When we talk about fire, we must also talk about water.
When the land is forced into imbalance, the fires will always roar and ravage and water will always dry up and flood.
Fire and water are not opposing, but deeply connected. We have more fires because capitalism consumes so much water.
LA in particular has been in a drought. But it is a drought caused by water being sucked away through colonial green grass lawns, data centers, over-processed foods, AI searches, non-native flora, privatized drinking water, microplastics, pollution, fast fashion, and more.
While Indigenous communities worked with the water, air, and land as relatives, colonizers always try to own and conquer water, air, and the land. Oppressors try to own those elements, just as they have tried to own people.
Through this, humans have changed the earth’s atmosphere, its very flow of water, air, plants, the patterns of migration of animals. Humans have changed everything, all living entities, including the land. With water, we have changed the very riverbeds, ocean lines, water flow, rain, and condensation. And thus we have altered the interaction of all the elements in the atmosphere all around us.
Capitalist colonial individualism has strangled everything that assists life. Everything that wants us to be alive.
The largest fires in LA are 0% contained. They say it will take weeks.
Indigenous people were doing ritual fires and cultural burnings for ages for hundreds of years to manage future fires, for ceremony, to encourage plant and tree growth, for water management, and regeneration.
The devastating fires in Lahaina were a direct consequence of land theft, real estate developments, tourism, and capitalist greed that destroyed the wetlands.
Lahaina and in LA were lands that once held large bodies of water. Yet, during these fires, water was not readily available, the land was too dry, and there was no buffer against the fire. That is all connected.
Water and fire are connected.
Capitalist colonialism consumes water in all of its treachery. From buying up forests, to oil and pipelines, unfettered AI data consumption, privatized water, to colonial green grass culture. Empire’s appetite is starving the world.
We need both Fire and Water to live, which means we must care for them as we do all living beings and entities.
Water is life, fire is medicine. May we grow and heal with them.
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