Well, it would be presumptuous to say much more when people are out there fighting fires -- one's main thoughts are with the firefighters and people who are stuck. The fact that a lot of thoughtlessness (not primarily their own) got them stuck is pretty obvious. The irony of course is that thanks to environmentalists like me people also now want to live out in the wild, but without paying the "wild price". You can't run the wild like an urban setting with firehouses and firemen protecting your property. The wild price -- as the sod farmers knew -- is living with the risk of losing it all. That is part of the tremulousness of living out in unmanaged space: people want the unmanaged space -- the excitement of the unexpected and the complex -- but they want it not to be too unexpected and too complex. A classic dilemma, solved by Walt Disney and every developer: -- Welcome to Frontierland and Vista Acres. Gary Snyder is the wisest head on this subject: always has been (and he was a fire lookout in his younger days).

yours, Peter T.