The Lotka-Volterra Model

After witnessing a cataclysmic wildfire event in Los Angeles, the government just fired vital qualified employees that are often called upon as “all hands on deck” firefighting resources.   Trail workers, archaeologists, veterans, graphic designers, janitors. Auxiliary Firefighters.  Firefighters none the less. Fired.  

NOAA staff suffered the same fate. NOAA’s predictive weather services are read daily in every (wildland) fire station in the United States.  Every incremental estimation between overlapping complexities and variables of seasons, weather events, monthly expectations, daily changes. It is all reported on and subsequently briefed, even down to every half an hour during critical fire weather periods.  And people still say “the LA fires were preventable.” “Why did they cut the firefighter budget?” “Where were the auxiliary firefighters?” We are witnessing the EXACT same missteps and alignment of mismanagement from the very people who ask those questions.

It is such a privilege to have our public lands as a historic and living educational system for our children.  My daughter saw ram and bison in Yellowstone before her 1st birthday.  She crawled at the Badlands. She took photos with the BLM protected burros while being protected by her English Bull Terrier, Burro. She saw Theodore Roosevelt carved on a mountain with her Maltipoo, Theodore. We owe it to well over a century of the spirit of civil servitude. We owe it to the people who chose the path of “paid in sunsets.”

American public lands are the body, sustained by the lifeblood of taxes, civil servants as the organs, serving every metabolic function for surviving a second century of health. American public lands are being preyed upon by predatory actors.

Your civil servants miss family reunions to cut your hiking trails in Yosemite.  They return to a shared one room bunkhouse smelling of pond scum to sustain the salmon population so you can take that father/son fishing trip, lifetime memory in the Pacific North West.  They live in their cars to maintain your OHV trails so you can take the Polaris RZR to Arizona on Memorial Day.  They skip their first summer out of high school to clean your toilets at Mount Rushmore.  Defend them.

<3 Matt