California fires: History versus hysterics

September 16, 2020. Far-left pundit Rachel Maddow has no problem concluding that "climate change" is causing spontaneous combustion in California forests. The truth is quite different from her misplaced histrionics. While this may be of small solution to California's misguided ecological mismanagement of their forests, it might offer a perspective that Maddow seems unwilling to consider.

Are there record acreages being burned in the UnitedStates today? No. Look at the last one hundred years of US burn acreage (see graph), peaking at over 50 million acres in 1930, averaging about 25 million acres over the twenty years from 1926 to1947, and after dipping to an average below 5 million acres from 1948 to 2000, the average has been rising to about 7.5 million annual acres in the last twenty years.

Or look at the US Forest Service 5-year averages over the same priori (below).:

Sometimes on-hundred year records are achieved simply because no one kept records for hundreds of preceding years. While the pre-twentieth century burn acreage records in the United States may be unsystematic, there are clearly records of even larger natural disasters, well before any bars for making a carbon-in-the-environment claims as to causes. As a Wisconsin resident, I am interested in the truly historic 1871 "Peshtigo" fire (see graphic, below), one that almost reached Appleton. One often overlooked element of sustainability is the fact that humans have found better ways to contain many of the ravages of our not-always-benevolent Mother Nature. Dams help control flooding. Building codes help prevent damage from wind and rain, and good forestry management can reduce the devastation of fiery natural disasters.

While even excellent forest management can reduce but never eliminate forest fires, humans are more of a problem than climate, and I don't mean human-caused climate change. Rather, by either stupidity or arson, humans are responsible for 90% of the California fires, according to California's governor (see initial Maddow video link for details). Remember that low point in US burn acreage in the last half of the twentieth century? What I remember well is the "Only you can prevent forest fires," mantra that accompanied the Smokey the Bear anti-frost fire campaign of the same period. So perhaps the human role in preventing forest fires is much more than in professional forestry management, "tree hugging," or other such save the forests campaigns.

Moving forward to the more recent and other record-setting fire damage times, those peaks in burn acreage back in the mid-1930's even caught the eye of the New York Times. See the slipping from the October 9, 1938 edition, below.

Today, with many more people in California, more homes, and just more 'stuff' -- man-made wealth -- in the path of the fires, the human and dollar damages are higher than back when California was less populated and there was much less manufactured wealth to be consumed by the fires. The existential threat to California is more one of ignoring natural disasters -- or thinking that they can be prevented in their entirety -- than it is one of anthropomorphic "climate change."

When I wrote my "managing sustainable development" manuscript five years ago, I started with the expectation that I would find the greatest conflict to be between ecological sustainability and economic development. My pre-conceived notion was wrong. Research showed clearly is that the real conflict is finding a sustainable balance in the conflict between damage caused by humans to the 'natural' environment and the damage caused by "Mother Nature" to human life, while also keeping in mind the damage humans do to one another, primarily through wars, domestic violence, automobile and other machine accidents, and more.