Practice Deliberate Discomfort
I remember the first time I heard about the Forest Service conducting a “controlled burn” operation. It sounded very strange to me. Here was an agency deliberately established to prevent fires and they were doing so by starting fires. By comparison, the local fire department didn’t go around burning houses. Why should the Forest Service be any different?
A quick search of the concept led me to some terrific insights on ecology, the regenerative effects that fire brings to a broad array of habitats, and the prophylactic power these measures have to prevent plant diseases, overgrowth, and more.
Then there was the biggest benefit of all: controlled burns were probably the best method to prevent catastrophic fire events of the sort that plague the Western United States.
So controlled burning, as bad as it may seem to my aesthetic sense, had deep benefit. Later, I stumbled on the concept again when reading Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile. He uses the practice as a direct metaphor for any exercise that creates a measured level of stress to a system as a means of strengthening it against catastrophe. I loved this idea from the start. Particularly because it promotes the counter-intuitive notion that effective prevention requires managed exposure.
