Environmentalists made the brushfires worse

Just a few decades ago, California was notorious only for its mudslides and its earthquakes—even its politics had been reduced to wailings in the wilderness—but that was before the ludicrous Luddites of the loony left seized control of brush management.

"Mother Nature knows better than man. Leave the brush alone." And thus was ended the rational sequence of prescribed burns and reseeding, which is to say, widely distributed, deliberate little fires followed by scattered mustard seed. (Our local politicians passed the buck and required urban homeowners to clear all brush and trees within 200 feet of a house, thereby leaving our neighborhoods denuded of everything other than grass and ivy. Brilliant!) A few hours of a moderate stench fireproofed local area after local area.

Ah, but the enviros, the greens and the tree-huggers had this view of an Earthly realm of pristine, self-balanced ecology, and they stopped the continuing sequence of prescribed burns. The combustible load increased. And increased. And increased.

Until. Flash here. Flash over there, and suddenly Southern California is enmeshed in wildfires. A thousand homes, ashes. A dozen people, dead. Hubris personified.

Wake up, you blind worshippers of Gaea’s pantheon.

When Mother Nature last ruled North America, mankind was in the Stone Age. Women screamed in childbirth and men used hand axes against lions and bears. The largest social structure was a band of, perhaps, 100 humans, sick and struggling to survive in the inhospitable graces of an uncaring Earth.

Is that what you want?

Wm. O. Felsman

Woodland Hills