Carl Pope, Brent Blackwelder on the Fires

by: Matt Stoller

Wed Oct 24, 2007 at 17:39

Friends of the Earth's Brent Blackwelder has a statement out, and the Sierra Club's Carl Pope blogged a response to the fires.

Rather than working to protect vulnerable communities like this in Southern California, the Bush administration has spent years protecting timber companies in Northern California.
If there's a message to take home from this tragedy, it's that we are woefully unprepared for the type of catastrophes we expect to see more and more of with global warming. Scientists have found that increasing temperatures in recent years have stretched the wildfire season by nearly two months. And hotter, drier conditions will lead to mega-fires unlike anything we've seen in the past.
If we want to prevent this scenario from happening again and again, we need to focus our energy and money on making communities safer, figuring out how to best respond to large-scale disasters like this, and combating global warming.

Both groups are being extremely careful about the science, refusing to demagogue excessively on climate change as the cause of these fires. Wildfires have long been a thorny issue for environmental groups, because they bring them smack dab into a political thicket of local development patterns and unfavorable Western political winds. Environmentalists are also the favorite target of the right in the media, blamed for the wildfires.

It's good to see activity around climate change, rebuilding and combating wildfires. One wonders if this pattern of disaster followed by rebuilding along more sustainable lines won't be repeated many times.

UPDATE: Gene Karpinski of the League of Conservation Voters also weighed in.

Matt Stoller :: Carl Pope, Brent Blackwelder on the Fires

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Carl Pope, Brent Blackwelder on the Fires | 2 comments

Also about where people choose to live (0.00 / 0)

In CA people want to live in wooded canyons or foothills at the interface of the forests and urban areas, preferably in wooden houses. In the East Coast they want to live on barrier islands. In Florida it is the beach. Other places it is flood plains.

Global warming exacerbates extreme eather and weather-related events and makes many of these most desirable places even more hazardous.

As insurance gets harder and harder to come by, what is the public and private responsibility here?

John McCain--He's not who you think he is.

by: Mimikatz @ Wed Oct 24, 2007 at 17:14:26 PM CDT

There's Also A New Report By NRDC (0.00 / 0)

just a couple of hours old, "Safe at Home: Making the Federal Fire Safety Budget Work for Communities", which obviously was not done in response to the fires, but was none-the-less perfectly timed.

An excerpt from the executive summary:

Homes can best be protected by "firewise" measures that improve the fire resistance of structures and modify the surrounding vegetation in order to limit the spread and intensity of these dangerous fires. However, a new NRDC pilot study of a community in California's Sierra Nevada region found that not a single home there met the minimum standards necessary to maximize the chances of the home surviving a fire. Fortunately, the fixes are relatively easy and affordable. Unfortunately, federal dollars that should be spent on firewise protections are instead diverted to commercial logging and other misguided practices that do not make communities safe, and may even heighten fire risks.
Misdirected federal priorities not only leave woodland homes exposed, but also reinforce a vicious funding circle that makes ever-increasing demands on the federal budget. Failure to get communities firewise means that fewer fires can be allowed to burn, for fear they will escape and reach a town. Increased suppression, however, can increase the intensity and threat of future fires. That, in turn, leads to an ever greater need for suppression funding. Attacking the problem of community safety directly and effectively will help break this cycle and make it possible to reduce suppression, and suppression funding, in the future.
WHO IS MOST AT RISK?
While wildfires occur across the country in forests, grasslands, and chaparral, this paper focuses on forest fires in the American West. Nearly 3.2 million homes in California alone are at very high or extreme risk of wildfire according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.1 The West is undergoing an explosion in development, much of it occurring within or near the borders of public, state, and private forestland-in what is known as the Wildland-Urban Interface, or "WUI." National demographic shifts mean that more and more people are building homes in the WUI.
Some experts estimate that nearly 60 percent of all new home construction between 1990 and 2000 was done in WUI areas.2 With more and more people moving into these at-risk communities, the need is greater than ever for the government to step up forest fire protections.

"Senate passes expanded GI bill despite Bush, McCain opposition"

by: Paul Rosenberg @ Wed Oct 24, 2007 at 19:24:14 PM CDT