A Second Hand Conjecture

So says Harry Reid and other environmentalists, so it must be true. No doubt they have checked with everyone who agrees with them and they have a consensus about it.

So, what caused them way back when…

If there was a “worst fire season” in the last century or so, Berlant said, it would probably be 1936 — when flames swept across more than 1,250 square miles of California, an area roughly the size of Rhode Island.

Three years earlier, in 1933, 29 men died battling a blaze in the city’s landmark Griffith Park — which was scarred by a wildfire again this month. The 1933 fire was the deadliest in the city’s history.

…

In 1970, 10 people were killed and some 400 houses destroyed when a 20-mile wall of fire burned over a mountain ridge toward the town of Malibu and the sea.

…

Berlant said firefighting has improved since the 1930s, when crews helpless in the face of massive wildfires were sometimes forced to let them burn.

But at the same time, the state’s population explosion and aggressive development into canyons and foothills has given wildfires the chance for more destruction.

Those issues and the fact that California is in the grip of a severe drought, part of a cycle that experts say can last for decades, have prompted Los Angeles officials to eye 2007 warily.

This is prompting some to call for a rethinking of fire management policies in California.

“California has lost 1.5 million acres in the last four years,” said Richard A. Minnich, a professor of earth sciences who teaches fire ecology at the University of California, Riverside. “When do we declare the policy a failure?”

Fire-management experts like Professor Minnich, who has compared fire histories in San Diego County and Baja California in Mexico, say the message is clear: Mexico has smaller fires that burn out naturally, regularly clearing out combustible underbrush and causing relatively little destruction because the cycle is still natural. California has giant ones because its longtime policies of fire suppression — in which the government has kept fires from their normal cycle — has created huge pockets of fuel that erupt into conflagrations that must be fought.

Fire needs fuel. If you let fuel accumulate, you get big fires. That’s what’s happened in our national parks, and is continuing to happen in California. Just as man is encroaching on the habitat of wild animals, man is also encroaching on the habitat of wild fires.

There’s been fires there for centuries. Man’s habitat is encroaching on places that used to burn with little notice. Man’s policy is putting out fires as quickly as possible, allowing fuel to accumulate.

So, which is it, the chicken or the egg??

I don’t expect that line of reasoning to get much hearing in front of those experts of everything in Congress…

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