In November 2018 fire ripped through the wild lands around my town, eventually burning almost 100,000 acres of my beloved Santa Monica mountains.

A few weeks later I ventured out to a hill where I often run. Seeing the charred hills and valleys, I felt I was picking up some kind of message from the land, from the Earth. The message was something like: “stop burning stuff to live, or it’s going to burn you back.”

Hominids have been burning stuff to live for as long as 1 million years, depending on what scientist you ask. Although our use of fire has rapidly become more sophisticated since the development of the steam engine 200 years ago to our high-tech gasoline engines and natural gas power plants today, we are still just burning stuff to live like our barely-not-chimp ancestors did.

It’s easy to overrate our accomplishments. Lewis & Clark took months to get from St. Lewis to Portland, a trip we can make by airplane now in a couple hours. Just don’t think too much that you made the modern crossing in a vehicle that uses fire to burn 25 gallons of kerosene every minute.

We humans have burned too much stuff by now, forgetting to move beyond our primitive ways. We’ve burned so much that it’s warming up the whole planet. Drying out crops and wild lands, changing weather patterns, killing plants and animals and humans, and causing big fires.

I hope we get the message soon. All of us. I hope we get the message that it’s time to grow up. Time to move beyond what served us so well as a baby race. It’s time to stop burning stuff to live.