Reading the Smoke Signals

Canada is our chief trading partner and without fail their leading import in 2023 will be that smokey haze that descended upon a chunk of the nation like a three-day fog thanks to colossal forest fires. It was a perspective event underscoring that despite all our technological advancements, Mother Nature rules.

A number of firsts occurred especially in New York City. The subway sported the city’s best air quality as the smoke overcame the prodigious aroma of marijuana that would choke Cheech and Chong with envy. Flights were grounded at LaGuardia airport and the Yankees struck out cancelling their game with the White Sox. 

The climate change mob will never allow a crisis to go to waste. They just can’t help themselves; it must be in their DNA. Once again, we masked up, cancelled, and submitted. One emergency goes, another arrives born of the left’s favorite religious denomination: environmentalism even though reported evidence points to the fire’s origin as arson. 

The left’s ideology is so focused they cannot see the forest for the trees, let alone all the smoke that clouds their reasoning beyond reproach. The left’s holy book of Climate Revelation, environmentalism is communism by another name with organizations like the Sierra Club supplying the hammer and sickle.

To question whether shoddy government forest mismanagement is to blame is unacceptable. Rather, lay the blame on all those plastic bags, straws, gas stoves and, of course, systemic racism. Smokey the Bear’s contract has gone up in smoke and why not? Smokey roams in flyover country. 

Environmentalists own this and will not tolerate dissent. What they fail to realize is timber, like any crop, needs to be cultivated and managed. Their decades-long fight against timbering and clearing underbrush only creates a steady buildup of combustibles enabling and sustaining ruinous fires that kill, destroy property, and devastate critical infrastructure.

Intervention allows for a more sensible policy affording a natural equilibrium with brush clearing, and controlled burns that will minimize the potential size and severity of any would-be forest fire. California still fails to adopt such sensible practices resulting in a burn, baby, burn mentality that only adds more carbon and pollution into the atmosphere. Adding to their misery are the uncontrollable variables: wind, temperature, and undocumented, illegal dumping.

Plenty of studies underscore how controlled burns actually reduce overall carbon emissions more than a fleet of offshore windmills or legions of electric cars ever could, while avoiding a catastrophe. Moreover, the harvesting of timber would turn a profit rather than acting as the major fuel source for an even bigger fire.

Unlike climate change activism, there is no money to be made for managing something as resourceful as forests. When it comes to firefighting, however; your Uncle Sam has an open checkbook. On the prevention side of the house that is not the case and only adds to the tragedy.

If an overgrown forest is not cleared, nature will not miss the opportunity and has been at it since time immemorial.

Over a century ago, the Forest Service commenced a vigorous management program to combat the forest and wildfires throughout the American northwest. Brush and the trees that needed to be harvested were and the monies earned from this venture were recycled back into forest management. Fast forward a half century when environmentalists pushed for and got policies that resulted in overgrown forests that triggered the catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988.

As Paul Harvey used to say, now you know the rest of the story.

Incredible headway has been made in cleaning up our environment but the bureaucratic class of the unelected dismiss and ignore practical and common-sense approaches to forest management. And no environmental crisis will be countered by wall-to-wall solar panels delivered by a fleet of electric trucks.

Believing humans can control nature is a level of conceit not seen since the days of the Babylonian’s Tower of Babel, which if you can recall ended quite unfavorably.

The new normal is to remain in a constant state of fear.

There will be no end to the nonstop counterfeit choruses of Kumbayas until the demand for authentic changes are heard, acted upon, and realized. 

Until then, expect more of the same.