There are so many Smokey Bear-pandering treatises on the horrors of forest fire. 20,000 bunnies fried; 100,000 acres burned; 4 McMansions brought down by embers.
I'm tired of it; I want to look at it from the point of view of the fire.
What does the fire get out of the rampage? Fuel, you might say. Okay, the fire gets sustenance. It gets to grow and feed off the energy its violence releases.
What else? Time, I'd argue. Initially, the fire uses the sustenance to buy itself time to survive. To grow. Later, time gifts wildfire will a full arc of destruction.
That's it; close the books. But no, hold on. There's a reason I'm writing about fire. Mcluhan's tenet holds here: the glowing medium is the message. Fire, maybe not a particular fire but the wholeness of platonic fire, gets notoriety. Fear, even. All those dead bunny's children telling other bunnies about the evil red monster, warren to weak-linked warren.
But fire can't hold territory, can it? It can only feed off other systems; it cannot generate sustenance, it only leaves ash. Except, of course, where it is handled by a larger agency, some creature with a mind. Who tends fire; circumsribes it to extend its time by focusing its power.
I'm running out of metaphor. Or, better to say it's burning off. The deeper I get into Holling/Gunderson's Panarchy, the more I'm dwelling on linked systems.
In this case, fire and system disruption. System attacks can also fuel an insurgency, allow it to continue, gain it notoriety. But how do they hold territory? They can destroy a given order, but how can any group defined by that tactic hope to build a system. They will have destroyed all their raw material.
So, you argue, maybe they don't want to hold territory. Territory has taken a back seat to identity politics, right? They fight to define themselves.
But, natch, they are defining themselves in opposition to these systems they keep ramming. Pity the fools when the systems are destroyed. They'll have nothing left to feed on, and will die themselves.
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