I've been expressing this basic idea in several forms every couple of months, so let's hit it from another angle this time.
Part of the craft I've been developing over the years involves tracing all the processes of destruction - and the motion resulting in that destruction - to express the ongoing state of world affairs. Expressing an image of constant acceleration within a cultivated state of mind creates a sense of urgency and alarm, focusing the attention, and in some cases, prescribing a collection of appropriate actions, or at the very least, anticipations.
But you do have to work friction in its many forms into this analysis, which affects the velocity of events, whether local or global. It is not all acceleration all the time. To put it another way, as countless mythologies and religions have expressed, creation and destruction are closely related, and oftentimes you find a single deity at the center of both faces.
To cite one deceptively simple example, take a clearcut (or to recap: the cutting and harvesting of timber on an industrial scale). Personally I don't like clearcuts categorically: they destroy root structures, forest soils and their micro-organisms, habitat, and the stocks of older and larger trees which tend to be better carbon sinks. It heats up and dries out that part of the forest, and the winds can really get going through them with the loss in resistance. And you get erosion when it rains, as the soil has been broken apart and destroyed, and is no longer held together by plant-life. That and they just look awful. Fresh ones that appear where you are used to seeing forest are a bit of a shock.
But not everyone around here has a problem with them, at least in certain circumstances. They free up views for one thing, and less superficially, they can make for good firebreaks depending on their location and extent. They allow more snowfall to reach the ground, which can percolate into the soil and refill groundwater reservoirs, depending on where the water is going and what the land can hold (to be balanced against a general drying out of the soil). They also clear the ground for other plant species to flourish, which could be good or bad, depending on the observer.
The same is the case with wildfires. I don't think I have to get into much more detail here about why they are a problem. We've covered good and recent ground on that one. But smaller wildfires are known to be good for various ecosystems, in which built up undergrowth and dead materials are burned up, releasing their constituents into the soil, freeing up space for fresh plant life, resetting the process of succession in the region. A robust forest ecosystem can stagnate, with the fit incumbents strangling out new growth. And an accumulation of drying out and decaying plant matter on the ground can lead to even bigger and more destructive fires in the future. And indeed, countless indigenous cultures have used controlled burns for thousands of years to shape the ecosystems they are a part of in their favor, and in favor of taking care of the land itself as its own interest.
But there is usually a direction that all of this is going. Part of fleshing out the oppositional forces of motion and friction of a thing is judging just exactly how fast the thing is going, the duration of that speed, and where it is going as well. It is the whole of these considerations that allows one to perceive and judge whether a wildfire or a clearcut for example, is a desirable thing in a certain context to a given observer. And then so on to judging bigger and more complex things.
A clearcut may have a certain set of interacting costs and benefits local to where it is formed, but then clearcut after clearcut driven by a voracious demand for lumber predicated on exploitation without reciprocity, on a constantly widening and intensifying scale, is a very different subject for analysis. And the same is the case for wildfires.
To further complicate all of this, we could continue to nitpick the very concepts of acceleration and friction themselves. After all, it is the resistance offered by friction that makes the kind of acceleration and motion we are so fond of possible. It is the meeting of the "rubber on the road" that provides that grip that makes a car go. And though impressive they may be, those successive explosions in a combustion engine wouldn't be doing much if they weren't contained, and coming up against the resistance of the pistons to do the specific desired work, producing the desired motion in the desired direction.
Part of teasing out the oppositional forces of acceleration and friction involves judging the proportions and ratios of those oppositions, and in turn determining the relative velocity that those ratios and proportions are helping to bring about.
To cap it all off, pieces like these are meant to add a little friction to the acceleration of my more "expressive" pieces, in the hopes of modulating the results of the analysis. Why "express" these things with such urgency and color? What is it all about? At times it makes sense to make a strong emphasis with some punch, and at other times it makes sense to dial it back, but what is most likely to come out in the wash is this: too much too soon, and in the wrong direction, and here's why. And if there is anything left to be done, what might that be?
