This is an extract from a National Review article that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
by Longreads
December 4, 2018
“Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
That’s an eloquent explanation of something I try to communicate to people when fire comes up in conversation. I will be saving this in my back pocket. I usually utilize the metaphor of building a campfire. In that case, you can’t just start a full size log on fire. You need tinder and kindling.
Of course, these new battery pack plants, like the one currently on fire at Moss Landing, deviate from that a bit, in that the energy they store and the manner in which it is stored is far more unstable than more natural energy storage devices, like wood and other hydrocarbons.
There’s an assumption in all of this that seems to be missed and is very common. The people running these institutions have assumed that they have existed in perpetuity and are impossible to break. They see the bureaucracy as a means to dole out rewards to their Allie’s and punishment to their opponents. The fires, and your husband, will be taken care by “somebody”.
The people who built these institutions were human beings who dedicated themselves to the job. However since they were human beings we can point out their very human flaws, that has nothing to do with putting out fires which they did well but allows these bureaucrats to “fix” all of their mistakes. The only bad assumption the Kristen’s made is that they thought they could not break the institutions
That true but my background is business and to me it’s more about Goodwill. That is perception of a company that is build up by its focus on execution and planning for the future. Much of the Private Equity world is about monetizing that goodwill and distributing it to their investors. What you have left is a shell of a company who is focused on only the next quarter. Thus everything is about keeping rates down so they can prop up their assets. Their no preparation for when the winds start to blow.
Right, makes sense. Yeah I think that’s what’s fundamentally wrong with an entire generation of McKinsey trained politicians who are good at talking and not much else. Mayor Pete comes to mind
Believe me they are very smart and very good at leveraging a companies’ expertise to assets. I have head the Bain process described as the “Shock and Awe” approach. Any job that cannot be justified in the moment is gone. Every join on the spreadsheet and has a revenue requirement. So even if sales go up if it does not meet the revenue per worker projections, you get layoffs. Real morale builder that one.
It is good and just that people have mainly focused on this line because these are the words of a true psychopath.
Being a lesbian of color - insanity. The insane should never be out in public.
“You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it’s a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that this person might understand their situation a little better.”
No, I don't. I want to see a 6 foot tall 290 pound man that can carry my wife and daughter out of the fire, while I drag my son out. I want to see someone who can hold the jaws of life and rip the hell out of the car door that's pinning my loved one in an accident. I want to see the person who can heft that fire hose and use it. I want to see the EMT that can lift a dying body and put it on a stretcher. I want to see a physically fit cop or sheriff's deputy who can chase down the murderer that's getting away.
I don't care if that person is white, black, yellow, or green. As long as he can get the job done.
Between the green theocracy behind its suicidal land and water management and the institutionalized cultural Marxism that is to a society what the Trojan Horse was to the defense of Troy, this disaster should serve as glimpse into the dystopian future on this path. Human flourishing is not a priority to these pathologies.
At this point, if someone told you the reason why there were no preparations made is because state and local governments are prepared to absorb a certain amount of damage in hopes of getting federal money and public support for climate change spending, would you doubt them?
The left are the party of midwits, not the completely stupid. A midwit is smart enough to know better than to acknowledge that reason, because it would risk that aid not actually coming.
The husband she would have left to die in his burning house was a white male. Her statement definitely implies that he would have deserved it. You are correct in calling them psychopaths.
This "look like me" rule has infected TV too. I watch 911 because it's basically a one-hour disaster movie, lots of fun. The Black lesbian EMT is used by LAFD to buttress their claim that it's a pervasive belief. That EMT bemoans how a Doc at the ER misdiagnosed her mother, as the Doc was a white male. Do they want to hear all our stories about how doctors at our ERs misdiagnosed us? It's all just bare faced lies.
Today I learned that The Jet Propulsion Lab located in the Los Angeles hills has its own Fire Department and it’s better prepared and better managed than the Los Angeles Fire Department.
“I like to think that the public sector careers of Governor Newsom, Mayor Bass, and the bigots like Kristine Larson whom they employ have been ended by this tragic episode.”
Excellent piece.
But unfortunately, other than for the Mayor, I very much doubt that this will end the careers of very many, if any, of the others you mention. California is now *that* leftist.
Reading you is iced tea on a hot day when you’re tired. Really beautiful prose, and makes me look forward to the future.
You illustrate perfectly a principle of social evolution.
Sometimes social systems mutate into things which require more effort and more tap dancing and more guesswork and more more to stay even-keeled. People who don’t go along with the more more sail ahead leaving the rest uncomprehending in their wake.
[The Red Queen Hypothesis]
I moved to LA in 1980, and over the course of that decade saw a fire virtually every year (quite awful ones in La Canada and Malibu) They just didn’t have a million people commenting every 5 seconds. Intense scrutiny seems to activate woke.
