.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/world-lost-one-third-forests