The Cobra Effect

In 1989, I saw the film Say Anything, and my whole life changed. I was 17, going into my senior year of high school, and inhabiting a purgatory much more capricious than that of the film’s cavalier lead. John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler gave voice to the sense of purposelessness I felt.

“I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don't want to do that.”

At the time, for me it wasn’t kickboxing. I was really into car stereos. Hooking up boom was when I was most content. But what I truly wanted to be was a novelist. I just didn’t know how.

Any dream I had along those lines was battered into flotsam one random day in English 101. I was attending the University of Idaho, simply because that is where my girlfriend went and they offered WUE tuition. I was sitting there minding my own business while the professor lectured us about how to write a proper cover letter. Now this, she said, is an example of what not to do. And I sat bewildered as she began to recite a firsthand account of my childhood.

“I live in a trailer without running water or electricity in the forest of northwest Montana where I raise my four boys.”

It wasn’t my perspective, but it absolutely was my life, so after class I stopped the professor and in the most surreal daze asked her who the author of that letter was. At first she resisted, citing confidentiality concerns, but finally relented when I told her I was utterly certain it was my mom. And it was.

For the longest time, in keeping with Lloyd’s imperative and my reading of the Tao and the Gospel of Matthew, I pursued a practice of non-participation. I worked only as much as I had to, taking seasonal gigs in various non-skilled labor roles and spending the rest of my time playing basketball, studying philosophy and political economy, watching re-runs of Northern Exposure, and reasoning at groundings. Of course, one can only go so far in eschewing modern civilization, so I was supported in this exercise by my friend’s family, who fed me and provided me a place to sleep. It sufficed for several years, but the winter of 1996-97, which buried Troy in feet of snow for what felt like eternity, made remaining there untenable.

That spring, I got a job at a tree nursery in Bonners Ferry, the hardest work I have ever done in my life. In August, I signed on with a farmer there and harvested wheat. With money in my pocket, I was thrilled to receive a phone call from my brother asking if I wanted to share an apartment in Missoula.

I spent shy of two years there, working random jobs and slowly reintegrating with society. I still maintained a largely ascetic lifestyle, but I participated. As 1999 opened, I had even found something I wanted to do.

For many years, I had thought that working outdoors with people, as a whitewater or mountain guide, would be something I could do that aligned with my values. A harrowing near miss that found me rocketing down a snowfield in the Bob Marshall had largely quelled this interest, yet that general arena still offered a glimmer of light. The path coalesced around a position with the Montana Conservation Corps in Kalispell leading work crews of “at-risk” youth.

As part of that program, I had the good fortune to receive basic wildland firefighter training from the local Montana DNRC Land Office. This wasn’t the first time. In 1990, I had joined a pick up crew formed by the Kootenai National Forest, although we never actually made it to a fire. In 1994, I spent 21 days living along the shore of Lake Koocanusa in a massive fire camp, working in the Supply Unit. And in 1996, I spent the summer serving as the lookout on Richard’s Peak overlooking the Thompson River drainage.

Fighting forest fires has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. As I like to say when introducing myself at agency trainings or meetings, my first fire assignment was in 1977 as a Junior Forest Ranger on Blue Mountain Lookout, where my dad was staffing the 80 foot tall steel tower. Some of my earliest memories include him leaving to fight fire on the Olympic Peninsula, and I recall his excitement as he shared the story behind some photographs he had taken of air tanker drops. Later, after we had moved to Montana permanently, he made the cover of a California newspaper, standing in the chow line with other members of a Kootenai crew to receive Thanksgiving dinner during the Siege of ‘87.

Wildfire was ever present but always in the background, but as the millennial clock rolled over into the year 2000, I seized on a thought. 1988 had been a huge fire year in the Northern Rockies. Again, in 1994. It appeared these things came around on a six-year cycle. If you want to make money, I started telling people, get on a fire crew. 2000 is going to be epic.

