Shrubs, dammit
Trump says it’s obvious how to fix the problem of wildfires in California: just remove every scrap of vegetation from the entire state. One wonders, among other things, if he realizes how much of the state is devoted to agriculture.
Chris Wallace asks Trump about the purpose of his trip.
"Just to see the firefighters. Nobody's ever seen what's going on over there."
From there, it gets worse.
Listen, if you can. Only 85 seconds pic.twitter.com/Zr80dAfW3U
— ☇RiotWomenn☇ (@riotwomennn) November 16, 2018
Shrubs, he says angrily, flailing his stubby little hands. He really seems to think that California needs to pave itself over right this second to avoid more wildfires. One wonders how he thinks that would even be possible, let alone desirable.
The BBC has a long, painful story on the eradication of Paradise, which makes it frighteningly clear how fast it happened.
06:15 November 8, a report of damage to a power line.
06:29
The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire) reports that a wildfire has started outside Pulga, about three miles north-east of Paradise.
07:30
Staff at the Adventist Health Feather River Hospital in Paradise, about 25 miles from Pulga in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, are warned that the Camp Fire is getting close to town and that they should evacuate their patients.
One nurse, Tamara Ferguson, is carrying out checks on new mothers in the maternity ward alongside a new trainee. She spots an orange glow out of the window and steps outside with her colleagues.
As they look up at the sky, ash starts to fall like snow.
…
09:26
The sky over Paradise is by now a deep sepia as the smoke starts to blot out the sun.
Within 10 minutes, it is as though night has fallen.
The only lights are those of the cars trying to make it out of town, but much of the traffic has ground to a halt. Ash falls on Paradise at a rapid rate.
“No, it is not six o’clock or seven o’clock at night, people,” William Hart says on a video he broadcasts on Facebook. “I don’t even know what the eff time it is.”
His is the last car in the queue leaving Paradise as the flames close in.
As she tries to leave town, nurse Karen Davis’ vehicle breaks down.
“Fire was coming on both sides. It was a fire tornado,” she later tells CBS. “All of a sudden, it filled with black smoke.”
It was fast.
And things like faults in power lines aren’t predictable. Unless you shave the whole state bald and then cover it in concrete (which would not be physically possible), you can’t prevent wildfires by cutting down the “shrubs.” Trump can flail his stupid hands all he likes, but that won’t make him right about the shrubs.
Reasonable people, who understand that other people have brains and knowledge, can grasp this point, but Trump, who understands nothing outside his own head, cannot.
This is without even touching on the question of what it would be like to live in a world stripped of vegetation, and how any life would survive.
The best thing Trump can do for California is to stay away – preferably on another planet – and let the adults deal with it. But he doesn’t understand that, because he knows things. Things no one else knows. I’ll agree with that. No one else knows the things he knows because they aren’t true.
My son e-mailed me about the Paradise catastrophe. It took me a minute to grasp what his subject heading meant – Paradise wiped out by fire. It seemed sort of metaphysical after-lifey for a lifelong atheist like him, but then I realized he meant it literally. He and I visited there a number of years ago, and I have many beautiful pictures from there.
I remember when some small towns in Oklahoma were blown away by the 1999 tornadoes. They were there, and then they weren’t. So many lives can change in the blink of an eye. I feel for the people of Paradise. I will not send them my thoughtsandprayers, but I will find a good, solid charity that is donating to them and do what I can.
I also read a letter to the editor in my local newspaper sometime where a guy said all the street trees across the city (which prides itself of being the “bush capital”) should be cut down to reduce fire risk. The thing is, these people are, of course, right: if the whole planet is a single desert there will be no forest fires. Also, if we knock down all our houses there will be no house fires, and if we scrap all our cars, trucks and buses there will be no traffic accidents. Useful insights, these.
OK, Trump’s a moron and I’m not defending him.
But the media coverage of his claim that poor forest management is the cause is the absolute pits. He keeps making this claim, the media keeps reporting it, and they keep refuting it by saying nothing more than of course it’s not true.
Well, if it’s not true, dig into the claim and debunk it thoroughly. This “of course he’s wrong, moving on” approach isn’t going to convince anyone that believes him.
And we can all laugh at his babbling about shrubs and joke about how he probably wants to cut down all trees, but forest management to reduce the chance of rapidly spreading wildfires is a real thing. Here it is being discussed on a site that doesn’t look a conservative front, for one example:
https://calmatters.org/articles/california-forest-management-fires/
It is not outside the realm of possibility that mismanagement could greatly exacerbate a fire like this. If the media knows that didn’t happen in this case, then it would be helpful if they explained why.
If for no other reason, they should do it because this fire is going to be studied, and if those studies conclude that poor forest management played a major role, Trump is going to be insufferable and his followers emboldened.
Skeletor, may I make a suggestion? You should become a journalist, so somebody can do it right. It doesn’t really help much to come here and berate Ophelia for the media’s failures, both real and perceived. So, maybe that would be a great new career for you, since nothing Ophelia shares here satisfies you.
As Ophelia’s next post illustrates, this is the management discussion as advanced in the present context: (1) it is meant to deflect from any discussion of global warming and (2) it boils down to “sweeping the forest floor” (just visualise the size of the forests and the number of sweepers that would require). I am not a fully trained fire ecologist, but even I can tell that the problem is more complex than that. For starters, every management technique will be a trade-off of different benefits and downsides against each other and may promote or reduce the recruitment of this or that species, including weeds, rare native flowers, or desirable forestry trees.
This attitude is right off a bumper sticker I saw years ago reading “Pave the World”.
Well, PG&E’s failure to maintain and supervise power-lines has been an ongoing scandal for years. They’ve been responsible for fires every dry season. But without climate change caused drought, and reversed wind patterns, that would still not account for this catastrophe.