Recently, a terrible fire destroyed a beloved cottage on Varnum Pond that had been in the Hodgkins family for generations. The two-story cottage, more than 100 years old and surrounded by grand, historic pines, burned to the ground. The fire, of unknown origin, also destroyed the pines that are still standing but which will have to be removed.

Dozens of volunteer firefighters from nine towns, under the direction of Temple’s new fire Chief George Blodgett, miraculously managed – despite high winds and limited road access – to prevent the fire from spreading to neighboring cottages and climbing the hill. Thankfully, no one was injured, either amongst the family (who were not at home at the time) or the firefighters and the auxiliary who brought them food and support.

This local fire occurred at the same time as the San Diego County fires in California that have raged for days, destroying 2,000 homes, thousands of acres, and causing more than $1 billion in property damage. While the loss to the Hodgkins family remains personal and devastating, the difference here is clearly one of scale.

We can sympathize with one family’s loss, but it is hard to grasp what it means when 2,000 people have lost their homes and possessions, and half a million people were evacuated and displaced. The magnitude of the Katrina/Rita hurricane devastation was also well beyond what we are usually called upon to imagine.

We are lucky in Maine. Our climate and geography protects us from such overwhelming disasters.

When I worked for a social service agency, one of my duties was emergency planning, to assure whenever possible that our consumers would continue to be served in the event of a calamity. We had the ice storm of ’98 as a model of what could happen, but little else. And difficult as the ice storm was, it was more of a challenge than a disaster. In the Maine way, it was met with resourcefulness and neighbor helping neighbor.

When you think about it, we don’t have a history of widespread calamities.

Hurricanes, if they reach as far as the Maine coast, no longer carry the power of the storms that hit Florida and Georgia and Louisiana. We have no San Andreas Fault, and no tsunamis. Tornados, which have great open spaces to build power in the Midwest, are almost unheard of here.

There is, of course, another important difference to consider: population density.

The Santa Ana winds that whipped up the California fires have swept through those canyons before. Fire is a historic form of renewal in the chaparral country. It’s just that before now, there weren’t hundreds of homes in those canyons.

Hurricane-blown floods have hit the Louisiana coast before, too, floodwaters that were absorbed by the coastal wetlands. With those wetlands eroded from development, the flooding problem was worsened.

In Western Maine, it’s easy to forget how elsewhere Americans are gobbling up the landscape.

Thirty years ago, my parents bought 15 acres at the end of a residential road west of Minneapolis on which they started a greenhouse and farm market business. Beyond the end of that little road were woods and sweeps of corn, soybean and hayfields. One year I went to visit, and found that some new homes had sprung up beyond the fence at the bottom of their field – 500 new homes, to be precise. Similar massive subdivisions, malls and shopping centers have now filled all the fields and extend for miles beyond the small-holding where my brother still runs the greenhouse business.

In Western Maine, we’re simply not on the map with that sort of thing. We have other struggles – low wages, a depressed economy, an aging population and the out-migration of our young people. It’s a trade-off for what we do have: human-scale neighborhoods and the comfort of being surrounded by the natural world.

I find it easy to forget what the pressures are on society in other places, and why people make bad decisions like developing wetlands and fire-prone canyons. But I am reminded that it is important to try to understand it, because after all, their problems are our problems, and it’s the only planet we’ve got.