None of those people are going anywhere. Bass will complete her term, Gavin Nuisance will be re-elected, The lesbians will remain at the helm. The people of California have willed themselves into this lunacy, they like it, and as long as the people in charge can blame someone or something else, which is the progressive politician’s forte, the electorate will keep on keeping them on.
The people of LA have precisely the utopia they voted for and desire. Psychopathic lesbians of color having power and six figure incomes is necessary to balance out historical oppression. None of the current distress will last. They will vote again and again for their own destruction (Newsome, Bass, etc.) until they're literally lined up and shot to pay for their ancestor's sins. Even then, they'll believe their murderers are righteous and justified.
California, and America in general, deserve every bit of this. Some for voting for it, and the rest of us for not hanging the mother fuckers responsible.
This is an extract from a National Review article that explains much about the causes of the devastating LA fires:
“And while the topography is different - the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.
"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.
But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.
But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A.Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.
Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.
"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.
"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."
Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.
"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.”
The Case for Letting Malibu Burn
Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?
by Longreads
December 4, 2018
“Less well understood in the old days was the essential dependence of the dominant vegetation of the Santa Monicas—chamise chaparral, coastal sage scrub, and live oak woodland—upon this cycle of wildfire. Decades of research (especially at the San Dimas Experimental Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains) have given late-twentieth-century science vivid insights into the complex and ultimately beneficial role of fire in recycling nutrients and ensuring seed germination in Southern California’s various pyrophytic flora. Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”
A key revelation was the nonlinear relationship between the age structure of vegetation and the intensity of fire. Botanists and fire geographers discovered that “the probability for an intense fast running fire increases dramatically as the fuels exceed twenty years of age.” Indeed, half-century-old chaparral—heavily laden with dead mass—is calculated to burn with 50 times more intensity than 20-year-old chaparral. Put another way, an acre of old chaparral is the fuel equivalent of about 75 barrels of crude oil. Expanding these calculations even further, a great Malibu firestorm could generate the heat of three million barrels of burning oil at a temperature of 2,000 degrees.
“Total fire suppression,” the official policy in the Southern California mountains since 1919, has been a tragic error because it creates enormous stockpiles of fuel. The extreme fires that eventually occur can transform the chemical structure of the soil itself. The volatilization of certain plant chemicals creates a water-repellent layer in the upper soil, and this layer, by preventing percolation, dramatically accelerates subsequent sheet flooding and erosion. A monomaniacal obsession with managing ignition rather than chaparral accumulation simply makes doomsday-like firestorms and the great floods that follow them virtually inevitable.”
That’s an eloquent explanation of something I try to communicate to people when fire comes up in conversation. I will be saving this in my back pocket. I usually utilize the metaphor of building a campfire. In that case, you can’t just start a full size log on fire. You need tinder and kindling.
Of course, these new battery pack plants, like the one currently on fire at Moss Landing, deviate from that a bit, in that the energy they store and the manner in which it is stored is far more unstable than more natural energy storage devices, like wood and other hydrocarbons.
Thanks for posting that. I really need to subscribe to NR again.
https://x.com/Hotshot_Movie/status/1878794288277893314
There’s an assumption in all of this that seems to be missed and is very common. The people running these institutions have assumed that they have existed in perpetuity and are impossible to break. They see the bureaucracy as a means to dole out rewards to their Allie’s and punishment to their opponents. The fires, and your husband, will be taken care by “somebody”.
The people who built these institutions were human beings who dedicated themselves to the job. However since they were human beings we can point out their very human flaws, that has nothing to do with putting out fires which they did well but allows these bureaucrats to “fix” all of their mistakes. The only bad assumption the Kristen’s made is that they thought they could not break the institutions
Good observation, thanks. It’s a version of the vacation from history fallacy, I think.
That true but my background is business and to me it’s more about Goodwill. That is perception of a company that is build up by its focus on execution and planning for the future. Much of the Private Equity world is about monetizing that goodwill and distributing it to their investors. What you have left is a shell of a company who is focused on only the next quarter. Thus everything is about keeping rates down so they can prop up their assets. Their no preparation for when the winds start to blow.
Right, makes sense. Yeah I think that’s what’s fundamentally wrong with an entire generation of McKinsey trained politicians who are good at talking and not much else. Mayor Pete comes to mind
Believe me they are very smart and very good at leveraging a companies’ expertise to assets. I have head the Bain process described as the “Shock and Awe” approach. Any job that cannot be justified in the moment is gone. Every join on the spreadsheet and has a revenue requirement. So even if sales go up if it does not meet the revenue per worker projections, you get layoffs. Real morale builder that one.
Pardon the spelling errors
“The only bad assumption the Kristen’s made is that they thought they could not break the institutions”
I was very much with you until this last sentence.
There are many, many other bad assumptions the Kristens made beyond this one…
It is good and just that people have mainly focused on this line because these are the words of a true psychopath.
