rockdog Loc: Berkeley, Ca.

Cwilson341 Loc: Central Florida

Very moving, Phil! It is terrible!

rockdog Loc: Berkeley, Ca.

Thanks Carol, hope you folks are not in harms way. Matt is a friend and a photographer I respect.

merrytexan Loc: georgia

i agree with carol, phil...it is all so sad and horrible. when will it ever end.

rockdog Loc: Berkeley, Ca.

Thank you merry, stay out of harms way.

JD750 Loc: SoCal

Lost me at this line:

Decades of reports said
this was coming
without climate action.

That is pure politics. Quick!! Send money to Al Gore then all will be fixed.

(Never mind 20 years of neglected Forrest maintenance which is also politics).

IDguy Loc: Idaho

The premise is completely false. The Governor of CA is promoting it to deflect blame for the real cause away from himself and his predecessor Governors. Others of his persuasion follow for political purposes.

They have mismanaged the forests for a hundred years through a bevy of methods including disallowing logging, controlled burns, and allowing communities in forest and brush lands to proliferate with no fire breaks.

While CO2 in the atmosphere has increased a link to climate change is still tenuous. Even if it were a prime cause of conditions favoring massive fires it will take a century for anything we do about it to matter. Not exactly a solution oriented assertion,

IDguy Loc: Idaho

Here are more mismanagement issues in the forest fire States:

“We do have a management problem on the state, federal level and local levels (in that order). This can be broken down into six key areas where we have failed: Access, logging, grazing, endangered species, water quality and air pollution.

▪ Access: There has long been a push to block access and create wilderness areas. This makes access more difficult during emergencies. This stops firewood scavenging in the national forests. Firewood collection creates mini fuel breaks along any open forest road. Only dead and down trees are legal to collect.

▪ Logging: If we never logged and we allowed the natural fire cycle to occur, we wouldn’t have to log now. Over the last century, we prevented the natural fire cycle. This wasn’t a problem until recently because logging thinned the forest as fire used to. Logging died at the hands of the misguided environmentalists in this state over the last 30-40 years. Fuels have accumulated. Logging thins forests and prevents wildfires from becoming catastrophic.

▪ Grazing: Grazing has been opposed for many suspect environmental reasons. Grazing thins brush. Grass fires are easy to fight and stay small. Brush fires are hard to fight and grow large quickly. In this way fire climbs to larger and larger fuels until it races through the crowns of the trees, leaving behind something eerily reminiscent of a nuclear blast.

▪ Endangered species: The constant “discovery” of “subspecies” by scientists whose funding and careers depend on finding them is dubious at best. Often good management practices are halted at the order of a court when one of the “subspecies” is “discovered” on a parcel of land.


▪ Water quality: Water quality is frequently used to halt grazing, logging, access, and other effective management tools.

▪ Air pollution: Air districts have a narrow window of air quality in which controlled burns are allowed. It would be much better to allow a little more air pollution from controlled burns then to wait for massive wildfires with extreme air quality problems.

Trump used the term forest managemen t— it would be more precise, but also more cumbersome, if he had said forest management, chaparral management, oak woodland management, grass land management, and desert management (I left off riparian management because it tends to burn less). He could have said wildland management.

In short,wildland fires have always been here and always will be. Bad management policy has created greater risk to citizens, firefighters, property, and the environment.

Read more here: https://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/readers-opinion/article221683150.html#storylink=cpy”