I think I get what he is trying to say and there is some substance to it - but it would have been a better article if he had included some concrete examples of his methodology.
The analogy that came to my mind was that of a forest fire: You can spend lots if time finding out the exact cause of a wildfire (was it an out-of control campfire? An electrical fault? Arson?? etc etc) but it will not help you much preventing future fires. In the worst case, you'd spend an endless amount of resources playing whack-a-mole against increasingly random and hard to avoid causes: No campfires, no smoking, no transparent water bottles (?), no glasses (??), no power lines (???) and even then you get random lightning strikes that no human was in any way involved with.
A more productive question would be how those banal and mostly random events have the ability to balloon into something catastrophic like a wildfire - or rather under which circumstances they do and under which they don't.
This brings you to questions such as the general health of your forest, accumulating underbrush, dryness and eventually even climate. It also would change the objective from avoiding sources of fire to changing the forest in such a way that individual fires cannot spread.
The analogy that came to my mind was that of a forest fire: You can spend lots if time finding out the exact cause of a wildfire (was it an out-of control campfire? An electrical fault? Arson?? etc etc) but it will not help you much preventing future fires. In the worst case, you'd spend an endless amount of resources playing whack-a-mole against increasingly random and hard to avoid causes: No campfires, no smoking, no transparent water bottles (?), no glasses (??), no power lines (???) and even then you get random lightning strikes that no human was in any way involved with.
A more productive question would be how those banal and mostly random events have the ability to balloon into something catastrophic like a wildfire - or rather under which circumstances they do and under which they don't.
This brings you to questions such as the general health of your forest, accumulating underbrush, dryness and eventually even climate. It also would change the objective from avoiding sources of fire to changing the forest in such a way that individual fires cannot spread.