Being a lesbian of color - insanity. The insane should never be out in public.
“You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency, whether it’s a medical call or a fire call, that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that this person might understand their situation a little better.”
No, I don't. I want to see a 6 foot tall 290 pound man that can carry my wife and daughter out of the fire, while I drag my son out. I want to see someone who can hold the jaws of life and rip the hell out of the car door that's pinning my loved one in an accident. I want to see the person who can heft that fire hose and use it. I want to see the EMT that can lift a dying body and put it on a stretcher. I want to see a physically fit cop or sheriff's deputy who can chase down the murderer that's getting away.
I don't care if that person is white, black, yellow, or green. As long as he can get the job done.
Between the green theocracy behind its suicidal land and water management and the institutionalized cultural Marxism that is to a society what the Trojan Horse was to the defense of Troy, this disaster should serve as glimpse into the dystopian future on this path. Human flourishing is not a priority to these pathologies.
For all the Progrssive use of the word holistic, they certainly seem to prefer battling bureaucratic fiefdoms. To stop actual Progress.
At this point, if someone told you the reason why there were no preparations made is because state and local governments are prepared to absorb a certain amount of damage in hopes of getting federal money and public support for climate change spending, would you doubt them?
I would not doubt that reality of logic.
But I would doubt if they said it out loud, yes.
The left are the party of midwits, not the completely stupid. A midwit is smart enough to know better than to acknowledge that reason, because it would risk that aid not actually coming.
No
The husband she would have left to die in his burning house was a white male. Her statement definitely implies that he would have deserved it. You are correct in calling them psychopaths.
Great essay.
Thanks!
My pleasure.
Well said. Kudos.
Thank you
This "look like me" rule has infected TV too. I watch 911 because it's basically a one-hour disaster movie, lots of fun. The Black lesbian EMT is used by LAFD to buttress their claim that it's a pervasive belief. That EMT bemoans how a Doc at the ER misdiagnosed her mother, as the Doc was a white male. Do they want to hear all our stories about how doctors at our ERs misdiagnosed us? It's all just bare faced lies.
Today I learned that The Jet Propulsion Lab located in the Los Angeles hills has its own Fire Department and it’s better prepared and better managed than the Los Angeles Fire Department.
“I like to think that the public sector careers of Governor Newsom, Mayor Bass, and the bigots like Kristine Larson whom they employ have been ended by this tragic episode.”
Excellent piece.
But unfortunately, other than for the Mayor, I very much doubt that this will end the careers of very many, if any, of the others you mention. California is now *that* leftist.
We’ll see… like I’ve said a few times, I choose optimism 🤣
Oh and thanks for the compliment! Hope you’ll stick around and read some more!
Well, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results…
One of our daughters lives in SoCal so I hope you’re right in your optimism.
We retired from NorCal to FL just over a year ago to avoid the insane policies and coming fiscal disaster, so I’m pretty confident you’re not.
But we will return to visit because the good parts of being in CA are so damn pleasant.
Yesh it is lovely here, though I doubt that will dissuade me from retiring elsewhere in ten years or so
Reading you is iced tea on a hot day when you’re tired. Really beautiful prose, and makes me look forward to the future.
You illustrate perfectly a principle of social evolution.
Sometimes social systems mutate into things which require more effort and more tap dancing and more guesswork and more more to stay even-keeled. People who don’t go along with the more more sail ahead leaving the rest uncomprehending in their wake.
[The Red Queen Hypothesis]
I moved to LA in 1980, and over the course of that decade saw a fire virtually every year (quite awful ones in La Canada and Malibu) They just didn’t have a million people commenting every 5 seconds. Intense scrutiny seems to activate woke.
Thank you, that’s a really great compliment. Also think you’re right about disasters and social media
“The danger is no longer theoretical…”
Spot on.
None of those people are going anywhere. Bass will complete her term, Gavin Nuisance will be re-elected, The lesbians will remain at the helm. The people of California have willed themselves into this lunacy, they like it, and as long as the people in charge can blame someone or something else, which is the progressive politician’s forte, the electorate will keep on keeping them on.
I think Newsom and Bass are done… but there are thousands just like them waiting to step into the jobs they vacate
Newsom’s latest dance video with him smiling and jiving while talking about land speculators is so weird I think that will end his career.
We can only hope, but sadly it is unlikely to happen.
Gavin can’t be re-elected. Come on…
Not as Governor., no…
The people of LA have precisely the utopia they voted for and desire. Psychopathic lesbians of color having power and six figure incomes is necessary to balance out historical oppression. None of the current distress will last. They will vote again and again for their own destruction (Newsome, Bass, etc.) until they're literally lined up and shot to pay for their ancestor's sins. Even then, they'll believe their murderers are righteous and justified.
California, and America in general, deserve every bit of this. Some for voting for it, and the rest of us for not hanging the mother fuckers responsible.