When we couldn’t see mountains we were nervous, when we couldn’t see neighbors house, we figured we should go. These were the words of a family who are affected in the Alberta’s hellish forest fire slowly engulfing cities and towns. THE BEAST is a very apt name given by firefighters fighting forest fire in Fort Mc Murray. These forests are home to some 500 First Nation communities, as well as caribou and bears, moose and wolves, and, in the summertime, billions of song birds. Onus of starting the fire has been blamed on a human hand. 80,000 residents of Fort McMurray had to flee from fire burning their homes forcing them to stay in makeshift shelters. Alberta needs help, desperately.
Though Fort McMurray is no longer in danger of being consumed, hundreds of firefighters continue to battle the flames of a major wildfire in Alberta’s north. There are 2,705 firefighters and support staff, 94 helicopters and 236 pieces of heavy equipment battling this fire, with an estimate of about 442 kilometers of dozer guard completed. Fire fighters will to surmount the odds of beating fire was successful because the fire inside their hearts burned brighter than the fire around them.
There was no significant growth in the Fort McMurray wildfire yesterday, and the fire is now nearly 58 per cent contained. Up to 20,000 residents have returned. For the first time, many are seeing the scenes of destruction for the first time in person. At the same time, a sense of normalcy has slowly returned to Fort McMurray. With one tenth of Fort Mc Murray destroyed the government is not sure on rebuilding the most affected areas. One analyst from Bank of Montreal has put the losses from fire could exceed $ 9 Billion, a staggering amount.
“The road ahead is still a long one,” Alberta’s Premier Notley concluded in her statement Wednesday. “Today is not the end of this story. It is not a return to normal life. And it’s not yet a celebration. There is still a lot of work to recover and rebuild Wood Buffalo. This will be the work of years, not weeks.”
The leading cause of the forest fires is carelessness. An unattended fire, a discarded cigarette can ignite the dry boreal forests of Alberta and British Columbia. Aided by days of wind turns the fire into real blaze. God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools. Forest fires are dangerous, and we should all take special precautions ‘year round’ to make sure fires are not carelessly ignited.
We speak constantly of the conquest of nature. The conquest of space, the conquest of mountains. Why must we be in constant fight with nature? We are using science and technology, the powers of electricity and steel to carry on a fight with our external world and beat our surroundings into submission with a bulldozer. We try to beat it into submission, and if we do that – comes disaster. We exploit the world we live in. We don’t treat it with love and gentleness and respect. We cut down millions of acres of forests to turn it into newspaper of all things. Lovely trees turned into information about nothing. And we don’t replace them properly.
We kick the world around in revenge for feeling that we are really puppets the world kicks around. We need a new consciousness in humans which feels that one ’s self is really not in the individual but interconnected all around. Flowers just don’t grow by themselves, they need perfect environment to sustain their beauty and protect it. We humans are also like flowers, who need perfect environment and nature to live. It is said by Suzuki, that we have become a force of nature, not long ago forest fires, hurricanes , floods, drought and earth quakes were accepted as ‘natural disasters’ or ‘acts of god’. But now, we humans have joined Gods, powerful enough to influence these events.
Vancouver Sikhs are sending truck loads every day to the affected areas. Donations in millions from sikh diaspora spread across north America were send to Red cross and directly to the areas most affected making into reality the Sikh way of life – Share with the needy people and help humanity.
We all have to remember, “A fire today – no job tomorrow”. Fire destruction is one man’s job; fire prevention is every body’s job. Fire fighting is one of the most essential services of an organized society. We don’t need to protect forests; we need to create an environment where a forest doesn’t need protection.
