It wasn’t the first time Trump had given us his expert opinion on forest management. He did so in August, too. And in October, during a cabinet meeting, he said: “I say to the governor, or whoever is going to be the governor of California, you better get your act together. We’re just not going to continue to pay the kind of money we’re paying because of fires that should never be to the extent.”
Scientists say that forest management had nothing to do with the Camp Fire, the worst in state history. It has killed at least 63 people and burned at least 6,400 residential and other structures in Paradise, a city of 27,000 that was 80 to 90 percent incinerated, according to the mayor. And 631 people are still unaccounted for. The fire began at the edge of the Plumas National Forest which had been thinned just 10 years ago. Paradise is itself in a wildland-urban interface, what fire experts label where human building verges on or mingles with undeveloped natural land. A third of the nation’s 44 million houses have been built in a wildland-urban interface, according the Department of Agriculture. Forest management also didn’t have anything to do with the wildland-urban interface Woolsey Fire that has killed three people in southern California. Or the Tubbs fire in 2017, the second worst in state history, which killed 22.
The implication that the state should be penalized for these fires is especially grotesque given that just 3 percent of California’s forests are owned by state agencies. Fifty-seven percent are owned and managed by the Forest Service and the Department of Interior. The Trump regime’s original 2019 budget proposal includes elimination of the USDA’s State and Private Cooperative Forestry division including Urban and Community Forestry. But fires don’t obey political boundaries. Dumping the programs in that division would increase the risk of wildfires jumping from state, tribal, or privately owned forest land into National Forests. How’s that for forest management?
And, naturally, in a regime brimful of climate science deniers, the fact that scientists are saying these two fires would not have been nearly so bad had it not been for climate change is being utterly ignored at the White House.
So, stay home this weekend, Donnie. Tweet some crap about the Mueller investigation or how the real reason you hid out in your Paris hotel from Armistice Day ceremonies wasn’t to avoid getting your hair wet in the rain or how you’re having second thoughts about how swell a guy North Korea’s Kim Jong-un is.
But leave us the hell alone.