As my ancestors would say in Tigrigna:
ዓሻ ዝተኸሎስ ለባም ነይነቕሎ (A tree planted by a fool is not uprooted by a wise person).
There is a temptation, when surveying the current state of the world, to locate a single moment of origin. A single decision, a single election, a single man, whose removal would in principle allow a return to what came before. This temptation is understandable. It is also, the old saying tells us, a mistake.
A tree planted by a fool is not uprooted by a wise person. Not because the wise person lacks the will or the tools. But because by the time wisdom arrives, the tree has been in the ground long enough to have become something other than a mistake. It has become a fact. Its roots are in the foundation. Things have been built in its shade. Lives have organized themselves around its presence. The fool is gone. The tree remains. And the wise person must contend not with the planting, which is finished, but with everything that grew from it, which is very much alive.
One tree is a mistake. A forest is a civilization’s accumulated choices.
When Was the First Tree Planted?
Ask ten people when America began losing its way and you will get ten different answers, each one honest, each one incomplete.
Some will say it was the rise of the Moral Majority in the late 1970s, when a deliberate and successful campaign began to fuse religious conservatism with economic libertarianism into a political force unified not by what it stood for but by what it opposed. Government expertise. Cultural pluralism. The idea that collective institutions could be trusted to manage collective problems. That campaign did not win immediately. But it planted something in the American political soil that would keep growing long after its original gardeners were gone.
Some will say it was Iran. Not the Iran of today but the Iran of 1979, when the hostage crisis humiliated a president and handed the presidency to a man who understood instinctively that expertise and institution were not assets to run on but liabilities to run against. The hostages were released the day Reagan was inaugurated. Iran learned that American elections were a lever. America learned, or began to learn, that projecting strength mattered more than being right. Those two lessons have been compounding ever since.
Some will say it was September 11, 2001, and the response to it. Not the attack itself, which was a crime committed by nineteen men, but the decision to treat it as a civilizational war requiring the suspension of normal judgment, normal law, normal standards of evidence. The intelligence was shaped to fit the conclusion. The dissenters were sidelined. A country that had just been attacked in a way that demanded careful thought responded instead with the kind of certainty that fills the space where careful thought should be. The precedents set in those years, for executive power, for preemptive war, for the management of public information in wartime, did not disappear when the administrations that set them ended. They became available to everyone who followed.
Some will say it was 2008, when the financial system built on decades of deregulation collapsed and the people who built it were rescued while the people who trusted it were not. That asymmetry, more than any ideology, produced the furious sense that the institutions of American life were not neutral arbiters but instruments of a class that had learned to privatize its gains and socialize its losses. That fury did not care much about left or right. It cared about who got bailed out and who didn’t. It was available to anyone who could credibly claim to be outside the system that had failed. And it waited, patient and combustible, for the right match.
The honest answer is that all of them are right. The forest did not have a single planting day. It grew from seeds scattered across fifty years, each one finding purchase in soil that the previous one had prepared. The Moral Majority loosened the ground against institutional trust. Reagan planted deregulation and anti-expertise deep in the root system of American conservatism. The Iraq war normalized the manipulation of public information in service of a predetermined conclusion. The financial crisis poisoned the water table with a grievance that has not been fully metabolized to this day.
Each tree grew in the shade of the ones before it. Each one made the next one more likely. By the time the most recent gardeners arrived, they were not starting a forest. They were inheriting one, and choosing, with great energy, to let it grow.
The Gardeners
Not everyone in this story is the same kind of fool. That is important to say clearly, because the temptation when surveying a forest this large is to flatten everyone who contributed to it into a single category of villain. But a forest this large requires many kinds of tending, and the people who have tended this one have done so from very different places, with very different levels of awareness, and very different relationships to what they were growing.
There are, roughly, four kinds of gardeners.
The first are the true believers. These are the people who look at the forest and see not a problem but a solution. They believe, genuinely, that the postwar institutional order was a bad deal for the country that built it, that the alliances were freeloading arrangements, that the regulations were strangling the natural vitality of the market, that the experts were a self-serving class using the language of knowledge to protect their own position. They are not extracting personal benefit, at least not primarily. They are enacting a vision. They will be the last to acknowledge the damage because the vision and the self are fused. To admit the forest is burning is to admit something about who they are that they cannot afford to admit.
