N.I.M.B.Y... an acronym for Not In My Back Yard. Everybody wants more power, but nobody wants the unsightly powerplant built next to their home. Everybody wants their garbage hauled away, but not if the dump lies next door. You get the picture.
Here's the tale of an environmental activist and director of the California Chaparral Institute, Richard Halsey, who began a fight to protect the chaparral plant back in 2003. So adamant was Mr. Halsey in protecting the environment that he took a typically conceited attitude towards those whose homes were dangered by the plant's overgrowth... that is, until his own home was put in danger this week.On Tuesday, Mr. Halsey found himself standing on the roof of his century-old home, garden hoses at the ready, as wildfire spread across the chaparral and torched houses a quarter-mile away. The Witch Fire, as the conflagration was named, was bearing down on his town of Escondido, Calif., just northeast of San Diego, feeding off the bushes Mr. Halsey has fought to save.
In the 15 or so wildfires that have ravaged hundreds of square miles in Southern California in the past few days, chaparral has been the primary fuel. Whipped by strong winds, the fire has spread across this vegetation, consuming some 1,500 homes along the way.
Chaparral has long bedeviled local fire planners. A key to fire prevention, Mr. Halsey and fire officials agree, is clearing such brush from around homes and other buildings to keep flames from jumping from brush to home.
But some fire-management officials have proposed more aggressive measures, including clear-cutting strips of chaparral to create fire breaks, or conducting controlled burns to combat overgrowth to minimize the potential of destructive wildfires.
Mr. Halsey takes the opposite view: Allow the chaparral to grow, and let nature take its course. "Our landscape is being misrepresented and condemned," he wrote in an essay on his Web site. "We need to come to its defense."
Mr. Halsey began his chaparral crusade in 2003, when he set up a Web site after the area's devastating Cedar fire, which started four years ago today. Mr. Halsey says he was appalled that the public criticized San Diego fire departments for not doing enough to battle the fires. But he also didn't like the bum rap the plants were getting.
"The problem is not the chaparral," he said this week. "The problem is people and the way they decide to place houses." He adds: "When you put a flammable structure in a flammable corridor it's like putting a bowling pin in a bowling alley -- ultimately, it's going to get taken out."
...This week's fires have led Mr. Halsey to do some soul-searching. When he moved to the area in 1982, he says, "I knew there were brush fires, but I had no idea about any of the real dangers."
His house was built in 1909 and he has no desire to lose it to a chaparral-fueled firestorm. And while he has made significant efforts to fire-proof it -- including a fire-resistant roof -- he admits it still contains some highly flammable old wood.
As the fire roared into Escondido on Tuesday, Mr. Halsey ignored the mandatory evacuation order. Along with teams of firefighters, he and a handful of other residents used hoses to soak buildings and extinguish flying embers that sought footholds on patio furniture, inside roof vents and under eaves.
"Embers are why a lot of these structures got taken out," says Mr. Halsey. "The only way to get rid of the embers is to get rid of the vegetation."
He remains opposed to controlled burns or clear-cutting vegetation in the wild. But from now on, he says, in his speaking engagements he will put much more emphasis on keeping the chaparral away from homes and other buildings.
"My passion and my bias is to favor the environment and the natural habitats," Mr. Halsey said yesterday afternoon as he walked by several burned-out homes. But after this fire, he says, "I have a greater appreciation now for the impact of vegetation near structures than I did before."
Mr. Halsey has no plans to overhaul his Web site to give it an anti-chaparral viewpoint. But he might add first-hand stories about fireproofing homes near chaparral. "I'll definitely add a line on the Web site that clearly says, 'Chaparral presents a real fire risk.'"
Labels: environment as religion, fires
When it comes to reporting of the California fires, did you know that police have killed one arson suspect, and arrested another, or that the FBI has recovered possible evidence of arson? You wouldn't know it from our broadcast media, that's for sure.
No, instead all we've heard is global warming and global warming. Today, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D, NV) stated but quickly recanted that global warming is responsible for the latest round of deadly forest fires in California.
