Mismanagement

At New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer David Wallace-Wells remarks on California’s wildfires:

California is Australia now. Beginning late last year, in what is already known as the country’s Black Summer, bushfires burned through 46 million acres, or 72,000 square miles; killed several billion animals, pushing a number of species to extinction or the brink of it; flooding Sydney with air so thick with smoke ferries couldn’t navigate its harbor and fire alarms in office buildings rang out, registering the smoke as proof the building itself was in flame; and forcing beachfront evacuations in scenes that crossed Dunkirk with Mad Max.

The situation today in California isn’t yet quite as grim, although this week CalFire advised every citizen of the state — all 40 million of them — to be prepared to evacuate. Already, more than 100,000 already have. Over just the last seven days, 700,000 acres have burned in California — a number that would have been, in recent memory, a historically devastating year of fire. In just five days, more land has been burned than in all of 2019, and 500,000 of those acres are in and around the Bay Area. There, the Lightning Complex — in wildfire terminology, “complex” is when multiple blazes join forces — has alone burned 200,000 acres and is, at present, zero percent contained. The Complex could burn as many as a million acres, it’s been suggested—the state’s first “gigafire.” The lightning storms that set it off simultaneously ignited so many other wildfires the state authorities couldn’t keep track of all of them, just the 376 most significant ones. All told, more than ten thousand lightning strikes were recorded in a single day; the week saw 560 wildfires start. Big Basin Redwoods State Park has been burned through, prompting a conservation group to write, “We are devastated to report that Big Basin, as we have known it, loved it, and cherished it for generations, is gone.” These trees are between 800 and 1,500 years old. Some of them, older than Muhammad, had stood for a thousand years by the time Europeans first set foot in North America. The youngest of them are older than the Black Death, and precede the invention of the printing press by centuries. Reports yesterday had them “scorched but still standing.”

Attributing fires caused by a combination of lightning strikes, bad land management, and human crime to climate change is nonsensical. A combination of too many people, its natural environmental circumstances (the same that have attracted people there in the first place), and an influential environmental movement have contributed to decades of bad land management. Rather than conducting controlled burns or clearing scrub, they’re letting nature take its course.