The second are the short-term extractors. These are perhaps the most clear-eyed people in the entire story, which is also what makes them the most dangerous. They understand perfectly well that the forest is not healthy. They have no illusion about what is growing or where it is headed. What they have done, with considerable sophistication, is position themselves to profit from the timber before the forest falls. The deregulated financial instruments, the volatility of markets during crises, the cryptocurrency ecosystems that reward chaos, the defense contracts that expand with every new theater of war. They do not need the strategy to work in the long run. They need it to work long enough. And they have correctly calculated that the mechanisms that might hold them accountable have been sufficiently weakened that long enough is probably sufficient.
The third are the captured opportunists. These are the people who might have known better, who in a different arrangement might have been a moderating force, but who have made a calculation, sometimes conscious and sometimes not, that the cost of resistance exceeds the benefit. The legislators who know certain votes are wrong but make them anyway. The officials who have read the assessments and understood the warnings and signed the orders regardless. The business leaders and the institutional figures who are waiting for a moment of safety that keeps receding, hoping to get to shore before the wave breaks. They are not driving the forest’s growth. They are tending it by omission, which is its own form of gardening.
The fourth are the genuinely clueless. And yes, some of them are simply not equipped for the complexity of what they are managing. This is not a comfortable thing to say about people in positions of enormous power, but it is true and it matters analytically. A decision-making framework that substitutes instinct for assessment, that explains complex social phenomena through the genetics of the people involved, that sets war aims in terms of what one man will feel in his bones, is not only authoritarian. It is also, at least in part, the product of minds that have never been seriously required to contend with evidence that contradicted what they already believed. They have been protected from complexity their entire lives by wealth and by the particular social ecosystems that wealth constructs. The forest looks fine to them because they have never been required to look at it carefully.
What makes this forest so difficult to clear is not any one of these gardeners alone. It is the way they need each other. The true believers provide the ideological canopy that makes the extraction look like a cause. The extractors provide the funding and infrastructure that give the believers their platform. The captured opportunists provide the institutional legitimacy, the votes, the signatures, the silence, that makes the whole operation appear normal. And the cluelessness at the center produces an unpredictability that keeps everyone else off balance, preventing the coordinated response that a more coherent operation might have generated sooner.
A forest tended by all four simultaneously does not need a master plan. It just needs to be left alone to grow.
The Roots in the Foundation
A forest changes the land it grows on. That is easy to forget when you are standing inside it. The trees are visible. The roots are not. But the roots are where the real work happens, the slow, invisible pressure against everything underneath, the hairline cracks in the foundation that nobody notices until the wall shifts.
This forest was planted wrong from the beginning. Not in the way that all human projects are imperfect, requiring adjustment and correction over time. Wrong in a more fundamental sense, in the wrong place, with the wrong species, by people who either could not see what they were doing or preferred not to. A forest planted in error can still be cleared, if it is recognized early enough, if enough people with enough authority agree on what they are looking at, if the roots have not yet gone too deep. The window for that recognition came and went several times across fifty years. Each time it closed a little faster than the last. What was a stand of saplings that could have been pulled by hand became a thicket that required machinery, and then a forest that required something more than machinery, and then something so large and so entangled that the people standing inside it could no longer agree on whether it was a problem or a landscape.
And while that window was closing, the forest was being tended. Not neglected. Tended. Watered, fertilized, protected from the small fires that might have cleared it while clearing was still manageable. That is the distinction that matters. In a natural forest, the accumulation of fuel load is a consequence of well-intentioned mismanagement, the error of people who understood fire as only destructive and suppressed it to protect what they had built. Here, the suppression was not always well-intentioned. Some of it was deliberate. The small corrective fires, the accountability moments, the institutional checks that should have burned through the accumulated debris before it reached the canopy, were suppressed not because anyone misunderstood fire ecology but because some of the gardeners needed the fuel to keep accumulating. The combustibility, for them, was not a risk to be managed. It was a resource to be harvested.
What have the roots done to the ground beneath?
The first thing they have done is to the scientific infrastructure. Not all at once, and not only recently, but across decades of accumulated pressure, the relationship between evidence and policy has been steadily undermined. It began with the deliberate manufacture of doubt, a strategy developed most visibly by the tobacco industry and adopted wholesale by others, where the goal was not to disprove inconvenient science but simply to create the impression that the science was disputed, that reasonable people could disagree, that certainty was arrogance and uncertainty was humility. That strategy worked not because it was scientifically credible but because it was politically useful, and what is politically useful tends to find institutional support. Doubt, manufactured at sufficient scale and distributed through sufficient channels, becomes indistinguishable from genuine scientific uncertainty to anyone not trained to tell the difference. And most people are not trained to tell the difference. That is not a failing. It is a condition that was deliberately cultivated.
