SOS Forests

The Incineration of California

Today the Wall Street Journal published the most ignorant article ever about the California fire situation. It is so ignorant as to constitute criminal stupidity. Many thousands of people will be killed and billions of dollars of damages will ensue if the ignorance displayed by the WSJ is not corrected.

An Open Letter to Californians:

IT’S THE FUELS, STUPIDS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The ignorant WSJ article is [here]. It was written by a Class A moron named Jim Carlton, but we do not know the name of the braindead editor that reviewed and published it. Both individuals should be locked in stocks in the public square and be mocked incessantly for a few weeks.

Here’s a taste of flaming ignorance from the WSJ:

California Frets Fire’s Early Start — Real Fight Isn’t With Mother Nature, but Residents Who Live in Blaze-Prone Areas

By JIM CARLTON, Wall Street Deadly Morons, June 3, 2008; Page A16

GILROY, Calif. — Californians normally are treated to a kaleidoscope of colors this time of year as spring rains give rise to wildflowers and verdant hillsides. But following one of the driest March-May periods on record, the predominant color in the Golden State’s wildlands is brown — and that is fueling an unusually early start to the state’s fire season.

Already, firefighters have been deployed to more than a dozen wildfires, including a massive conflagration in the rugged Santa Cruz Mountains above here that broke out on May 22 and scorched more than 4,000 acres and 31 homes before being declared under control Wednesday. State officials are so concerned about the potential for fire damage this year that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an executive order mobilizing California’s firefighting resources in early May. Normally, the fire season begins in June, but doesn’t really get going until late summer.

But the real battle for the “Terminator” star and his staff isn’t against Mother Nature. Forests and brush have burned with nearly clock-like regularity for thousands of years. The fight, instead, is with the humans who insist on moving into fire-prone areas — and other regions buffeted time and again by natural disasters that people soon forget.

Excuse me? Human beings have been living in California for THOUSANDS of years. The current spate of fires have burned in CITIES of long standing like San Diego and Oakland.

STOP BLAMING THE VICTIMS!!!!!

It ain’t the people – IT’S THE FUELS!!!!!!

But the WSJ, a major forest raping company, doesn’t stop there. Jimbo Carlson then blames, you guessed it, GLOBAL WARMING!!!!!!

Global warming is making the situation even worse. Many scientists blame man-made climate change for unusually dry conditions that have begun to appear in California and much of the rest of the West.

Here’s the real story. the fires have everything to do with fuels. All the areas burned this Spring have been heavily populated for thousands of years. CA is the ideal climate for people, and plenty of people lived there for millennia. They did not suffer massive conflagrations that wiped out their civilizations, despite the vagaries of climate over the last 13,000 plus years.

Why not? Because they controlled the fuels with human-set fires. Regular, frequent, seasonal, anthropogenic fire kept most of California in prairie and savanna. That’s the facts, supported by numerous works of anthropology, landscape geography, ethno-ecology, and plain history.

After waves of European diseases wiped out 90 percent of California’s population in the early 1500’s, the Franciscan missionaries enslaved and killed off the remainder of the indigenous residents. Thousands of years of traditional ecological knowledge and techniques were lost, and the anthropogenic fires stopped.

At first Spanish cattle grazed the vast grasslands of CA and kept the fuels down, but over the last 50 to 100 years cattle have been removed and the fuels have built up. All the Santa Cruz Mountains behind Watsonville were grass, but they are now poison oak brush, live oak, and scrub conifers.

Carmel Valley and the surrounding hills were cattle ranches — now they are deep fuels. Someday a fire is going to sweep through Carmel Valley and kill hundreds or even thousands of people and do a billion dollars in damages or more.

Ditto the entire California Coast from Mendocino to Mexico.

The current residents really are to blame. They sit stupefied in fire traps, rural and urban alike, while their braindead political bosses spin like tops in screeching ignorance.

I see it coming, but do not know what to do about it. I feel like the Prophet of Doom and wonder if I should go stand on street corner in San Jose and preach to the commuters.

HELLO CALIFORNIANS. YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!

It’s not just the high tech McMansioners from Silicon Valley that need to catch a clue. It’s the entire damned population.

Californians, you have three choices. One, do nothing and suffer the consequences. Two, move away from there. Three, deal with the FUELS!!!!

The WSJ would have you move. Abandon the place. Move to NYC and jam in there with Jimbo the rest of the WSJ morons.

A better solution would be to cancel your subscriptions to the WSJ and reduce the fuel loadings. And not just in your yards. Defensible space must extend to the furthest reaches of each and every watershed.

Try this plan: restore the vegetation to pre-Franciscan conditions. Get with history and put California back the way it used to be before Euros wrecked the place.

Let’s throw the WSJ a bone. They almost got part of it right:

It [the Summit Fire] started in the predawn hours near the top of a 2,400-foot high mountain, in chaparral and pine that had grown unusually dense because a fire hadn’t hit there in more than a half century, said Bill Baxter, a state “fire behavior” analyst.

Across the state — and the West — forests have become dangerously overgrown, the result of policies during much of the 20th century to fight fires as they erupted. After infernos started breaking out, including a massive 1988 conflagration in Yellowstone National Park, firefighting agencies began to realize that forests need some fire to thin out trees and brush, and have been working to clear out stands.

Baxter is short-sighted. The build up of fuels along the California Coast started when the cattle were removed. If nobody fought fires for the last 50 years, there would still be huge fuel loadings (and a lot of charred corpses to boot), because plants GROW, you dumb bunnies.

Who in their right mind thinks that “natural” fires kept CA fuel loadings down for thousands of years? That’s a crock of bull, impossible, ignorant, and deadly stupid. Yet that’s the NEW PLAN – just LET IT BURN.

You cannot “thin out fuels” with natural fire. Sorry, Charlies, it doesn’t work that way. The vegetation GROWS BACK!!!! Abandoning the entire state of CA to natural fire is a ticket to massive holocaust, death, and destruction.

Nope, what has to happen is active, regular, frequent vegetation management by human beings with their heads screwed on.

It’s called STEWARDSHIP and your LIVES DEPEND ON IT!!!!!

A few people in CA get it. From the WSJ:

But California officials remain worried about the rest of the fire season, which is likely to last until November. And they worry what will happen if fire hits a more populated place, like 2,571-foot Mount Tamalpais in Marin County.

A major wildfire hasn’t swept the mountain in decades. In 1929, a 2,500-acre fire burned about 100 homes in the town of Mill Valley. Today, there are 850 homes in that same burn area, said Rich Lopez, deputy chief of the Marin County Fire Department. In all, he said, there are as many as 5,000 homes surrounding the mountain that could be at risk from a wildfire, many situated on narrow, winding roads where fire trucks could have a hard time getting in.

“The scenario that is probably going to happen,” Mr. Lopez warned, “is that we are going to get a north wind, a few sparks from a fire and that would take care of it.”

YOU WILL ALL DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But hey, why listen to me? Why do anything. You are all going to die someday anyway; might as well be sooner than later. Be passive. Do nothing. Let Mother Nature take care of it.

Ban fire suppression, if you think that’s the cause of your problems. Dismantle CalFire. Part out the fire trucks. Ground the air tanker fleet. Fire the firefighters. Let Mother Nature rip giant megafire holocausts right through the center of your towns.

San Francisco burned to the ground in 1906. Other people, the ones who didn’t get killed, rebuilt it. Don’t worry, be happy. Marry your pet goat for all I care. Ignore the fuels build up. Let it burn. It’s your funeral.