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Dave's avatar

This is an extract from a National Review article that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:

“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.

"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.

But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.

But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.

Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.

"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.

"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."

Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.

"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”

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Kevin Carstensen's avatar

Why do you suppose people of color aren’t interested in fighting fires? I hardly think fires are racist But the left are grasping at straws to explain this disaster as a racist event or caused by climate change How about gross negligence on the part of the left??

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