I’ve come to the conclusion that this series isn’t going to fir in single monthly posts. To address this issue, I’m experimenting with monthly Topic, and then three supplementary posts exploring more detailed aspects of the world-building/premise. Supplement number 1:
Fire Management and Forest Management
One of the biggest reason for all the wild fires in the western United States is the large amount of wild forest in the area, much of which actually evolved to benefit from periodic fires. Over time, burnable material accumulates in these forests, and eventually there’s a spark, whether it’s lightning or in more modern times humans doing things they really ought not.
But, because we don’t want uncontrolled fires burning where they can harm our towns or farms or businesses, we tend to put fires out as soon as we find them. This means that burnable material builds up even more, to the point where once a fire gets going, it’s almost impossible to stop it. One method of dealing with this conflict is controlled burns. I’ve even done a few. Predictably, one of them got out of control, and the local rural fire department came in with forest fire equipment and quickly put it out before it go too far into the woods and burned down the whole property.
I’m elaborating on this aspect of the crisis park premise because one of the major points I wanted to make in the original post was not that socialism is good, or more government involvement is always better. That depends on a whole batch of factors specific to given times, places, and cultures. Instead, I want to highlight the importance to society of finding solutions that deal at least partially with multiple problems at once.
For example, just housing all the homeless population in government housing parks is expensive and doesn’t address the root cause of the problem: people not having enough money and skills to support themselves. But at a basic level, you can address this by offering job training. And it just so happens that large government installations designed to house thousands or hundreds of thousands of people need a lot of workers to take care of maintenance, construction, food services, health services, etc. Which provides a built-in job market for all of the people you are housing and training.
Similarly, just having an on-call disaster response service employing hundreds if not thousands of emergency services and logistics workers is expensive, and the resources aren’t even being used most of the time, if you’re lucky. So what can you do with those resources in the off-time that can either save or make the organization money to keep operating?
My soft science fictional proposal in the case of our Western Section Crisis Park is forestry management. You can hire researchers and support staff, again creating skilled jobs, and for markets that may be over-saturated with fresh college grads, to look into best practices for controlled burns and other management techniques for the millions of acres of government-administered forest in the western US. Then you shift your fire-fighting crews to management tasks in the off-season, which hopefully also reduces the incidence of new fires next season. Some of those forests really do need to burn to stay healthy, but it doesn’t have to be wildfires that threaten lives and property.
Further, when those forestry crews come through a town, with all of their support staff, they can provide valuable locals services, such as training for private property owners, medical care for marginalized and disadvantaged groups in the area from the highly trained emergency medical staff they employ, etc. They can be trained to improve roads and bridges, wells and water plants, and lots of other infrastructure. You may have heard of the Civilian Conservation Corps that did so much work improving national parks and other areas during the Great Depression. This premise could be considered somewhat similar.
And then, once those workers are trained and have worked out their contracts, they can take those skills and find jobs in private industry, or start new businesses. Say a two or three year training contract with the Crisis Park, after which it is very likely they will have more than returned the resources invested in them. So not only are they gaining valuable skills, but it supports them without significantly raising taxes. And having these crews move through local towns and providing some of the services described also serves as advertising for the programs and job openings created by the crisis park system.
Hopefully I’ve now established more value for this policy proposal, and also opened up some interesting story hooks in a way that makes it clear how design your premise to support a social science fiction story. In the next supplemental posts I’ll look at a different one of our fictional geographical Sections and how a crisis park might serve it. The final post on Crisis Parks will then propose and partially elaborate on three plots ideas that could take advantage of the crisis park thought experiment to tell an interesting and well-grounded near-future science fiction story.
Atsiko's Chimney 