Gazette's Comments on the Fires

With luck, the California fires may lead to more rational land management than Mark Udall and his "environmentalist" allies are currently willing to tolerate. The Gazette devoted an editorial to the subject this morning. Here is only a part of what it had to say:

Markets have less influence over government-owned land, however, which is managed based on political considerations, mostly under the influence of special interest groups. Fire risks seem higher in areas of high public (meaning, government) land ownership; lower (with a few exceptions) in places where much of the land is privately owned, mostly due to the strong incentives people have to maintain and protect their property.

When property is owned collectively, there’s less incentive to manage it wisely. Environmental rules and restrictions have leaned in recent times toward non-management, or a policy of benign neglect, under pressure from those who think human meddling in these landscapes is unnatural and wrong. That’s left more fuel to burn when lightning, a fallen power line or an arsonist ignites a fire.

We’d argue for a land management approach that puts humans and human habitats first, whenever practical, and embraces the idea that we can manage these landscapes not just for economic, aesthetic and ecological benefits, but with an eye toward safeguarding public safety as well. We shouldn’t allow the real and rhetorical smoke generated by California’s wildfires to cloud our judgements about the nature of the problem.

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.

Topic of the Day: Forest Fires - Part 2

Anyone who watched the national news today on any channel would know that the lead story is the out of control fires in California. They don't know how many multi-million dollar homes have been burned, but they estimate that it will be the worst fire in California history.

California has asked for fire crew help from its neighboring states. 250,000 people were forced to flee the fire.

At some point enough people will be burned out or be at risk of being burned out by forest fire after forest fire that people will begin to question the wisdom (if that is the right word) of the environmentalist left and their congressional shills like Mark Udall, John Salazar, and Diana DeGette.

It may not happen this year, or even next, but hopefully these words will still be in some internet archive when it does happen.