Why Thousands May Die in California Wildfires?
Thousands more may die and hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by wildfire in the Western United States and around the globe before the wildfire problem is solved. Modern man has become so out of touch with nature and truth resistant that I believe that we have yet to see the pain and suffering necessary to make a significant cultural change in how we relate to fire. Most of the world’s landscapes are fire adapted and when man wanting to get back in touch with nature moves into the urban wildland interface his home competes with fire adapted vegetation for living space and sunlight and the home if not fire adapted is subject to being burned out.
Fire adapted tree species in the uplands with fire resistant trunks and flammable needles and fronds have used both light fire and catastrophic fire to drive less fire adapted species into the lowlands and wetlands and this includes man if he fails to adapt. Other types of vegetation have above ground flammability with protected underground root systems from which to sprout back from light fire or catastrophic fire. The situation is made even worse by degraded ecosystems caused by decades of fire suppression raising fuel loads to extreme levels.
It’s a very difficult thing to make any kind of ingrained cultural shift and it’s true for the culture of fire suppression that has developed and accelerated from the event of agriculture and industrialization. In a hunter-gatherer society man was well adapted and surrounded by nature and natural forces, but as he moved out of nature into towns and cities, he has become separated from nature by his technology and because of this, less adapted to nature’s forces of wind, water and fire.
As bad as the fire situation has been in California and Europe there still does not seem to be the national will to commit tens of billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars for wildfire mitigation efforts such as fire hardening homes, creating defensible space, prescribed fire buffers for cities and a general rebuilding of fire dependent ecosystems. As soon as the wildfire is under control public and media attention moves elsewhere until the next catastrophic fire kills even more people and destroys even more property. Until people come together with a detailed well organized plan and are prepared to implement it, the situation looks bleak.
I have created an outline or synopsis of a Billion Acre Fire Management Plan for the Western United States that if fleshed out and implemented could resolve most of the wildfire problem but at a cost of billions of dollars. We have a Facebook group that is open to the public called the Association of Fire Management Activists where I have been posting a continuous stream of media coverage. Unfortunately most of the media seems to still be focused on just what is causing the problem rather than moving forward as to how to solve the problem. Some media even say it’s next to impossible to solve the problem.
People keep thinking it can’t get any worse than this and the tolerance for pain and suffering seems to rise rather than making the cultural shift necessary to resolve the wildfire problem once and for all. The issue is complicated by politics with folks from both the left and right using wildfire to push agendas other that getting the fuel loads down in the wildlands and in the wildland urban interface.
While people dither and argue amongst themselves as to the true cause of catastrophic wildfire, more dangerous sources of ignition such as pyro-terrorism are building with the potential to cause the destruction in lives and property to rise ten or twenty times or more from what it is today. So far lightning, arson and careless ignition fires are mostly single ignition fires where people can evacuate cities, but with multiple ignition fires caused by pyro-terrorists the threat rises exponentially and people get trapped in cities with no way to escape.
Fire adapted tree species in the uplands with fire resistant trunks and flammable needles and fronds have used both light fire and catastrophic fire to drive less fire adapted species into the lowlands and wetlands and this includes man if he fails to adapt. Other types of vegetation have above ground flammability with protected underground root systems from which to sprout back from light fire or catastrophic fire. The situation is made even worse by degraded ecosystems caused by decades of fire suppression raising fuel loads to extreme levels.
It’s a very difficult thing to make any kind of ingrained cultural shift and it’s true for the culture of fire suppression that has developed and accelerated from the event of agriculture and industrialization. In a hunter-gatherer society man was well adapted and surrounded by nature and natural forces, but as he moved out of nature into towns and cities, he has become separated from nature by his technology and because of this, less adapted to nature’s forces of wind, water and fire.
As bad as the fire situation has been in California and Europe there still does not seem to be the national will to commit tens of billions, even hundreds of billions of dollars for wildfire mitigation efforts such as fire hardening homes, creating defensible space, prescribed fire buffers for cities and a general rebuilding of fire dependent ecosystems. As soon as the wildfire is under control public and media attention moves elsewhere until the next catastrophic fire kills even more people and destroys even more property. Until people come together with a detailed well organized plan and are prepared to implement it, the situation looks bleak.
I have created an outline or synopsis of a Billion Acre Fire Management Plan for the Western United States that if fleshed out and implemented could resolve most of the wildfire problem but at a cost of billions of dollars. We have a Facebook group that is open to the public called the Association of Fire Management Activists where I have been posting a continuous stream of media coverage. Unfortunately most of the media seems to still be focused on just what is causing the problem rather than moving forward as to how to solve the problem. Some media even say it’s next to impossible to solve the problem.
People keep thinking it can’t get any worse than this and the tolerance for pain and suffering seems to rise rather than making the cultural shift necessary to resolve the wildfire problem once and for all. The issue is complicated by politics with folks from both the left and right using wildfire to push agendas other that getting the fuel loads down in the wildlands and in the wildland urban interface.
While people dither and argue amongst themselves as to the true cause of catastrophic wildfire, more dangerous sources of ignition such as pyro-terrorism are building with the potential to cause the destruction in lives and property to rise ten or twenty times or more from what it is today. So far lightning, arson and careless ignition fires are mostly single ignition fires where people can evacuate cities, but with multiple ignition fires caused by pyro-terrorists the threat rises exponentially and people get trapped in cities with no way to escape.