How many more lives must be lost?
How many more cities, homes, historical landmarks, businesses, and wildlife must perish before the governor, state Senate, state Assembly, Air Resources Board, the state Air Pollution Control Agency make forest management the No. 1 priority and protect California residents?
What is it going to take?
What is your number of lives and towns destroyed?
What is the number of wildlife and their habitats destroyed before you take priority action?
Shame on every environmental group who believes that scrub sage and chaparral deserve more protection than people!
Barbara Harmon
Arroyo Grande
This article appears in Holiday Guide 2018.
OMG, now it’s “environmentalists” who are responsible for wildfires in the National Forests??? Not global warming fueled by Big Fossil? Not profit crazy PG&E transmission lines snapping in the breeze and igniting fossil baked brush and timber? Not stupid local zoning laws that allow development in the middle of dangerous wildfire zones? Not Federal policies that have suppressed controlled burns nor the firefighting lobby that makes millions contracting its services?
Ex-probation officer Harmon sounds like she needs a bit more environmental education to get the objective facts. So much easier to scapegoat those enviro socialists.
I knew a woman once who was driving drunk and ran into a tree. In the hospital she seriously talked about cutting down the tree. It was the trees’ fault…..These fires are increasing not just in California. Don’t you remember British Columbia being ablaze just months ago? A million and a half acres this year……
Forty years ago Dr James Hanson (NASA’s Goddard Institute) testified before congress that climate change will be our future unless we move to clean energy. That we can expect increased droughts and fires. Forty years ago the US Forest Service’s budget for fire suppression was 17% of its budget. It is now over 60% and rising. This is not a coincidence. If you want to blame, please blame the cause, Global Warming. Its caused by us, and there are solutions. Cutting down forests are part of the problem not the solution.