It's wildfire season in the West again; time for a lot of typically-revisionist claptrap about why we're seeing fires of such unprecedented ferocity. Of course, the sweeping and simplistic explanation for everything, “climate change,” conveniently gets most of the blame, as does Trump. But the root causes of the crisis, as I understand them, go much deeper than that.
It's a complicated question, worthy of book-length treatment, but the bottom line, from the point of view of someone who has been carefully watching the issue for more than 20 years, is that this is largely a man-made catastrophe.
Western wildfires largely result from more than a century of lousy, short-sighted forest management, compounded by disease outbreaks that bureaucracy-bound Washington failed to address in a timely fashion. The idiots blaming Trump for a crisis many decades in the making are either misinformed or willfully stupid.
Then, conveniently for the bureaucrats and organized
extremists who helped build this tinderbox trap, "climate change"
came along as the intellectually-lazy, simpleton-satisfying, catch-all
explanation for how we got here, further dooming any practical efforts to get a
handle on the situation. Why try tackling the beetle blight problem, after all,
if "climate change" is the root cause? You can't manage your way out
of such an insurmountable problem; no steps short of overthrowing capitalism
and reversing the industrial revolution will do!! Meaning, once again, that
"analysis paralysis" and climate hysteria blocked any meaningful
effort to fix our forests.
The lesson of the Western wildfire crisis, if you're looking
for one, is that massive federal bureaucracies can't manage anything well,
including (and maybe most of all) our far-flung Western lands, This should make
Americans extremely wary of putting any additional power or authority in
Washington's hands -- unless they want the bureaucrats mismanaging their healthcare (and the rest of your lives) the same way they historically mismanaged
"federal lands."
