Of course, the kid who sparked the wildfire that destroyed huge sections of the Columbia River Valley in September can't pay all of that money back! Many Americans don't make a mill after a whole lifetime of work. And you must be at the very top of the one percent for that kind of money, $36 million, to impact you in the way $3,600 would impact an ordinary American.
The itemized charges that add up to the total cost of the fire are as follows:
$5,000 to Iris Schenk
$8,111 to Allstate Insurance
$31,551 to Oregon State Parks
$100,000 to Heuker Properties
$168,000 to Trail Club of Oregon
$1,048,878 to Union Pacific Railroad
$1,643,035 to Oregon State Fire Marshall
$12,500,000 to ODOT
$21,113,755 to US Forest Service
Clearly, the court that ordered this restitution from the boy is not trying to get the money back but to make a point. But it's a very dumb one. First of all, the lesson of price value is empty because the destruction is in essence not calculable in dollar terms. It is pure madness to imagine that it is. Only neoclassical economics believes, and therefore mainstream reasoning at all levels transmits the belief, that a price tag can be fixed on all things. This is the core of the lesson. There is a price. Recognize the price. But this is a fantasy that has its reflection in the unfortunate young man, Jia Rui, who, in the Chinese 18th century masterpiece by Cao Xueqin, Hung Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber), enters a magic mirror and thinks he is having endless sex with a beautiful woman, Wang Xifeng, but, in reality, is passed out on the floor and just ejaculating in his pants.
The young man keeps dreaming, keeps thinking he is fucking, but he only keeps coming and coming on himself. A pool of sperm grows and grows around him. Jia Rui eventually dies from the excessive discharge of semen.
The reality is this: there is no economy of forests or photosynthesis; the ecology, which is always in flux, can not be made intelligible by the mechanism of prices (the wet-dream of the Austrian school). The ecology is not inside the economy but the other way around. The court's decision to punish the boy with prices only makes things worse. It's teaching him to respect a system that's directed by the dangerous illusion of its own rational dominance of nature. The price system that the boy is ordered to respect is, in reality, incapable of coming anywhere close to anything like respect for the environment it's in.
Lastly, the boy did not start the fire. His society did. This fact can only be appreciated if you completely break with the limited vision of American ideology and see the boy as a particular kind of animal. He is not just an ape, but a very social one. The saying, "monkey see, monkey do," is mistaken or misdirected. It should really be about us—and we're not monkeys because we don't have tails. We should really say: "The human ape see, the human ape do." We are the imitation animal in much the same sense that cows are the grass-eating animal. If a society has a relationship with nature that is, for the most part, dismissive and exploitative, then how do we expect its young to act? They can't make up shit. They do as others do.
After judge John A. Olson sentenced this boy, we can easily picture him entering a car, turning its engine on, and, as the thought of having done something great for society bubbles in his noble head, begins burning fossil fuel and liberating carbon.