When we had completed our training with the Kalispell Unit, the fire forester, a lean, stoic man whose pulaski swing I’ve yet to see bested, informed us that, if we wanted a job on the fire crew, we should be sure to apply. “We’ve had good luck with MCC folks,” he said. By April, I was signed on as a first-year nozzleman. And by October, I had found my niche.

There is a lot about wildland firefighting that appeals to me. The nature of the work, especially in the initial attack sphere, aligns with my personality - nothing for long periods, then go, go, go. Right about the time I would be completely fed up with it, and would have quit another job, they laid me off. There is a team dynamic and potential for catastrophe. But most importantly, at least for me, it fulfills Lloyd Dobler’s directive - other than consuming vast quantities of gasoline and Gatorade, fighting wildfires doesn’t really do anything.

Or so I thought.

By the time I was working permanent full time, now the assistant manager at Missoula Interagency Dispatch Center for the Southwestern Land Office of the Montana DNRC, I had begun to see something was amiss. Since I had started fighting fire routinely in 2000, fire seasons had become more regular and substantial. The six year cycle was broken, with the Northern Rockies experiencing severe fire in 2003 and again in 2007. Sitting in Missoula Dispatch, where I oversaw the initial attack operations, I began to note that, every year, we had to put out fire in the same spot, until finally there was a day when we couldn’t catch it.

The forest wanted to burn.

In the mid-2010s, it was basically accepted knowledge that fire suppression in fire-adapted landscapes was not only futile, but actually counter-productive. However, almost no one was willing to put that knowledge into practice. In my agency, the reason was clear - the DNRC was the protecting agency, but we didn’t own the land. We had to put the fire out. But I got crosswise with the then Lolo National Forest Fire Staff Officer one day for questioning why we were dumping mud on a new fire at the edge of the Bob Marshall Wilderness in a relatively wet year, suppressing a fire that should clearly be let go.

I had, at this point, made it my mission to catch every fire. Some of this was rooted in my inherent competitiveness, and some was overcompensation for being stuck in dispatch. I learned how effective fighting fire from the desk could be while working on the Kootenai in 2007, where the Fire Staff had not only given me license but directed me to order 2 tankers and a lead and immediately launch air attack at the first report of smoke. While the neighboring forests all picked up at least one large fire, the biggest in our zone was less than 200 acres. I was sold on a robust, pre-planned initial response.

But after the third Alder Creek fire up Sawmill Saddle, I was beginning to have my doubts.

A huge part of why I liked fire was because it didn’t involve selling or buying or anything I associated with capitalism. Here was a collective enterprise, financed by society, with minimal externalities. Whether we caught the fire or didn’t catch the fire didn’t really make a difference in the big scheme of things. Success was really only predicated on whether everyone made it home. Still, as the years went by and the fires kept getting worse, a nagging skepticism began creeping in.

I quit the DNRC in 2017, and spent most of that season, the biggest since 2007, outside of fire. For the next six years, my involvement was limited to taking 14-day assignments as an AD, basically an at-will worker for the Forest Service, traveling to dispatch centers around the country as an initial attack and aircraft dispatcher. However, in 2023, the Dispatch Center Manager on the Bitterroot opened up, a position I had long wanted. I applied and was hired.

What excited me most about the position, other than its proximity to home and supervisory capacity, was that the Bitterroot National Forest was engaged in an ambitious program of prescribed fire work aimed at returning the forest to a more historical fire interval. The 2024 fire season, while difficult and challenging, trying to keep the center functioning with a revolving door of trainees, was rewarding for the number of acres we got treated. We left a ton of fire on the landscape, and it burned till November.

Even so, something wasn’t sitting right.

Fire season in 2025 saw a reversal of fortunes. The new Chief of the Forest Service under the Trump Administration immediately called for a return to a full suppression posture, and the Bitterroot dutifully obliged. The summer saw us staffing fires in goat rocks with rappellers and jumpers that, more than likely, would have gone out by themselves. Looking out the window at the mountains, I felt more and more that this wasn’t for me.

It wasn’t until early in February of 2026 that I finally understood why.

