January 22, 2025
The fires in Los Angeles have been the most devastating in the city's history. A full account of the causes of the conflagration can't be attempted here, but in this week's column, I'd like to talk about the responsibility of environmentalism for what happened.
By "environmentalism," I mean a movement that is hostile to human beings, their private homes, and to industrial growth. Some of its advocates want to do away with people altogether. Instead, environmentalists want to preserve the natural world in its pristine purity.
In Los Angeles and its surrounding communities, there is an abundance of lush vegetation. Further, there is usually very little rain during the fall and winter seasons. LA does get some rain in the spring, but as Coim Toibin remarks, "In the spring, the rain makes the scrub and the brush grow stronger so when they get dry later in the year they are liable to burn more strongly." This problem is exacerbated by fierce Santa Ana winds that can rapidly spread any fire that has started.
In order to cope with these difficult circumstances, it is necessary to follow a policy of controlled burning. According to David Stockman, "The failure to do just such controlled burns is exactly what is behind the LA wildfire today. That is, a dramatically larger human footprint in the fire-prone shrub-lands and chaparral (dwarf trees) areas along the coasts has increased the risk residents will start fires, accidentally or otherwise. California's population doubled from 1970 to 2020, from about 20 million people to nearly 40 million people, and nearly all of the gain was in the coastal areas.
Under those conditions, California's strong, naturally-occurring winds, which crest periodically, as is occurring at the moment, are the main culprit which fuels and spreads the human-set blazes in the shrub-lands. The Diablo winds in the north of the state and the Santa Ana winds in the south can actually reach hurricane force, as has also been the case this week. As the winds move West over California mountains and down toward the coast, they compress, warm and intensify.
These winds, in turn, blow flames and carry embers, spreading the fires quickly before they can be contained. And on top of that, the Santa Ana winds also function as Mother Nature's blow-dryer. As they come down the mountains toward the sea, the hot winds dry the surface vegetation and deadwood rapidly and powerfully, paving the way for the blowing embers to fuel the spread of wildfires down the slopes."
A policy of controlled burning is needed to deal with this, but the environmentalists oppose this, because they want to keep as much of the lush vegetation in place as possible. "We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres - an area about the size of Maine - to restabilize in terms of fire.
In short, if you don't clear and burn-out the deadwood, you build-up nature-defying tinder-boxes that then require only a lightening strike, a spark from an un-repaired power line or human carelessness to ignite into a raging inferno. As one 40-year conservationist and expert summarized,
There's only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid."We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load."
It is also necessary to supply vast amounts of water to the area, but again the environmentalists oppose this. The water might disturb the habitats of a few fish and snails. This is in their insane view, a bar to what is necessary to protect the lives and property of millions of people. David Stockman explains:"In this case, state and Federal politicians have simultaneously curtailed the supply of water available to Los Angeles firefighters in order to protect so-called endangered species. Specifically, southern California is being held hostage by sharp curtailment of the water pumping rates from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in order to protect the Delta Smelt and Chinook Salmon."
Also, fire hydrants must be kept up-to-date and equipped to handle large scale blazes. Enough fire fighters must be hired to cope with potential emergencies. In a free society, hydrants and fire fighters would be supplied by the market, but we unfortunately do not live in a free society, and it is up to the government to take care of these matters.
But Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass is not interested in such matters. She was out of the city, on one of her perpetual junkets abroad, when the fires started, even though it was a matter of public knowledge that Los Angeles was in a dangerous period. The Los Angeles Times reported:"As the Palisades fire exploded in Los Angeles on Jan. 7, Mayor Karen Bass was posing for photos at an embassy cocktail party in Ghana, pictures posted on social media show."She is, by the way, a revolutionary Communist:"Back in the 1970s, community activist Karen Bass went on at least 15 trips to Cuba, many with a group known as the Venceremos Brigade, a Marxist group started by the Castro regime to subvert American interests, weaken democracies, and spread communism around the world."
As you would expect from such a person, Bass doe not care about public safety:"But Bass was accused of deploying sleight of hand to minimize the many very real dramas surrounding water that hindered efforts to douse the flames.
While the tanks were indeed full before the fire broke out, by Wednesday fire hydrants in Palisades had run out of water, as they are not designed for such mass-scale wildfires.
All of the three water tanks in Palisades and several fire hydrants temporarily lost water because of the high demand, as experts have explained the system is not built to fight major blazes.
The water system used to fight the Palisades fire buckled under the demands of what turned out to be the most destructive fire in city history, with some hydrants running dry as they were overstressed without assistance from firefighting aircraft for hours early Wednesday."
California Governor Gavin Newsom is no better. As Mises Institute President Tom DiLorenzo says:"For the past two years, under the guidance/dictates of Nancy Pelosi's nephew (aka governor of California), LA County has been sending firefighting equipment, including fire trucks, to Ukraine. Is it constitutional for a state to have its own foreign policy? Is there really a line in the LA County budget for fire trucks for Ukraine? Which LA County politicians ran on a platform of: 'Vote for me and I'll give our firefighting equipment away to the dictator of Ukraine"? Did anyone vote for this, or is the Newsom dictatorship really no different from the ones in Ukraine or North Korea?"
Let's do everything we can to reverse the policies of these anti-human environmentalists!