We are studying fire these days. Part of understanding the drought-fire-flood-famine vicious cycle is to understand the rain-tree/plant-aquifer recharging-flowing-river to ocean hydraulic virtuous cycle.  In this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h13jrgqv_Vo you find me standing at my back door as rain falls into the forest.  I hope you can see the way a hundred thousand leaves are nodding and catching each raindrop.  They gently usher it down to the spongey leaf-littered floor.  Here the rain has time to slowly meander through the layers of decaying leaves and eventually deep below recharge the aquifer.  It also slowly trickles across roots and fallen limbs into my creek which runs clear, not muddy, due to the generosity of the trees deciduous nature.  When forests are clear cut, or burned as in the Amazon, their grace and protection is not available to slow down the rain.  Rain rushes over bare ground without time to be absorbed.  This huge volume then gains speed in streams and more speed and volume in rivers creating huge flooding. The aquifer is starved, and flooding washes away topsoil.  It is not a flowery metaphor that trees call the rain!  Without the transpiration of the forest, the particulates that constellate mist into rain no longer function.  No rain means cracked hard-pan earth, hence more drought and fire.  When rain finally arrives, it quickly becomes flood; food crops are ruined and famine is close on its heels.  What can each of us do?  Watch this video and follow Diana Beresford Kroeger’s Global Bio Plan.  We Can Do This!!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPOsgqJF77U

Below is a piece of a poem about the mitigating relationship of trees and plants to fire. From my book A Litany of Wild Graces.  Order it on bookshop.org!

Wild Cathedrals

Light-eating spirits,

flora are ancestral forces.

Photosynthesizing,

they make divinity

visible to our blunt human sight:

Beech trees open their

copper arms

touch hair

greet and bless.

Silvery glade ferns bow,

exude antediluvian perfume.

Curling grapevine tendrils swing

in the wind of our passing.

The central flame,

the green light, rooted

ever-rising

is the mitochondrial matrix.

Its combustive heat

fed by pacifist chloroplasts

turns stardust into flesh

photo @ed-leszczynskl