Thomas Sowell wrote a column[1] about this that is spot on, twenty years later.
0: I love these types of economic theories (x is a political problem, not an exogenous problem). Amartya Sen's theory of famines is another one.
1: https://www.ocregister.com/2007/10/31/thomas-sowell-preservi...
Useful commentary about wildfires looks very different and people actually concerned about the land are not as he paints them.
The general point is true, though. If you go past seeing wildfires as boogiemen and instead view them as allocation issues, they become more solvable.
No matter how much open space there is, it is never enough for environmental extremists, who will make political trouble if anyone is allowed to break up those miles and miles of solid vegetation with buildings, even though pavement and masonry don’t burn.
In other words, government preserves all the conditions for wildfires and subsidizes people who live in their path.
Not everybody wants to live on Trantor and the people local to the wildfires discussed in the article lived alongside and with them for 70,000 years sans parking lots.
On this matter Sowell appears to be unqualified, uninformed, and worse than an idiot.
Are you against controlled burns?
see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKdZpRbzMk
et al. - I've spent much of the past month and a half on tender watch during harvest in an Australian summer - we had one day with 14 spot fires from lightning strikes just a few weeks past.
Detaching from Sowell is an excellent idea.
Your inital point was correct though, wildfires are politicized.
The Australian Black Summer, the season that went viral across the globe, was heavily pounced upon by News Corp. et al to push a contra AGW climate change narrative .. which was staggering to watch unfold in the face of data to the contrary.
[0] https://www.cpr.org/2024/11/22/fighting-a-decades-old-underg...
Uncle (a CFA station chief) was on the missing list overnight during the Ash Wednesday fires, when he and his partner were trapped at Mt. Macedon. Witnessing the firestorm destroying nearby houses, they took refuge in a concrete public toilet block. He retired not long afterwards.
My father narrowly missed getting caught in the Black Saturday fires as he had been doing road inspections in the Strzelecki range. The Central Gippsland fire jumped the range in a matter of hours due to the 100kmh gales.
Close family friend was the pit manager at Loy Yang Power Station and had a very bad day that fortunately didn't become catastrophic, as Loy Yang A & B provides 50-60% of the base load for the whole state of Victoria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Saturday_bushfires#Centr...
My neighbor, who spent 40 years in the USFS doing fire fighting and prevention, pointed Zeke out to me saying, "This guy really understands fire." Zeke does great live streams during large wildfires, explaining what is happening with webcams and mapping of near-realtime data. It's crazy to watch him triangulate smoke plumes from multiple webcams and then correlate that with cartographic data put out by the agencies fighting the fire. His experience is obvious when you see how calmly, quickly, and rationally he evaluates devastating situations.
kqr•1w ago
It taught me a lot that surprised me and is also mentioned in TFA, such as
- The main weapon against wildfires is dirt, not water. Wildfires burn so vigorously that trying to extingush with water is like pissing into a bonfire.
- Water is used to cool down firefighters, though. It is also used in places the fire hasn't yet reached to slow down its progress.
- Firefighters don't say "vegetation" or "trees" or "moss", they say "fuel".
- Controlled burns are an effective thing even though it meets political resistance.
- Firelines are like dirt roads except completely bare of fuel.
- Crown fires are terrifying.
- Looking for smoldering underground after a wildfire is important and extremely labour intensive.
- Fires travel faster downwind and uphill.
- The PPE a wildland firefighter carries may give them a few more minutes of oxygen if they end up surrounded by fire but it won't save their lives in most situations.