By the time the formal erasure came, the scientific consensus on climate declared a hoax by decree, the apparatus of climate science defunded and depopulated, the endangerment finding revoked, the roots had been working on that foundation for forty years. The wall did not collapse suddenly. It had been cracking for a very long time. What looks like a recent assault on science is the settling of a structure whose foundation was compromised long before the current gardeners arrived. They did not create the crack. They walked through it.
The same roots have been working on the alliance architecture. The postwar order was not just a set of treaties. It was a set of habits, of expectations, of accumulated trust built through decades of consultation and collective decision making, imperfect and unequal but real. Alliances are maintained not by the documents that create them but by the daily practice of behaving as though the other parties matter, of consulting before acting, of absorbing costs for collective benefit. That practice has been eroding for longer than the current moment. The Iraq war’s unilateralism, the financial crisis’s revelation of whose interests the system actually served, the gradual replacement of multilateral instinct with transactional calculation, each one was a small fire suppressed, a moment when the alliance system should have been forced to reckon with its own contradictions and was not. When Germany’s defense minister says this is not our war, we did not start it, he is not making a new argument. He is saying out loud what has been accumulating quietly for twenty years, the slowly composting debris of a hundred smaller grievances that were never allowed to burn clean.
The information environment is perhaps the most comprehensively damaged foundation. A democratic system requires, at minimum, a shared factual baseline from which disagreement can proceed. Not agreement on conclusions but agreement on what the facts are, what the evidence shows, what actually happened. That baseline has been under systematic pressure since long before social media made the pressure easier to apply. The same doubt-manufacturing strategy that worked on climate science was applied to electoral integrity, to public health, to the basic question of what expertise is and whether it can be trusted. What social media did was not create the fracture. It industrialized it, made it profitable, gave every fragment of the fractured baseline its own ecosystem in which to grow undisturbed by contradictory evidence. The result is not a public that disagrees about conclusions. It is a public that disagrees about reality, which is a different and much more dangerous condition. You can negotiate conclusions. You cannot easily negotiate reality.
And underneath all of it, the democratic norms. The unwritten rules that held the system together not because they were enforced but because enough people in enough positions of power believed in them enough to observe them even when observing them was costly. A legislature that has abdicated its war-making check has not just made one bad vote. It has demonstrated that abdication is available, which makes the next one easier. A court whose ruling is circumvented within hours has not just lost one case. It has shown that circumvention is a tool, which means it will be used again. A press threatened with license revocation during wartime has not just been intimidated once. It has been shown the shape of the cost of independence, which changes the calculation for every editorial decision that follows. Norms interrupted long enough stop being norms. They become stories about how things used to be done, which is a very different thing.
This is what roots do in the wrong forest. They do not announce themselves. They work slowly, invisibly, against everything underneath, widening the cracks that were there before they arrived, opening new ones where the ground was softer, until one day the foundation shifts and everyone asks when it happened.
The answer is always the same. It has been happening for a very long time.
Healthy forests burn. Not catastrophically but regularly, in surface fires that clear the accumulated debris, open the canopy to light, and trigger the heat-dependent seeds that cannot germinate any other way. The great insight of modern fire ecology is that the instinct to suppress every fire is not protective. It is catastrophic in slow motion. Every fire suppressed is fuel saved for the next one. Every decade of successful suppression is a decade of accumulating danger, the understory filling with dry material, the canopy closing, the diversity that requires light and disturbance gradually disappearing, until the forest that looks from a distance like it is thriving is in fact a single ignition away from a crown fire hot enough to sterilize the soil.
But this forest was not a healthy one that accumulated fuel through natural processes and needed careful management. It was planted wrong. Its existence was the error. The fuel that has accumulated is not the byproduct of natural growth but the deliberate product of deliberate tending, and some of the people tending it have always known that a large enough fire would serve their purposes. Creative destruction. The burn that clears the old order for what they want to build in its place.
That is perhaps the most dangerous idea growing in the forest. That the fire is not the catastrophe to be prevented. That the fire is the plan.
