In late July, President Joe Biden held a virtual joint planning meeting and press conference with the governors of various Western states to discuss how to handle 2021’s wildfire season.
Every leader blamed catastrophic human climate change for the severity of recent wildfire seasons.
The New York Times allowed Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Kate Brown to follow up that event with an editorial titled “The West Is on Fire, It’s Past Time to Act on Climate Change.”
Biden and the governors are wrong.
Wildfires have been common throughout the West historically, often burning more acres than they’ve burned in recent years. To the extent that wildfires have increased in intensity recently, it isn’t due to modest warming, but rather to decades of federal and state mismanagement of publicly owned forests throughout the Western United States, leaving those forests in tinderbox conditions.
It has been more than a century since California experienced wildfires of the magnitude it has suffered recently. But research published in Forest Ecology and Management reported that prior to European colonization, more than 4.4 million acres of California forest and shrub-land burned annually. And those huge wildfires came when the Earth was cooler than it is today.
Had Brown studied history a bit, she would have found Oregon has suffered large fires throughout its history.
As detailed in an article sponsored by Oregon’s Department of Forestry:
“Prior to Euro-American settlement large, stand-replacing crown fires burned Pacific Northwest coastal forests every 200–500 years. Smaller surface fires revisited dry interior forests as often as every 4–20 years. West-side Cascade wildfire intervals and intensity fell somewhere in the range between.”
This changed with the arrival of Euro-American settlers in the West, who stopped the regular burning both to deny Native Americans of their traditional lifestyles and food production system and to prevent fires from burning newly settled towns and farms.
Forests grew thicker.
I’m 67, and remember when Mom and Dad took us kids on family vacations to see every state possible in Dad’s 2 week vacation schedule every year. They wanted us kids to see every part of this great USA so we had a real understanding of where we lived.
I remember asking Dad why there were large swaths of no trees cur through the western mountain forests which were widely prevalent everywhere we went out there. He told me they were fire breaks, is in case of a forest fire, the firefighters has a clear path to fight it and they were wide enough to hopefully stop the fire from spreading further.
I returned to Oregon a couple of years ago and saw large regions of burnt meadows for miles and miles, but when seeing the forested mountains, only ski lift paths were clear and no other. No wonder these “Wildfires” have become so devastating, there’s no wirelines to work with anymore!
With such a devastation lumber “shortage” happening now, why not put 2_2 together?
Freaking dolts run these Democratic states, that’s why. Vote then OUT!
Western area Democrats getting their KARMA !!!!! esp California !!!!