Letters respond to Ian Frazier’s account of fires on the Great Plains, Tad Friend’s profile of Gavin Newsom, and Claire Friedman’s Shouts & Murmurs.
It’s telling that the word “ecology” is nowhere to be found in Ian Frazier’s heart-wrenching account of the extensive prairie fires last year (“The Day the Great Plains Burned,” November 5th). Journalists tend to see wildfires as evidence of the harm caused to humans by climate change. How, given this widespread blindness, are people to learn about and work with nature’s logic? The article hints at ecological realities, but doesn’t connect the dots. Fire plays a role in any healthy ecosystem. On the prairie, wildfires convert the previous year’s dead grass into fertilizer, which explains why, as Frazier writes, “the grass came back better than before.” Native Americans “used fire as an environmental tool” because the nourishing regrowth attracted game. The native prairie grasses funded by the Conservation Reserve Program prevent erosion and sequester carbon in their deep roots. Like carbon dioxide, prairie fire is a friend until it’s turned into an enemy. If only the community-building generosity and coöperation shown in a disaster’s wake could be channelled into understanding and proactively working with nature to avoid future calamities.
Before reading Frazier’s article, I was apprehensive about how the people who lived on the plains would be portrayed. Thankfully, Frazier describes them without resorting to cliché. He picked up on two related attributes that characterize the people of the region: a kind of fatalism and a stubborn streak of communitarianism. (Oklahoma once had the largest Socialist Party in the nation, and Kansas was not far behind.) The people here have a realistic understanding of the scale of humans in relation to the universe, and they know that they have to work together to survive. This humility contributes to their skepticism regarding climate change—they question how mere humans could change the entire climate—and also to their historically low levels of voter participation. But, when they are moved to unite as a community and work toward a higher purpose, like rebuilding after a wildfire, they can accomplish great feats.
Tad Friend’s excellent profile of Gavin Newsom treats his legalization of gay marriage in San Francisco, in 2004, when he was mayor, as a bit of a rookie blunder (“Golden Boy 2.0,” November 5th). On the contrary, Newsom’s decision was the greatest single act of any American politician in my lifetime. The reality of 4,036 married gay couples completely changed the national conversation about gay rights. What was unimaginable in 2003 gained widespread acceptance and became law in 2013. I don’t know what Newsom thought would happen when he sent his order to the city clerk, but he changed the world that day—or, at least, he gave it a big shove in the right direction.
I very much enjoyed Claire Friedman’s “How to Read ‘Infinite Jest’ ” (Shouts & Murmurs, November 5th). My daughter has been reading the book for what seems like several years. Every so often, I will ask her how she’s doing with it and she laughs in the way people do when asked about how their back-yard vegetable-garden plan is coming along.