The Park Benches
Knowing a forest was planted wrong does not make it removable. That is the part of the old saying that is easiest to misread. It is tempting to hear it as fatalism, as a counsel of despair, as the wise person throwing up their hands and walking away. But that is not what it says. It says the wise person cannot simply uproot what the fool planted. It does not say nothing can be done. It says that what can be done must reckon honestly with what is there, which is a different and harder task than the one most people want to be doing.
The reason the forest cannot simply be cleared is not the trees. It is everything that has grown up around them.
There are park benches in this forest. There are paths worn smooth by years of use. There are houses built in the shade, businesses that depend on the canopy, communities whose entire geography is organized around the forest’s presence. There are birds that nest in trees that should never have been planted, and fungi in the soil that have spent decades building networks through the root systems of the wrong species, and there are children who have grown up in this forest and know no other landscape and would not recognize the land without it.
This is not metaphor for the sake of beauty. It is a description of how the wrong forest becomes, over time, the only forest anyone living can remember, and therefore the forest that must be contended with rather than the forest that should have been.
Consider what has been built in the shade of fifty years of anti-institutional politics. Entire media ecosystems whose business model depends on the fracture of the shared factual baseline. Political careers built entirely on the premise that government cannot work, careers that require government to continue not working in order to remain viable. Financial instruments whose profitability is indexed to volatility, that perform better in chaos than in stability, that have no incentive structure pointing toward the kind of long-term institutional health that would make them less necessary. Communities whose identity and whose economy have been organized around industries that the wrong forest protected and that a corrected forest would have to reckon with. These are the park benches. They are real. The people sitting on them did not plant the trees. Many of them did not choose this forest. They simply arrived, or were born, into a landscape that was already here, and built their lives within the parameters they found.
This is why the argument about blame, while not entirely useless, is insufficient as a guide to action. Blame points backward to the planting. The park benches are here now. The people sitting on them are here now. Any serious attempt to reckon with the forest must account for them, not because they are right or because the forest is good, but because they are real and their presence is a constraint that wisdom must operate within rather than wish away.
There is a second kind of park bench that is harder to see and more important to name. These are the institutional accommodations, the legal precedents, the procedural adaptations, the organizational structures that have been built not in celebration of the wrong forest but simply in response to its existence. Regulations designed to manage industries that should not exist in their current form. International agreements negotiated around American unilateralism rather than confronting it. Scientific communication strategies developed to reach publics whose relationship to evidence has been systematically degraded. Democratic norms bent and reinterpreted to accommodate behaviors that the original framers could not have imagined. These adaptations were often made by people who knew exactly what they were doing and did it anyway because the alternative was worse. They are the captured opportunists’ most lasting legacy, not the complicity itself but the institutional shapes that complicity produced, shapes that now constrain even those who had no part in producing them.
And there is a third kind, the most intimate and therefore the most politically potent. These are the identities. The sense of self that has become fused with the forest’s existence, that experiences any challenge to the forest as a challenge to the self. This is not unique to any political tribe. It is a human condition applied to a political circumstance. When a person’s understanding of who they are, their values, their community, their place in the world, has been built inside a particular set of arrangements, the prospect of those arrangements changing is not experienced as a policy debate. It is experienced as a threat to the self. And threats to the self produce responses that are not accessible to evidence or argument, because evidence and argument are not the register in which the threat is being felt.
This is the deepest root in the foundation. Not the political structures or the economic arrangements or even the information environment, though all of those matter. It is the human need to have the world make sense in terms that include oneself as a worthy participant, and the way that need has been captured and directed, for fifty years, by gardeners who understood that identity is the most durable of all the things that can be built in a forest’s shade.
You cannot argue someone out of a forest they live in. You can only offer them a different place to live, and wait, and hope that the offer is more compelling than the forest is familiar.
Which brings us to the fire.
The Fire
Forest ecologists distinguish between fire regimes. Not all fires are the same. A low intensity surface fire moves through the understory, clears the accumulated debris, releases nutrients back into the soil, and leaves the large trees standing. It is disruptive and locally destructive but the forest recovers, often stronger and more diverse than before, because the seed bank is intact, because the soil is not sterilized, because enough of the structure survived to organize the regrowth.
A crown fire is different in kind, not just degree. When the fuel load has accumulated long enough, when the understory is dense enough and dry enough and the canopy connected enough, the fire does not stay on the ground. It climbs. It moves through the tops of the trees faster than it can be outrun, generating its own wind, its own weather, temperatures high enough to destroy not just what is growing but the capacity of the ground to grow anything for a very long time. The soil loses its structure. The seed bank is sterilized. What returns first is not the forest that was there before but opportunistic species, fast growing, shallow rooted, adapted to disturbed ground, that can look like recovery from a distance while preventing it up close.