At Christmas, my sister-in-law and I got into a conversation about books, leading to her stating that she loathed when someone gave her a book, because she knew it was going to the bottom of an already too-large stack, which would only make her feel guilty for not reading it. I tended to agree. My reading list is always a half-dozen books deep, and those are only the contemporary titles, saying nothing of all the classics and foundational sci-fi I hope someday to read. In light of that conversation, it was funny then when she ended up giving me a book.

I have read all of the fire books - The Great Burn, all of John Maclean’s work, and, of course, the progenitor of the genre, Young Men and Fire. At first glance, this title, When It All Burns, seemed like more self-congratulatory hype in the vein of Murray Taylor’s Jumping Fire. I was actually dreading having to read it. But a Basic CISM course in Coeur d’Alene provided the perfect opportunity to orient myself to the upcoming season with a book about fire.

Through my continuing inquiry, I was very much aware of the fact that capitalism cannot abide subsistence. People who can produce their own sustenance from common land have no need of wages. Although the Enclosures had begun as early as the 13th Century, it wasn’t until they were codified by the Inclosure Act of 1773 that their service to industrialization was fully realized. Now having land meant paying rent, and very few could afford to do so. The resulting displacement fed the ranks of working poor the burgeoning factories required.

In the New World, this process proved even more sinister. Page by page, enthralled, anthropologist and author Jordan Thomas laid out a history of fire suppression as purposefully employed to deny native Americans subsistence as the killing of the buffalo. I was stunned. In trying to avoid participating in this system of oppression, I had inadvertently stumbled into serving its primary weapon.

When I was driving combine on the wheat farm, I was struck multiple times by how my mind would rebel against the work. Here I was, doing the single most important thing a person can do, making bread, and yet I still wanted to be free of it. For all its convenience, I don’t believe humans were ever meant to be industrialized, for all the reasons of alienation that Marx ascribed. The industrialization of fire suppression makes an already questionable practice all the more objectionable.

There must be something productive that I can do. I’m not sure what that is, and until then, fire will have to suffice, although I am going to seek to limit my engagement to supporting large fires, the ones that already got away, rather than trying to catch them. And I still subscribe to the message Lloyd Dobler was trying to impart. I’m not selling anything, but I’m not buying it either.

Panels Versus Plants

Let me be clear. The only true solarpunk is tending plants. It isn't solar panels and electrification. That's simply industrialization of the sun. Mining, smelting, and forging are not solar in any real sense of the term. Neither are they punk.

That said, I'm a big fan of solarpunk.

Why should be readily apparent. I live in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, which only averages 158 sunny days per year, well below the U.S. average of 205 days. The sun, in addition to improving my mood, powers photosynthesis, which miraculously turns solar energy into mass that can sustain animals both directly and indirectly, as in the grass-fed beef that gets us through the long winter. It drives the evaporation and transpiration that leads to the snow and rainfall that recharges the Bitterroot's water cycle, providing us with drinking water and irrigation for our pasture, orchard, and garden. In other words, the sun is crucial.

My neighbor Todd is a perfect foil. Although we have known him and his family since 2016, he and I really got to be friends during the pandemic, when we would take long walks along the county road on which we live. Todd is a tinkerer, and he is constantly engaged with projects. Whereas I tend to theorize on many subjects, Todd is hands on with them. While I was reading and learning about the societal potential of blockchain and cryptocurrency, Todd was building a mining rig in his crawlspace. He didn't really care what the point of the crypto he was mining was; mining it covered his electric bill and gave him something to tinker with.

Todd's most recent project is a photovoltaic solar system to power his house. I'll try to follow up with some of the specifics on the system he installed but suffice to say he has a smart inverter that is grid tied so that he can access electricity from the grid when necessary and operate independently when the power goes down. It's a wicked cool set-up, if a bit too complicated for my tastes, and I'm truly jealous.

