Summary
Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) threatened to withhold federal disaster relief from California during ongoing Los Angeles wildfires that have killed at least 16 people and destroyed over 12,000 structures.
Davidson criticized California’s forest management policies, echoing misleading right-wing claims that poor management, not climate change, is to blame.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom refuted these claims, noting that the state’s forest management budget has increased tenfold since 2019.
Davidson’s comments follow a pattern of GOP blaming state policies for disasters, similar to rhetoric from Trump.
Reminder that California pays the highest federal taxes in the country and has never once complained about the cost of rebuilding in Florida despite annual devastating hurricanes or rebuilding in “tornado alley” despite frequent devastating tornadoes. People keep rebuilding their houses there and we never say shit.
Californians did not build their houses in wildfire country, they built them in areas that were previously safe and have now become tinderboxes thanks to climate change. It’s not our fault that we are stuck holding the bag, but at least have the common courtesy of extending us the exact same aid money we send out to other high risk areas.
Great post but I have one quibble.
In fact we did. Most of the state is comprised of fire-adapted ecosystems. I think it would be more correct to say that we built in wildfire country when the impacts of wildfire were manageable.
I only mention this because I believe it’s important to accept that fire is good and a part of these ecosystems that we need to embrace if we are going to live in them. It’s not that climate change has “introduced” fire it’s that it, the scale of human development, and over a century of misguided fire management has made it so dramatically impactful.
Okay, that’s a very fair point. Perhaps we are not giving enough acknowledgement to the fact that we are living in a place that historically has been extremely fire-prone and that if we had bothered to ask the native tribes living here when we arrived, they probably would have warned us that settling in this area with buildings meant to last is probably not the best idea.
Absolutely. They could also have given us a lot of important information on how to handle it all through cultural burning. Instead we made their practices illegal and jailed/killed native americans for doing what they’ve done for millennia in part to “protect” timber “resources” but mainly to drive them off their land.
An interesting tangent here is that the ecosystems here are co-adapted to these cultural practices. IOW, native burning of areas has co-existed with and altered the landscape over thousands of years. The notion that this land was “untrammeled by man” is racist fiction.
Yosemite Valley is a good example of this and you can even compare what it looked like in photos from the 19th century. It was predominantly wide-open meadow with widely spaced very large trees that were extremely resistant to fire. We suppressed fire and now it’s incredibly susceptible to it. Duh.
The good news is that we are finally waking up to the importance of this historical native knowledge and their practices.
Here’s an interesting recent article on this: https://www.savetheredwoods.org/redwoods-magazine/autumn-winter-2024/banned-for-100-years-cultural-burns-could-save-sequoias/
And this one talks about Yosemite and nearby areas in particular: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/how-indigenous-practice-good-fire-can-help-our-forests-thrive