The question for a forest planted wrong and tended toward combustibility for fifty years is not whether there will be a fire. There will be a fire. The question is what kind, and whether anything in the seed bank survives it.
We do not know the answer yet. That is the honest thing to say and it is important to say it clearly, because the temptation at this point in the analysis is to resolve what cannot be resolved, to offer either reassurance or despair, both of which are forms of dishonesty about a situation that is genuinely open. The fire has started. That much is visible. Whether it stays on the ground or climbs into the canopy depends on variables that are still in motion.
What we can say is that the conditions for a crown fire are more fully present than at any point in living memory.
The institutional seed bank has been depleted. The scientific infrastructure that would organize recovery has been scattered. The alliance architecture that distributed the load of global stability has been strained to the point where several of its members are saying out loud that they did not sign up for this forest and will not help tend it. The information environment that a democratic recovery would require, a shared factual baseline, a public capable of collective deliberation, has been so thoroughly fragmented that it is not clear how it reassembles even under favorable conditions. The economic arrangements that might have provided a stable platform for transition are carrying the weight of a war, a tariff regime in legal chaos, oil at prices that arrive in the bodies of ordinary people before they arrive in any policy discussion.
And the four kinds of gardeners are still in the forest. The true believers are watering. The extractors are harvesting timber as fast as they can. The captured opportunists are watching the smoke and calculating the moment to move. The genuinely clueless are looking at the flames and seeing a controlled burn.
Three outcomes are visible from here, not as predictions but as the territory the future must move through.
The first is the managed burn. The fire stays on the ground. The institutions that remain intact, and some do remain intact, bend without breaking. The electoral mechanisms function well enough to produce a course correction. The allies who have been alienated are patient enough to wait for it. The economic pain is absorbed without producing the kind of political desperation that historically generates its most dangerous expressions. The seed bank survives. Recovery is slow, incomplete, marked by the permanent loss of things that will not come back, but the basic structure of a functioning democratic society and a functioning international order, diminished and chastened, continues. This is not optimism. It is the best case, and it requires things to go right that have been going wrong for a long time.
The second is the slow crown fire. The institutions continue to erode faster than they can be repaired. The electoral mechanisms are stressed enough by the information environment and the accumulated precedents of the last decade that course corrections become harder to achieve and easier to contest. The alliance architecture fractures not dramatically but gradually, each country making its separate accommodations to a world without reliable American leadership, building the bilateral arrangements and regional structures that fill the vacuum, arrangements that will outlast any American political correction because they will have become load-bearing by the time the correction arrives. The dollar’s reserve currency status erodes across a decade rather than collapsing in a moment. The scientific infrastructure does not recover its previous capacity within a generation. The world that emerges is not unrecognizable but it is organized around different assumptions, different centers of gravity, different answers to the question of who can be trusted and with what. The postwar order, already weakened, does not survive in any meaningful form. What replaces it is negotiated in conditions of reduced American influence by actors whose interests were not well served by the order that is ending.
The third is the crown fire. A confluence of crises, any one of which might be manageable in isolation, arrives simultaneously in a system whose resilience has been depleted. The Middle East war expands into a theater that pulls in actors who have been calculating on the sidelines. The Pacific vacuum created by military overextension is tested at the wrong moment by the wrong actor. The economic stress passes the threshold at which ordinary people’s patience with democratic processes runs out and the political options that were previously unthinkable become thinkable. The information environment cannot produce the shared understanding of crisis that collective response requires. The institutions that might coordinate response have been weakened precisely in the ways that this particular combination of crises requires them to be strong. This is not inevitable. But it is no longer unimaginable, which is itself a measure of how much the fuel load has accumulated.
There is a silver lining, if it can be called that, in the crown fire scenario that the other two do not offer. A full burn clears the ground completely. The wrong species are gone. The root systems that were cracking the foundation are gone. The canopy that was blocking the light is gone. What remains is open ground, scarred and depleted, yes, but open in a way it has not been for fifty years. The question of what grows next becomes genuinely open. The opportunity to plant right, to plant with intention rather than inherit by default, is real. It will be slow. Succession after a severe fire is measured in decades, not election cycles. The first growth will be opportunistic and shallow and will be mistaken for recovery by people who do not understand what they are watching. But underneath it, if the seed bank survived, if enough people protected enough of the right things through the fire, the conditions for a different forest become possible.
