CommentsWHY CALIFORNIA IS ON FIRE---Record setting fires burn in the Western U.S. These fires of recent years are the largest in the California history, and to date 3.2 million acres have burned, tragically taking lives, homes and structures, and property.
Hazardous smoke smothers the state. The sun in Los Angeles is orange, and the sky is brown. Smoke is smelled in the city. The height of the fire season in California is in the coming months, a grave prognosis of what is yet to come.
The Bobcat fire, one of the largest in the history of Los Angeles County cannot be contained. The historic and iconic Mt. Wilson Observatory has been threatened twice.
Fires in Oregon burned with unprecedented speed and size and their smoke made for days the air quality of Portland the worst in the world.
The causes for the infernos of 2020 can be traced to basically two means, global warming, and forests too overgrown.
Since its inception the U.S. Forest Service has viewed the nations forests not so much as beautiful wonders of nature, but forest banks for lumber. The Forest Service allowed the forests to become clotted and clogged with undergrowth, creating more fuel for fires. When John Muir visited his beloved Sierra Nevada Mountains he marveled at the open spaces, with clearings throughout the forests making horse riding easy and accessible.
The clearing was the work of the Indigenous People of California who regularly cleared the forest floor. This led to healthy forests, less susceptible to the intense conflagrations we now experience. Veteran forest fire fighters repeatedly say todays fires are more intense, and more destructive, fueled with too thick undergrowth.
The U.S Forest Service saw the forest for their timber, and it was used to promote the massive suburban home building which continue today. A cleaned and cleared forest will not yield as much lumber, so when there were fires instead of letting them proceed in a controlled burn, the commodity of lumber needed to be saved, so fires were suppressed.
Smokey the Bear should be the mascot for suburban sprawl.
This sprawl continues to march deeper and deeper into areas adjacent to, and within high burn areas. The lumber harvested for the growth of the suburbs was part of the fuel which now threatens the state.
Our forests cannot be clear cut, nor thinned taking only the largest old growth trees. This would weaken the forest ecosystem and could be as deadly to forests as todays infernos.
The other major factor in the increasing intensity of forest and wildfires, and responsible for a longer fire season is the increasing heat of the planet through man made carbon gases released into the environment. This increase in the temperature is not slowing. We need to make drastic changes now to reduce carbon gases going into the atmosphere. If we don’t the infernos will continue to become more frequent, hotter, bigger, deadlier.
Some say global warming is accountable for only 30-50% of our current era of massive conflagrations, as if this is acceptable. It is not. If global warming was not part of the equation today’s fires would half as large, half as hot, half as destructive, half as deadly. Tax dollars spent to fight the fires would be half.
The planet must begin to cool. This is not in dispute with the vast majority of climate scientists, global leader and nations of the world, many industries, and even the United States Military.
Our leader, President Donald Trump, has the answer. The forest floors need raked. This disastrous proposal would destroy the forest ecosystem. The rainwater which would otherwise be absorbed by the lush debris of the forest floor would instead sweep off the mountain sides, taking the earth with it to create mudslides.
Trump calls global warming a hoax, so to make his statement of cognitive dissonance sound reasonable to him and his supporters, the diversion of raking the forests comes in handy.
Leave our rakes at home. Indeed, leave our cars at home and ride mass transit to reduce our carbon footprint. Leave coal burning power plants behind.
We need clear and honest thinking from our president, his aides and supporters-particularly industries who continue to support a lifestyle of creating more and more pollution, making the Earth hotter and hotter.
If we do not, we could all become ash while we clutch our rakes amidst the fires.
(Matthew Hetz is a Los Angeles native. He is a transit rider and advocate, a composer, music instructor, and former member and president and executive director of the Culver City Symphony Orchestra. He is a CityWatch contributor.)
-cw
