The Creative Science of Natural Disaster

Trump's tweet today about the California fires "gross mismanagement of the forests. Remedy now, or no more Fed payments!" highlights his ignorance towards and bias against the environment. "Forests" in California are not like the forests of the eastern US, they are designed to burn every few years in a way that maintains the understory from becoming too overgrown and allows renewal and germination of seedlings and other plants. Northern California has what looks like a forest he might be familiar with from pictures and mountain resort areas, however even these are adapted to burn in the hot and dry Mediterranean climate. Coastal southern California mountains are different. They are covered by chaparral and other vegetation adapted to dry climates that is even more fire adapted. As construction has increased in these areas, suppression of the natural fire ecology has as well, so the vegetation that is naturally maintained at a low level becomes a great stockpile of flammable material that becomes more dangerous as man-made inputs of carbon dioxide increases temperatures and drought frequency and duration in the state. When the natural and perhaps more frequent due to climate change Santa Ana wind conditions occur, as they inevitably do, it takes the slightest ignition to create an inferno now. How do we "remedy" this, as the president demands? This can happen only by undoing stupid and purely profit motivated decisions that allow our summers to become hotter, longer, (and drier in California and other places) and by curtailing development in areas which are predictably prone and naturally adapted to burning every few years. As a land developer, our president has no sense of the tremendous responsibility he and those who share his very limited knowledge of how the natural world works have in turning naturally adapted ecosystems into disaster areas. Those who lose lives and property on coastal barrier islands and other coastal areas in developed hurricane prone regions share the same cost to life and property of legislation kowtowing to the profit interests of an ignorant and self concerned privileged few.