Sunland residents Michael and Susan Schaafsma watch the hills near their home burn at twilight on Tuesday. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

A towering cloud from the super-heated Station fire in Angeles National Forest billows into a blue sky behind downtown Los Angeles on Monday. (Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

Newhall residents Will Moriarty and his son Max, 2, keep an eye on the Station fire along Aliso Canyon Road in Acton on Sunday. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times)(Click for larger version.)

The LA Times is doing a great job covering this disaster. Here is a page of hi-res photos from the fire zone.

A sailboat makes its way through the harbor in Marina del Rey against a backdrop of smoke from the Station fire. (Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times / August 29, 2009)

Palos Verdes fire: Residents of Cartier Drive in Rancho Palos Verdes watch as a helicopter, right, makes a water run at a brush fire in the Portuguese Bend area. (Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times / August 27, 2009)

Los Angeles Times fire photo gallery.

Hamish Fulton at Little Big Horn Battlefield, Montana, Summer 1969.

Hamish Fulton understands the connection between art and walking. Notes Wikipedia,

Hamish Fulton (born 1946 ,London England), is a “Walking artist” and photographer. His initial work concerned the experience of walking but in the last twenty years Fulton has painted more directly on exhibition walls. Author and writer of books and essays. His wall installation A 21 day coast to coast walking journey, Japan 1996 at the John Weber Gallery, NY incorporates the concrete poetry format and his earlier work A Seven day walk in the mountains Switzerland early summer 1984 was the inspiration for the ‘fulton’ Visual poetry form.

I thought about Hamish Fulton tonight when I read a profile of the British (another walking Brit artist!) novelist Ian McEwan in the February 23, 2009 issue of the New Yorker, The Background Hum: Ian McEwan’s art of unease:

We ascended the crop field; behind us, solar panels on the roof of McEwan’s cottage glistened in the sun. Entering a fern-carpeted wood, McEwan joked that he places his friends along a divide: those who enjoy hiking (Barnes, Michael Frayn) and those who consider it a fatuous premodern practice (Amis, Christopher Hitchens). McEwan relishes the mental restoration that comes from being in nature. “The sensual pleasure of it traps you fiercely in the present,” he said. “It has knock-on effects when you go back to work.”

Much of McEwan’s best writing can be tied directly to a long walk….

“The sensual pleasure of it traps you fiercely in the present,” is a fantastic description of the in-the-moment feeling I have when hiking, and even more so when skiing. Two days ago I went skiing for the day up at Sugar Bowl, near Lake Tahoe, California. I left home near Berkeley at 5:15 in the morning, drove for three hours, skied from nine until just after 3:00pm, then drove the three hours back home. On the drive home, I was thinking about the beauty of skiing, for me, being inexorably linked to the focus of concentration that this sport demands of me: if I don’t give what I am doing 100% of my attention, I could be horribly injured or die on the mountain. Really good skiers and snowboarders may be able to do it blindfolded, but for me, a merely decent intermediate slope tumbler, exhilaration and terror are bound at the wrists and poised at the edge of a cornice, awaiting my push.

Though I have never been a soldier, I think this feeling must have something in common with the oft-mentioned notion that many soldiers fighting in wars feel most alive when their lives are most threatened. I don’t think it’s a case of being more or less “alive” at any given moment, only that certain situations provide us with a moment of focus and clarity where we are really paying attention to life to a much greater degree than we normally do in our daily lives. This is certainly what Zen Buddhism and mediation point toward, but for me I find it easier and more natural to achieve while flying down a steep snowy mountain nearly out of control than sitting cross-legged on a mat “trying” to think of nothing. While skiing, I don’t have to “try” to think of nothing but the task at hand, it is simply gone from my mind for those blissful moments that I am “trapped fiercely in the present.” And being forced by circumstance to fully confront the moment is a great gift.

Traditionally, analysts have cautioned that Chinese growth figures should be greeted with skepticism, but, according to one school of economic thought, there may be something to the idea that the quake served as a brutal stimulus. In fact, some economists argue that hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions, ice storms, and the like, despite the widespread destruction they leave behind – indeed, largely because of it – can spur economic growth.

Rebuilding efforts serve as a short-term boost by attracting resources to a country, and the disasters themselves, by destroying old factories and old roads, airports, and bridges, allow new and more efficient public and private infrastructure to be built, forcing the transition to a sleeker, more productive economy in the long term.

Because of this upgrade in technology and efficiency, disasters might actually spur innovation:

Studies have found that earthquakes in California and Alaska helped stir economic activity there, and that countries with more hurricanes and storms tend to see higher rates of growth. Some of the most recent work has found a link between disasters and subsequent innovation.

There are critics of such findings, who point to the negative effects of diverted human energy and natural resources lost, but there are numerous striking examples of the long-term value:

The research on longer-run effects, its supporters argue, is less vulnerable to this criticism, because the key factor is not merely new stuff but better stuff. In this model, disasters perform the economic service of clearing out outdated infrastructure to make way for more efficient replacements – Mother Nature’s contribution to what the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter famously called capitalism’s “creative destruction.” The economy, as it recovers, actually becomes more productive than it was before, and some economists argue that the effect can be seen decades after the disaster.

Of course, those individuals who are killed by natural disasters, or their friends and families, might have a different opinion about the value of capitalism’s and Mother Nature’s “creative destruction”, but chances are good that many of us living today are better off thanks to horrible disasters endured by our predecessors. Which should make you feel better about “taking one for the team” by living through our current economic disaster, if it helps to improve the future prospects of our children and grandchildren.