Creating The Perfect Firestorm

EVERY YEAR, the wildfires which consume California consume larger portions of it, or so it certainly seems. The wet and dry cycles which the climate bestows upon this land mass which came floating in from the ocean and collided with the continent hundreds of millions of years ago, are nearly as ancient as the collision. Wet and dry seasons, and a veritable plethora of earthquakes are, alas, California's heritage, its destiny. Nonetheless, the dry season gradually becomes longer, and drier, as climate change inexorably changes the climate of the entire world. A perfect storm, a combination of circumstances, produces this tragic situation. First, of course, is climate change. Then too, the sheer abundance of ill advised human construction; cities and housing projects built where these firs are most common, only exacerbates the loss of property and life. Unwise construction methods, predicated on maximizing profit rather than minimizing fire hazards, plays a large role. Houses are literally built to burn, that less money money be burned building them. California, perhaps more than any other state on the union, is replete with invasive species of flora; plant species which do not belong there, have been imported for aesthetic and other reason, which multiply, crowd our native plant life, and fill the land with a tangle of flammable bio mass. and, there is much truth to the oft mentioned lack of forest clearing, the tendency of land management policies to place too great an emphasis on preventing wildfires, rather than allowing them to burn naturally, thus clearing the land, thinning out the foliage, and in the long run reducing the flammability of the land. Above, the most serious cause of this dire situation is not what people do, but what they have not done. We the people have failed to develop desalination and water management policies which could and would replenish the water content in the soil, depleted by too mush use by to many people. funding for fire management measure has been lacking, and even now the Trump administration is reducing federal aid to California, based on the president's misguided belief that the entire blame belongs to the state's policies, and ignoring the huge impact of climate change, in which the president famously, like most of his misguided supporters, famously do not believe. The president is conspicuous by his silence during the current conflagration. Trump does not like California, for good reason. The progressive people of the state despise him at the highest levels in the country; the west coast and the east coast oppose the president by huge margins, while his support comes from the conservative center of the country. For this to underpin the president's refusal to address California's fire plagued woes simply reveals yet another form of presidential criminal behavior, among the many others, well known. Like solutions to the nation's other pressing problems, solutions to California's dilemma will beyond doubt come from progressive thinkers and politicians, not the intellectually moribund reprobates on the far right.