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California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people w
by hedora 1y ago
California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts (replacing thousands of years of work by indigenous people with fire suppression), and also unprecedented climate change.
Should they do more? Of course. With what resources?
I recently learned 82% of California fire fighters are unpaid volunteers. That doesn’t include the prison labor.
The entire government has its
priorities completely wrong, especially at the federal level. Blaming the city of LA makes very little sense.
Blaming environmentalists for consistently sounding the alarm over this stuff for 50+ years and then being ignored also doesn’t make sense.
One thing that does make sense: Look at the writings of the people that blocked wind and nuclear power in the 1980’s, and solar / batteries in the 1990s.
They explicitly said they knew their actions would burn the planet down, and it didn’t matter to them. Now they’ve dismantling our democracy, eliminating emergency response groups like FEMA, and retasking the national guard (California’s last line of fire defense) as an illegal police force.
- duped 1y ago> California is digging out of a combination of over a century of misguided forest management efforts Including building in the chaparral hills in the first place. Sane policy would be to forbid new construction where fires have ravaged in the past or at least deny insurance, because it's like building in a floodplain. The problem is that the same area is suffering from systemic under-construction of housing.
- nradov 1y agoYour comment is quite disconnected from reality. Blaming the city of LA makes a lot of sense. The mayor Karen Bass was completely ineffectual. And even before she was elected the city had failed to properly upgrade their fire fighting infrastructure or building codes. Most volunteer fire fighters act as reserves in more rural areas and are only called up for major incidents. The city of LA and surrounding cities like Calabasas don't rely heavily on volunteers. Climate change might be a minor factor in the intensity of the 2025 Southern California wildfires but those have been happening periodically for millennia. The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) will sometimes dump a lot of rain on Southern California for several years at a stretch causing extensive brush growth, then shift north for several years allowing everything to dry out. At that point any little spark will ignite a raging wildfire, especially when the Santa Ana winds are blowing. This is not "forest" that can be actively managed, it's chaparral in rough hilly terrain. It's simply impossible to clear much of the brush or conduct controlled burns. The only effective measures are building fire-resistant structures with defensible space around them — or simply not building in those areas at all.