California's Wildfires And The Firefighters' Philosophy

We see the might of the fire department when it tries to contain enormous wildfires, and we know that this fire department could replace the police and the army in places that are susceptible to fires. The fire department's up-to-date technology, such as the latest cutting-edge chemicals to tackle the blaze, and its highly skilled manpower consisting even of airplane pilots, enable it to manage large swathes of land and large numbers of population, making it very powerful, sometimes literally overnight. But this power is dependent on the whims of the fire.

The sustenance of power in the fire department depends fully on the duration of the blaze: if the blaze lasts for days, the fire department is powerful for those days, and if it lasts for weeks then the fire department is powerful for weeks. After the wildfire is extinguished, the fire department dramatically loses power and once again goes back into oblivion. Its oblivion and inactivity is complete, for the fire department maintains no internal “office politics” because its experience of power is intense, short-lived and accompanies the fire, as opposed to being the result of careful and farsighted political planning, team-building and manipulation.

Today's intense and panicked focus in the media on the wildfires of Canada and the USA are not so just because the fires have been particularly intense and active, but because of the anxiety that the longer the fires last the longer the fire department stays in power, and gets the chance to further strengthen its role in a certain place and in wider society, toppling even the police and army from certain places, for one.

The fire department dictates the flows of people out of dangerous places and evaluates when the population's private property has to be left behind. Giving the painful instruction to leave behind one's home and other belongings which cannot be taken along is made far easier by the philosophies declaring the impermanence of things. It is this idea in philosophy of impermanence which can be carried forward, thought over and espoused by the fire department more than by other organizations. It is this philosophy with which the fire department is engaged in while doing its “office work,” when the firefighters directly face the blaze, as opposed to being politicized thoroughly like the police and the army and thinking of the tactics and strategies to gain more political power for a certain team or leader within the department, even when they are supposed to be completely engaged in on-the-ground operations. Politics is of no interest to the firefighter, politics ultimately being the search and problematization of the “other” of a certain society, which the firefighter is not concerned with, given that his/her “enemy” is the natural fire itself and not the foreign or criminal “other.”

However, there is a political-philosophical problem in the fire department when it engages in the Greek philosophers/thinkers who consider fire to be one of the important four or five elements which compose the universe, and influenced by the ancient Greeks the firefighter celebrates the importance of fire and becomes a supporter of fires, and considers fire to be his/her leader and indirectly lends support to the sustenance of the fire department's power through his/her desire to see the fires burn for as long as possible. He/she ceases to fight the blaze, and builds all kinds of protests in the department in order to ultimately support his/her budding revering of fire. We must continue to reward the firefighters as enduring heroes and heroines of society for their role in dousing fires even long after they doused the blaze, which may convince them to abandon Greek philosophy's emphasis on and exaltation of fire.