The way the Israeli public perceived the Carmel fire is a frightening reflection of our cultural mindset: It’s all about war. The fire is the enemy, the forest is a war victim, the solution depends on the weapons we’re able to stockpile.
By Gaby Nitzan

So what do we do? Buy the biggest plane in the world? Develop a more effective flame retardant? Apologize for the Mavi Marmara incident in return for a firefighting alliance with Turkey? Buy helicopters? Accept the proposal of the big reformer Ayub Kara and impose the death penalty on arsonists?

The way the Israeli public perceived the Carmel fire is a frightening reflection of our cultural mindset: It’s all about war. The fire is the enemy, the forest is a war victim, the solution depends on the weapons we’re able to stockpile. We’re a small country surrounded by sparks plotting to destroy us, so let’s outsmart them.

The way we perceive the forest and nature is also condescending: We’ve conquered the wasteland, we’ve JNFed the hills, behind every tree is a Jewish donor from Cleveland, behind every cyclamen one or two national poets, and planting trees in orderly rows is still considered a noble act. Having sprouted a mini-Switzerland in the midst of the Levant, we are cursed if we allow one single pine tree to burn.

But if we take a moment and look at things from a less conventional perspective, say from the point of view of the forest, the whole picture changes. A forest fire in principle is not a disaster, nor is it a problem in and of itself. In fact, it is a vital need. Forests burned on this planet long before Homo sapiens rubbed a rock and invented the barbecue. Fire is an integral part of the lifecycle of a forest. It is necessary and beneficial. The organic ash it generates makes renewal possible and preserves soil fertility. The fire devours sick and dead trees and allows a new generation to grow in their stead. It appears to play a role as well in the evolutionary processes of organisms.

Still, a fire on the scale we had here is not an entirely natural process. What happened here was not the result of a lack of firefighting equipment, but precisely their overuse. Forest fires cannot be prevented. But small fires can be allowed to burn uninterrupted in order to prevent the really big ones. That’s what happens in natural forests, where humans don’t intervene, and that’s how you prevent the creation of giant, flammable, territorially contiguous areas. The Carmel fire didn’t happen because of two teenagers with a water-pipe but because of a patronizing and ignorant policy that prevented the forest from creating its own natural fire barriers.

A small country like ours doesn’t need to invest in Jumbos and Ilyushins. Instead, for a change, it should listen the forest and let it recover. All the experts out there have been trying to figure out how many dozens of years will pass “until the forest begins to recover.” But the truth is that it’s already begun that process. This spring, most of the area will be fresh and green, new plants will blossom, trunks that looked dead will grow new and healthy branches, a host of dormant seeds will sprout, the oaks will show us once again that it takes much more than a fire to wipe them out (a building project, for example ), cyclamens and crocuses will again demonstrate the genius of the concept of a bulb. As for us? We can continue whining that our garden’s been ruined, or we can marvel at the endless wisdom of nature and perhaps even learn something from it.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/from-the-perspective-of-the-forest-1.329438