Only the Western Christian Paideia Can Prevent Forest Fires

The Progressive Paideia’s Far-Reaching Destruction is Real

Dateline:  July 11, year of our Lord 2022

If words had relatives, Paideia's closest living relative would be "education."  But, that comparison might be as helpful as evolutionists calling a chicken the closest relative of Tyrannosaurus Rex.  If you've read Battle for the American Mind, you know that progressives deliberately derailed the Western Christian Paideia (WCP) 100 years ago.  When we wrote the book, Pete and I wondered if we should use a word like "paideia" that was so difficult to relate to everyday life.  So, occasionally in this column, I'll bring forward concrete, specific examples of why paideia matters.

As a reminder, paideia is a deeply held fusion of the back-story we believe about our world, with related affections, virtues, and our vision of the good life embedded in us as youth.  As a result of this deeply held view of the world, we are each shaped to love certain things, and to take action based upon that love.  

This week, it matters because I took a mountain bike ride on what was once America's premier Mountain Bike trail, declared so by Outdoor Life  in the 1990's.  That trail, and much of my forested state, is a shadow of what it once was, courtesy of the progressive paideia.  How does a word that, before "Battle" became a best-seller, was known only to a small cadre of academics, matter so much to something so far away as the mountain beauty of the West?  Here's the story…  

In 1910, when America still held a fairly strong WCP, the mountain states including Idaho and Montana were newly discovered provisioners of natural resources for America.  One of the trains that carried timber and mining ore threw a spark that started The Big Burn — what has been called the largest forest fire in U.S. history.  When the smoke settled, government and industry went to work and built a fire-suppression system that essentially ended major forest fires across the Mountain West between 1920 and 1990.  I lived and backpacked in Idaho at the end of this period and rarely ever saw a fire scar.  The state of our back country was a hidden gem.

Then, in 1988, Yellowstone caught fire and was decimated.   The "experts" at the time told us that this tragedy was caused by man suppressing fires — underbrush buildup was the cause, so they said.  So, the policy changed to let fires burn across the West.  In the 30+ years since, fires have ravaged the West and logging has been severely cut back.  We're told this is necessary.  But, that's not true.  Here's what happened.

In the first half of the 20th century, before progressive education went to seed, nearly everyone believed in the dominion view of the world.  God had set us about subduing and taking dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:26), not to exploit it or damage it, but to tend it like a garden and leave it better than we found it.  As is always the case, exploitation did occur.  But, as a rule, foresters during the early part of the 20th century sought to protect the forest and other resources and maximize their use for good.  In the West, they set in place a network of fire fighters and watchtowers that stopped fires within hours, so they never got big.  Rather than wildfires, they thinned forests through logging, a few controlled burns, and they built roads that helped to care for it.  The result was that by 1980, there were vastly more healthy forests in the West than at the turn of the 20th century.  

By the late 1980’s, the dominant progressive paideia, informed by atheistic humanism and materialism, had taken root.  It had been well-cultivated since the 1960's, both in k-12 and into the college educated political elite and the forestry schools.  By 1990, we see the tell-tale generational "paideia lag" (see "Battle…”) enter the world of land management.  Progressively educated foresters no longer had a deep dominion ethic from Christianity.  Rather than a garden, they saw nature as god.  In their new progressive story, evolution had created a finely-tuned ecosystem out of which man evolved.  With no transcendent God and no dominion mandate, man was a danger to the very ecosystem from which he evolved.  After all, if time and chance created man, he could as easily destroy the natural world if he meddled.  Unlike Adam, who was created with the Imago Dei to take dominion over creation, the highest good for the progressive man is to leave nature untouched.

This new virtue — untouched wilderness is ethically better than cultivated forests — extends into many other areas.  And, perhaps there are good reasons to leave some areas wild, even in a dominion ethical system.  For example, Teddy Roosevelt made some good conservation points from his dominion view, courtesy of education in the late 1800's, when he created national parks.  But the senselessness of burning millions of acres of forest rather than let them be logged for our use is bald-faced insanity that only progressives could deliver.  While there's not room here to make a case for fire-suppression forestry, it is simply obvious to anyone on the ground:  the progressive paideia results in destruction.  Yellowstone was vulnerable precisely because, as a national park, it was off limits to the forester's care! The progressive paideia's commitment to a false ethical system, results in ugliness, shortages, and more insanity.

But then, bald-faced insanity seems to be in long supply these days.  While we revere nature as god in the forest, our progressive culture now rejects nature when it comes to human sexuality.  The same paideia tells us to disparage police and celebrate crime, and then wonder at out of control murder rates and looting.  Why are these contradictions suddenly exploding onto the scene?

C.S. Lewis famously said in his essential work on education, "In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."  

 I hope our forests can recover, but I pray that our culture's bigger problems will become evident to the next generation of Christians. It's time for everyone to engage in the great recovery of the Western Christian Paideia.