When we started this conversation half a decade ago, Todd asked when I was going to get solar panels. He knows I'm an independent type, keen on self-sufficiency, and into that sort of thing. At the time, our vehicles consisted of a Chevy 4x4, a Honda Civic, and a Volvo XC90, so I explained to him that, having done the math, I was prioritizing an electric car over solar. It was Todd himself who had first begun seriously looking at EVs, and he was constantly cracking me up with his admitted "range anxiety".

The population of the Pacific Northwest enjoys access to relatively cheap hydroelectric power. Todd and I are served by the Ravalli Electric Co-operative, and our rates are some of the lowest in the nation. Nearly 60% of the electricity he and I use comes from hydroelectric, produced by dams that were built before I was born and are thus, if we exclude the environmental externalities, some of the cleanest energy sources in the United States. This means that buying an electric car would "green up" my transportation footprint while reducing my financial outlay, assuming that the EV was replacing one of our ICE vehicles that would otherwise need a major overhaul, which they all did (as I've noted in this blog before, the cleanest vehicle is the one you already own - drive it till it drops).

Admittedly, Todd bought an EV before his solar system, but I beat him to it. I also wonder whether the things we do on our smallholding - keep goats and chickens, maintain a garden and orchard, constantly plant shrubs and trees - are more solarpunk than Todd's solar panel-powered suburbia. Considering the hydropower we have access to and the limited sun we receive, photovoltaic solar seems more prepper than punk. Not that I won't be getting some of my own, especially now that Todd has done all the work to spec out the ideal system; only that it's down the list from grapes, blueberries, and more bur oak. 

End of an Era

Isis is gone.

She bookends an era. It began with Kona, my first Siberian. 

She was black, with a white diamond where her neck met her shoulders and a white mask that was like a reverse widow's peak. The next one looked almost identical, which is how she came to me - the folks at the doggie daycare thought she was Kona. They were both such great dogs that, after watching an episode of Nova about Russian experiments with foxes, I decided I wanted two intact dogs that would throw more of the same. That is how I came to get Tensaw, and Isis as well. I wanted to recreate Kona.

What I came to understand is that there is never a dog like your first one.

But the postulate that this particular set of markings is indicative of other desirable qualities was absolutely true. The black and white, blue-eyed Siberian Husky is the best of the breed.

Vaya con dios, mi corazon.

What Makes a Husky Soul?

Last night I realized that I may soon be without a husky. Admittedly, we do still have five of them, but Isis is not long for this world, the three remaining Saws will be twelve this year, and Vaxie is more timid lap dog than Siberian. We can leave the gate open and she won't even look to escape.

I've thought about getting another, but nothing will ever replace those first ones. That is something I've learned from all this, at least. We thought about breeding Vaxie and Bucksaw, and that is still on the table if she happens to come into heat before he turns twelve (AKC will not register a litter if the sire is older than 12 years), but I'm losing interest. I'd love a dog out of Bucksaw, but Vaxie has not impressed me. It may say Siberian Husky on her certificate, but she does not exhibit the qualities I treasure in the breed.

These days, I'm inclined toward the Cursinu, a French working dog from the island of Corsica. I am in discussions with a breeder in France, and I am seriously considering adopting one. The breed exhibits many of the same traits I appreciate in the Siberian, along with a degree of obedience and loyalty that the other typically does not have.

Technically, the term "husky" refers not to the Siberian specifically but to any dog bred to work in the northern latitudes. The preeminent Alaskan Husky is really a mutt, with varying degrees of native Alaskan dog ancestry tempered with genes from any number of other breeds, predominantly Eurohounds today. Siberian dogs were first brought to Nome, Alaska by the Russian fur trader William Goosak, but the breed we know today as the Siberian Husky owes its existence to Jafet Lindeberg, one of the founders of Nome. Lindeberg acquired a number of puppies and gave them to Leonard Seppala, who, along with Elizabeth Ricker, a New England musher and afficionado of the Siberian, created the kennel at Poland Spring, Maine that established the line of dogs now recognized by the AKC.

I say this to make the point that perhaps I don't need to own a Siberian Husky to have a Husky soul. Maybe what drew me to the Siberian was that I am a Husky myself. We share similar attributes - vocal, independent, endowed with endurance - so it seems plausible. There is even some science to back it up.

