Northern California Burns

by JASmius



Bear in mind when you read the quote that wildfires are actually a part of nature.  I'll explain below:

Fire officials called for thousands of evacuations as numerous homes remained threatened by Northern California wildfires Monday, while more than nine thousand firefighters battled twenty-one major fires in the State, officials said.

Wildfires were also burning in Washington and Oregon as the West Coast suffered from the effects of drought and summer heat.

The largest California wildfire was raging in the Lower Lake area north of San Francisco. It nearly tripled in size over the weekend to eighty-four square miles.

The fire has destroyed twenty-four homes and twenty-six outbuildings and was threatening 6,300 homes, many of them ranches scattered in rural areas ranging from grasslands to steep hills, officials said.

Officials have ordered twelve thousand people to evacuate homes, the Sacramento Bee reported. Several roads have been closed.

Fire officials "are calling the behavior of this fire unprecedented," State fire spokesman Jason Shanley told the newspaper. "It is jaw-dropping to see some of the things it is doing."

"Everyone we know that lives down there, they have nothing anymore. It's just crazy," Nikki Shatter of Clear Lake told KCAL-TV.

Droughts are a part of nature, ladies and gentlemen.  So is summer heat.  And, yes, wildfires.  Ecologically speaking, they are nature's way of clearing out dead underbrush and groundcover so that new flora of both sorts plus new trees in forest areas can germinate, emerge, and grow.  If you believe the "millions and billions of years" uniformitarian/evolutionist fiction, then nature has been purging forests and prairies via rapid oxidation for, well, "millions and billions" of years.  Still has been for thousands of years, anyway.

Note the causes of most, if not all, of these latest wildfires:

Many of the California blazes were sparked by lightning. The danger was expected to continue with scattered thunderstorms and gusty winds forecast for some areas of Northern California into Monday, state fire spokesman Daniel Berlant said. [emphasis added]

In other words, these wildfires are not "anthropogenic".  We have no control over nature, no control over the weather, and no control over the climate.  We cannot avert "climate change" and we cannot prevent wildfires beyond not flicking lit cigarette butts out of our car windows as we crawl along in snarled traffic on the Interstate caused by the latest wave of wildfires.

Indeed, one can argue that if we want to limit the damage to houses and man-made structures, we shouldn't build them in the first place.  Note I did NOT say we shouldn't be ALLOWED to build them.  It's like a city like New Orleans, Louisiana being build largely below sea level in the middle of a huge river delta directly in the path of regular hurricanes.  Hurricane Katrina a decade ago was devastating, but it was always inevitable.  The logical solution would have been to abandon New Orleans and rebuild the city somewhere else.  But of course that wasn't done, any more than people will stop building homes on the sides of steep hills prone to landslides or in the path of regular wildfires or tornadoes in the Midwest or any other formula for disaster.

In short, what bugs me about stories like this is the underlying tone of incredulity, as though fire is somehow a new and novel phenomenon in an area that has wildfires year in and year out, and as though it shouldn't be happening.  It's yet another facet of the same infantile leftwing mentality that holds that every risk in life can be eliminated if the technocratic "experts" are given the power and resources to centrally plan them out of our lives.

Newsflash, people: Barack Obama cannot sign an enforceable Executive Decree banning entropy.  Or nature.  The best we can do is be aware of the risks, accept the consequences and do our best to mitigate them, or get the hell out of their way.