This is a NASA satellite picture of the forest fire currently raging in California.
How did things became so bad: “An average of 5 million acres burns every year in the United States, causing millions of dollars in damage­.”?

It all started more 100 years ago: “The 1910 fire—fanned by hurricane-force winds called Palousers and known variously as the Big Burn or the Big Blowup—scorched 3 million acres of Idaho and Montana, killed 78 firefighters and nine civilians, turned entire towns to cinder, and darkened sunsets all the way to New York City….   The Big Burn ….  “was one of the main drivers, if not the main driver, of the Forest Service getting deadly serious about fighting fire.” The horrific maelstrom produced a public outcry to suppress future forest fires at all costs.”

Only recently people started to understand what really happened: “Fifty years of aggressive fire suppression by the U.S. government has hindered fire’s natural and beneficial processes; many areas have become choked with brush, and other kinds of trees are competing with the large species that formerly dominated the forest. The U.S. Forest Service tried to solve the problem by allowing timber companies to log more of our National Forests. However, the logging companies take only the high-value timber — the largest trees whose thick bark naturally resists the small periodic fires that sweep through forests, leaving behind saplings and massive piles of sticks and debris called “slash.” The forest floor dries out more quickly and temperatures can get much hotter, turning slash piles and debris-strewn clearings to fire-friendly tinder.”

What should we do?
About the fires? I don’t know, I’ll leave this to the specialists. The problem is that I recently saw the picture above on the FB.  My  comment was:
“You wish…
‘Too big to fail’ is a human concept, not a natural occurrence.
Watch what happened to the dino’s  and last time I checked elephants and whales weren’t doing that well either.
And while we didn’t have anything to do with the fate of the dinosaurs it was us who hunted the elephants, the whales, the dodo birds and so on…
The Earth is not at all too big to fail but rather it should be too important for us to meddle with!”

Another issue: The so called Global Warming.
– Everybody agrees that carbon dioxide is indeed a ‘hot house gas’ and that we produce huge, and growing, amounts of it.
– England has seen a resurgence of commercial wineries.
– French, Spanish and other grapes have so  much sugar that wines reach now an alcoholic concentration of 14-14.5% on a regular basis.
And the list can go on.
Yet we not only choose to ignore the deluge of carbon dioxide (chlorofluorocarbons, another class of hot house gases were only recently banned) we unleashed onto the Earth’s atmosphere but also try to deny what’s going on around us: ” “Global Warning Has Stopped”? How to Fool People Using “Cherry-Picked” Climate Data”.

Now what am I driving at? That we should go back in time and live in caves like our fore fathers?

Certainly NOT!
Actually for the time being I’m not that worried about the global warming – the heat spell that transformed the the southern Greenland into the pastures where  Erik the Red fed his sheep had been probably more intense, the same places are not (yet at least) green again.
Moreover the contribution of the carbon dioxide to all this is debatable and debated. (The chlorofluorocarbons were banned because they destroy the ozone layer, that’s another human contribution to the well being of the planet.)

BUT WHY RISK IT?

We strongly need another economic ‘seed’ – like wool clothing and then steel were for England and like the automobiles and airplanes were for the US.
So why not transform this potentially dangerous situation into a win-win situation and turn the global economy around by building a carbon dioxide free future?