But even if that really is true, I'm in no hurry to see it realized. I would have been perfectly happy had Kona and Blue lived forever.

A Continuously Evolving Paradigm

This is my favorite blog, even if the regularity with which I update it makes it seem otherwise. In contrast to a fine wine, the quality of the writing has declined with age, but like that particular vintner who first revealed to you the enchantment of the grape, I still love it. Even if it is only a cheap merlot.

We've been forced to accept that to try to push back against the tide of ecological irresponsibility is nothing more than an act of self-flagellation. The entire system is aligned against such behavior. It actively discourages it. Doing the right thing equates to punishment, if you're fortunate enough to find a way to the do the right thing in the first place.

I've somewhat adopted the attitude assigned to the so-called Gen Z, that of "nihilistic optimism". I disguise it under the cloak of no longer forcing my family to uphold my values, of allowing them to decide for themselves what they desire their ecological footprint to be. But it is, at least to a certain extent, a giving up on my part. Sans a total commitment, living as the unhoused, for example, or outright rebellion, there is nothing to be gained by green incrementalism. It is merely delaying the inevitable.

Not that I am giving up entirely. We continue to work our smallholding, support the local food system, buy organic cotton clothing, and minimize the throughput of plastic on our account. But I've abandoned the fantasy that such activities are more akin to living as homesteaders than an average middle income household. And it's clear that no degree of incremental mitigation is going to stave off the impending catastrophe.

One facet of green capitalism that I've latched onto with both hands, however, is electrification. It makes sense for those of us living in Nch’i-Wàna, with our abundance of hydropower. The electricity it produces offers the potential for the highest sustainable standard of living, assuming the rest of the thermodynamic equation can be approximately balanced.

Montana residences consume more energy per capita than any other state. That doesn't include transportation, a category in which we still rank in the top 15, owing to the long distances that separate our communities from one other and the manufacturers of the world. Our cold climate does not allow for much to be done to reduce the amount of CO2 produced in heating our homes, as air-source heat pumps only go so far while ground-source, the ideal solution, is prohibitively expensive. But knowing that we are going to continue commuting to work, driving kids to sports practice, and traveling for competitions, the highest return on our mitigation dollar is in obtained by spending it on electrifying our transportation.

This spring, we bought Brandi a new Kia Niro plug-in hybrid. The greenest car is the one you can hold onto the longest, a point my brother Dagan often makes in comparing his oil-burning early 60s Volkswagen to a new Tesla, but Brandi's old car, a 2005 Honda Civic unusual in that its engine only lasted 200k miles, didn't make sense to repair given its age and the cost of replacement. 

The compact plug-in hybrid SUV is the car every household in the rural west should be issued. It serves every need and is incredibly efficient. Brandi is able to complete her commute and get the boys to their extra-curricular engagements on an overnight charge from our Juicebox home charging station. When we have to travel beyond the Niro's 30 mile electric range, the car averages 45 miles per gallon.

I was so taken by the Niro that I bought a second one, this one a used 2020 full EV. While its sub-200 mile real range makes the prospect of it serving as a rural household's only automobile untenable, as a second commuter, if needed, it can't be beat. The 2019-2021 model years are particularly enticing, considering that low mile, one owner examples can still be found for less than the $25000 cutoff to qualify for the federal tax credit and even the lowest EX trim level comes fully equipped. Just be sure to get the optional Cold Weather package if you live north of the 45th parallel.

While the book is yet to be written on whether battery electric vehicles prove less environmentally harmful than their internal combustion powered cousins, they beat them hands down otherwise, for every use case involving distances less than 200 miles. The driving experience is sublime, if arguably not as engaging as an air-cooled Porsche 911 or fire-breathing V8 from Detroit. Combined with a high-speed electric rail system and adequate bicycle infrastructure, electric vehicles have the power to utterly transform the paradigm in personal transportation without sacrificing the North American's continued desire for total mobility.