Wildland Fire And Pigs
...and composting
Every once in a while I see something that inspires me and I become temporarily less grouchy. Like most people, I need a paycheck. One of the ways I earn one is to manage the medical response to disasters. Almost always that’s wildland fire.
I’m on the 13,000 acre Boise fire – pictures here - in Humboldt County CA. We have several camps set up. The one that I’m in - Forks of the Salmon - has some 1,200 people. We get fed three times a day. Breakfast and dinner are hot meals in large, open tents serviced by a Fleet of 18-wheelers.
I’m inspired by the nonprofit that’s set up outside the dinning tent and the folks that enthusiastically staff it that take every one of our dishes, toss the landfill trash, and then scrape the food – minus pork and bones - into a container and deliver it to a free-range pig farmer. Food that is going to be used to create more food and is not going into a landfill, and happy, well-fed pigs that are free to wander instead of spending their entire livesin a gestation crate - a metal enclosure in which a sow is kept and used for breeding. A standard gestation crate measures 6.6 ft x 2.0 ft (2 m x 60 cm). That’s ‘home’ for a sow for almost her entire life. The crate contains no bedding material and are instead floored with slatted plastic, concrete or metal to allow waste to be efficiently collected below.
I offered the workers a box of latex-type medical gloves, but they were content to just use their bare hands.
So…all in all, pretty cool. I’m a happy and inspired little piggy.