How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time!
My elephant is this website, this blog, and the goals I have set for myself. During the Covid-19 shut-down (which I’m still in while I type this), I stopped thinking about fire for over 2 months. It was TOO BIG, TOO MUCH. Seen alongside Covid-19, then the racial protests after George Floyd’s killing by police, and the rest of my work life and personal life, this took a major back seat. I knitted and cleaned out closets instead.
There is too much to do, learn, decide. There is way too much to think I can actually do it all, especially when some factors are in direct opposition to each other.
For example, our garden has voles. VOLES! Cute, furry, fat little garden destroyers. One year, we failed our annual fire inspection because the darned voles ate the roots out from under a mature rose bush right underneath our roof eave and it dried up the day before the firefighters came. We had dead vegetation where not a week before was a flowering rose bush that was not (ahem) illegal.
The conflict for us is how to get rid of the voles without poisoning wildlife or damaging the health of our soil. Protecting both soil health and native wildlife are important to the environment and therefore, important in slowing climate change which is directly related to the increase in wildfires and their destructiveness…
…so the voles are making our garden more flammable by the day and the IPM approach included destroying their burrows, which means trying to collapse them. I was going out and stomping on soil mounds because I didn’t want to put out poison where other wildlife could be affected. Previously, I wouldn’t have considered stepping on the soil lest I compact it. Now, I’m stomping on it and seriously considering the poison option.
Voles: Soil health vs expense vs fire risk vs protecting wildlife. The challenge is picking the least dangerous option when there is no perfect way out. Do we increase our fire risks more by compacting the soil or by having voles? Do we put birds of prey and neighborhood cats at risk by using poison?
I digress. Let’s get back to eating this elephant. I heard the line once: ‘how do you eat an elephant?’ Answer: ‘one bite at a time!’
The elephant here, of course, is all of the things that we need to know about our risk factors and exposures to the threat of fire. It is a LOT, and that’s just the start – knowing things must lead to doing things; doing the things we aren’t doing already, correcting what we are doing wrong, and discerning what to do next.
My suggestion is this: one thing at a time. Learn something here or there, think on it, make a small change OR decide that it is good as-is. Learn a thing, do/decide/change something, share with a colleague.
For us, we’ve decided that the voles are more dangerous than the soil compaction from stomping their burrows, and poison is too dangerous to try before we’ve exhausted other options like trapping.
I wouldn’t take on all of the learning at once, it takes time to absorb and to notice new connections. The synergies between various landscape practices and their environmental effects are complex. That’s something we aim to illustrate so that as we eat our elephant, you can eat yours with us.
What is your elephant?
