Beauty in the eye of the beholder.

At least some of the fires near San Diego and Los Angeles appear to have been set. As this is being written, the burned area almost certainly exceeds a half million acres.

Barbra Boxer claims that the problem is global warming, presumably caused by man.

The left is stunningly silent on the contribution of these mega forest fires to the CO2 in the atmosphere. It also conveniently ignores its part in creating the conditions that cause these fires.

Let's assume that Boxer is correct. Wouldn't it be more sane to require the forest service to clear cut enough fire breaks that the fires would be limited in size to, say 10,000 acres?

Make no mistake, a 10,000 acre fire is still huge, more than 15 square miles.

Clear cuts aren't pretty, but they do grow back far more quickly than areas burned over by the hot fires we see today. If that regrowth were managed in a way that minimized the fire danger, it might even be possible to have both a heavily forested area and a safe forest at the same time.

Mark Udall's brand of environmentalism would consider this suggestion to be heresy. He seems to prefer the natural brown "beauty" of these mega burn moonscapes where nothing in nature survives to the "ugly" scars that clear cutting leaves, even if they protect the adjacent green forests and their inhabitants from mega fires. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.