Rakes will halt wild fires? | Tom Camfield

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Two-thirds of the acreage burned in California is on federal lands and not within the purview of state officials. Two major fires combined to burn more than 150 square miles in Sequoia National Park, tearing through groves of giant redwoods.

Donald recently proclaimed himself to be the “number one environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt.” He also said recently of himself: “‘trump is the great environmentalist . . . I am, I am; I believe strongly in it.” Yet his administration has sought to weaken or roll back some 100 environmental regulations since he became president.

As pointed out by editor David Knowles on Yahoo/News (on Sept. 8, concerning back early in the year, when Donald was beginning the cover-up that made such a disaster of the coronavirus) it was the Trump administration that had lopped off 2,000,000 acres from two cherished wilderness areas in Utah, “the largest roll-back of federal land protection in the nation’s history.”

In February, a statement from Alaska Wilderness League Action, Clean Water Action, Defenders of Wildlife, Earth Justice, EDF Action, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society read: ”Donald Trump’s administration has unleashed an unprecedented assault on our environment and the health of our communities. His policies threaten our climate, air, water, public lands, wildlife and oceans; no amount of his greenwashing can change the simple fact:

”Donald Trump has been the worst president for our environment in history.”

And I sit here today, Sept. 19, with the entire western U.S. ablaze confined to my home not only by the coronavirus (which will have me masked with more-intelligent Americans until at least the middle of next year) but also temporarily by air quality ratings of “very unhealthy” and “hazardous.” It’s been six days already since The Guardian noted: “In recent days five whole towns have been destroyed by fire in Oregon. So has much of Malden, Washington, and swaths of Big Creek and Berry Creek, both in California.” To many people, this will seem like “deja vu.” In 2018, another town also was wiped off the map in the most dramatic recent example of this horrible genre. Paradise, California, was much larger, home to 27,000, and it was destroyed in just a few hours. Eighty-five people were killed.

This time nearly 100 fires have ravaged mostly in three states — Oregon, Washington and California. Some 3,000,000 acres have been destroyed by now — with schools trying to reopen and Trump bellowing about Democrats, as if they were to somehow blame for it all.

By Sept. 15, fires along the West Coast had burned through an area larger than the state of Connecticut, and 220,000 people in three states had been driven from their homes.

And reading about his continued denial of global warming in favor of fossil fuel and industrial America — and and the destruction of western wildfires . . . it’s really nothing new. It was a presidential election off-year in mid-November 2018 when Donald visited the former site of Paradise in northern California and first suggested cleaning forest floors with rakes.

He told reporters that in Finland they spend a lot of tine “raking and cleaning and doing things” to clear forest floors. Finland’s president was among the millions of Finns who wondered where the U.S. president got the idea that raking its part of that country’s routine for managing its substantial forests.

Wally Covington, professor of forestry at Northern Arizona University, agreed that forests have become overgrown and need to be thinned, but “not with a lawn rake.” Some of the policies that led to overgrown forests, such as aggressive fire prevention were implemented more than 100 years ago, so blaming current leaders doesn’t make sense, Covington said. He said that people living in areas burning are paying the price because policymakers would not address climate change and the effects of fire suppression on forests 30 or 40 years ago.

Donald, meanwhile already has hated the western states, particularly California, for their failure to kneel before him. He blames everything on “mismanagement” and has threatened withdrawal of funding. Climate change has long since been expunged from his thoughts. Ralph Propper, president of the Environmental Council of Sacramento, told the Associated Press: "Raking the leaves and forest floors is really inane; that doesn’t make sense at all.”

All-time record high at Woodland Hills (Pierce College, Calif.)
Sept. 8 at 121 degrees broke the old record of 119 set July 22, 2006. The permafrost is melting in Siberia, etc.

Except for Putin’s Russians, the world is pretty much against Donald