What none of these outcomes includes is a return to the forest that was there before. That forest is gone regardless of how the fire behaves. Whatever grows in the clearing, whether it is healthy diverse regrowth or opportunistic shallow-rooted colonizers, it will not be what was there before the fool planted the first tree.
The Day Unfolds
There is a second old saying in Tigrigna, as old as the first and from the same tradition, which means it comes from a people who have had extensive practice watching fools plant trees and wise people struggle with the consequences.
ከም ዕዳጋኻ እምበር ኣዴኻ ኣይከምዝበለትካን (The day will unfold not according to your mother’s plan but according to the will of the market.)
It is not a counsel of passivity. The mothers in this tradition are not passive women. They are planners, organizers, the people who hold families and communities together through exactly the kinds of disruptions this essay has been describing. To say that the day unfolds according to the market rather than the mother’s plan is not to dismiss the mother’s plan. It is to acknowledge that reality has its own logic, that it operates according to forces larger than any individual intention, and that wisdom begins with an honest reckoning with those forces rather than a wish that they were different.
We did not plant this forest. Most of us did not tend it. Many of us warned about it, in different registers and different languages and different decades, and were not heard, or were heard and not heeded, or were heard and heeded too late. The forest is here. The fire has started. The day is unfolding not according to anyone’s plan but according to the accumulated logic of fifty years of wrong planting and deliberate tending and suppressed small fires and roots working quietly against the foundation.
That is the reality we are required to act within. Not the reality we would have chosen. Not the reality that should have been. The one that is.
And here is what the fire ecologists know that the political analysts sometimes forget. The most important work in a fire is not the fighting of it. The most important work is the seeding that happens in its wake. What you plant in the clearing determines what forest grows next. Get it wrong and you are back where you started, the opportunists establishing themselves, the wrong species taking hold while the ground is open, the same mistakes made in the same disturbed soil by the same combination of true believers and extractors and captured opportunists and genuinely clueless gardeners who do not know they are gardeners.
Get it right and you have something that has not existed in the clearing for fifty years. Light. Open ground. The possibility of planting with intention rather than inheriting by default.
Getting it right requires, first, an honest account of what went wrong and why, not to assign blame, which is the wrong tool, but to know what species not to plant again. It requires patience with succession, with the understanding that the forest you want cannot be rushed into existence on disturbed ground, that the transitional phase is necessary and will be uncomfortable and will be mistaken for failure by people who do not understand what they are watching. It requires the protection of the seed bank, the institutions and habits and practices and people that carry the genetic material of what a healthy forest looks like, even when they seem small and fragile against the scale of what has burned.
And it requires the willingness to do this work without knowing how the fire will end. The crown fire scenario is real. The slow burn scenario is real. The managed burn scenario is real. We are inside the fire and cannot see its edges from here. The day is unfolding according to forces that no single actor controls and no single analysis can fully predict.
What we can control is what we plant. What we insist on naming accurately while it is happening. What records we keep. What habits we maintain in conditions that make maintaining them difficult. What we refuse to normalize even when normalization is the path of least resistance. What seeds we protect and carry and wait for the right moment to put in the ground.
The postwar order that is ending was itself planted in the clearing left by the last great fire. It was imperfect. It was unequal. It protected some and exploited others. It carried within it the seeds of its own wrong forest, as all human arrangements do. But it also contained things worth carrying forward, the habits of collective deliberation, the architecture of international cooperation, the infrastructure of scientific consensus, the practice of accountability, however imperfect, between power and the people it affects. Those things did not emerge automatically from the rubble of 1945. They were planted, carefully and with intention, by people who had watched the wrong forest burn and understood, with the particular clarity that surviving a catastrophe sometimes produces, what they did not want to grow again.
We may be approaching a similar moment. Or we may manage something less than a full crown fire and find ourselves in the harder, slower work of trying to plant right in a forest that is still partially standing, where the wrong trees are still taking light and the roots are still in the foundation and the gardeners who planted them are still arguing that the forest is fine.
Either way, the work is the same. Name what is. Protect what matters. Plant with intention. Accept that the day will unfold according to forces larger than your plan, and do the work anyway.
The fool’s forest is burning.
What grows next is still, just barely, up to us.