Columnist Hugh Hewitt justifiably calls Reid "a witless opportunist."Reid may have wanted to blame the fires on global warming before he got called on it and ran away, but I'd be hard pressed to be persuaded that global warming caused arsonists to start several of these fires, or that global warming knocked down a power line in Malibu starting that fire, or that global warming caused a couple of construction workers to work with an arc welder in high winds, showering the local brush with sparks.
But then again, Reid was simply sounding off in the liberal echo-chamber. Both NBC News and CBS News have this week used the fires as evidence of a climate change problem. CNN too.
If one is seeking cause-effect proof of forest fires they need look no further than a short history lesson, courtesy of Junk Science's Stephen Milloy. It's the environmentalist lawsuits, stupid!"Our forests are detonating like napalm bombs. We need to remove dead and dying bug-killed timber," said Rep. Wally Herger, R-Calif.
Is this Monday-morning quarterbacking spurred by the wildfires now raging in California? Hardly. Rep. Herger uttered those words in August 1994 as part of his demand that Congress declare a state of emergency in federal forests to permit quick removal of dead trees, fallen branches and other debris that fuel wildfires -- like those that burned 3 million Western acres and killed 14 firefighters that year.
A spokesman for the Natural Resources Defense Council ( search) responded at the time by calling Rep. Herger's demand "a pretext for accelerated logging in the Sierra Nevada." Nine years later, though, Rep. Herger's demand is looking pretty prescient.
...As the Western forests burn -- and people die and homes are destroyed -- environmentalists and their political allies in Congress only seem concerned that some "old growth" trees may be cut in the process of thinning the nation's tinder traps. Their nonsensical opposition to thinning only makes it easier for wildfires to spread out of control. That's positively cuckoo.
"We need to do some active management to prevent unnatural fire" that occurs as a result of dense underbrush and trees built up over decades, U.S. Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth says. "If that means cutting a 14-foot [diameter] Sequoia, that's reasonable [to do to] prevent fire."
Amen, brother.
These opinions aren't just relegated to conservative columnists based in Washington D.C., nor are they new. Here's another prescient opinion by the Denver Post from March:We use more paper and wood every year, happily importing these products from Canada and other countries instead of harvesting trees in our backyard.
We want fires suppressed, loggers barred, our forests undisturbed. But the forest needs disturbance, says Ron Cousineau, assistant district forester for the Colorado State Forest Service. "Now we are seeing disturbance on a landscape scale."
You got that right, fella.
Worse, in this article from 2004, it's made pretty clear that the environmentalists' aims aren't so much about "protecting" anything as they are about politics.Groups like the Sierra Club and Greenpeace believe America has already started down that slope and vow to use lawsuits and peaceful protests to stop the slide.
Greenpeace's strategy includes what sound like SWAT teams. "Forest rescue stations," made up of a mobile lab and tents, will be set up at the site of controversial timber sales to monitor activity. The first one opened this month in southern Oregon. "That's where the rubber's meeting the road," says Greenpeace spokeswoman Celia Alario.
Charles Wilkinson, a University of Colorado law professor who advised the Forest Service during the Clinton administration, considers that grandstanding by environmentalists "searching for a mission."
Mechem, the industry spokesman, notes "it's an election year" and that "many people feel President Bush is vulnerable on the environment."
Wilkinson is also skeptical that the timber industry will go back into national forests in a big way because it now has vast private tree farms in the Southeast. Mechem echoes that view, noting the industry gets just 3 percent of its fiber from public lands.
Hmmm. What are we in right now? That's right, another election cycle. Expect to see the mainstream media, Harry Reid Democrats, and environmentalists alike push their "global warming causes forest fires" message in the next year.
But where the rubber meets the road is this: To stop the forest fires you must stop the lawsuits and environmentalist radicalism. Oh, yeah, and the arson too.
Labels: climate, environment as religion, fires, global warming, media bias
