By Kira Cluff
The first and most important reaction to California''s wildfires must be one of deep sympathy and grief. At least 17 people are dead and nearly 2,000 homes have fallen to the flames.
Ten thousand firefighters are putting their lives on the line in an attempt to halt the devastation.
Nevertheless, out of the smoke arises two smoldering questions: Who''s to blame, and how do we prevent the repeat of such crushing loss?
Since Oct. 21, at least 10 wind-driven wildfires - many of them arson-caused - have rampaged through Southern California, blackening more than half a million acres of land from the Mexican border to the Ventura-Los Angeles county line.
The death toll is projected to rise, as will the nearly $2 billion of property damage, until the fire is put out.
A large portion of the blame for the fires can be thrown at the arsonists'' feet. But the responsibility for the tremendous wreckage should also fall on California''s shoulders, as the state continues to maintain conflicting land management policies that have put thousands of families in the way of the flames.
California is stuck in a previous era of forest management.
For a long while, ecologists believed that, while man may have no alternative but to share space with the wildlife, he does not have the right to change or even direct the development of said habitat.
Environmentalists of that particular school managed to freeze even the collection of fallen deadwood, as it would affect the forests'' pristine state. However, the environmentalists failed to hold off a rising number of homeowners who stubbornly built their residences closer to forested areas and left the surrounding trees and brush for aesthetic reasons.
They also failed to hold of an increased number of hikers and campers that continue to pursue their recreational interests in and among highly flammable trees and brush.
Much of the nation has joined a slow revolution to allow campers to collect firewood, logging companies to selectively thin forest areas and forest rangers to start and putout controlled fires.
The revolution continues to gain power and speed as each new scientist projects the exponential growth of long-term damage caused by pristine-state management.
Recent drought conditions have exacerbated the already mounting fire danger posed by the unmanaged park reserves and have prevented the local fauna from regenerating itself as many of the plants depend on small wildfires to catalyze seed germination.
The resulting firestorms burn far hotter and longer than they would in a natural state. While Mother Nature has recovered from forest fire damage for millennia, she cannot heal the scars caused by large infernos.
But the latest shift in wildlife management has missed California''s national park reserves.
One in four of the trees in these forests are dead or dying - the piles of brush, fallen limbs and dried loam continue to mount. Every year a part of California''s forest goes up in flames and leaves the states hardliner environmentalists untouched.
A federal bill that could eliminate the undergrowth and dead, diseased trees that is causing these fires to burn at excessive temperatures and out of control has been under discussion in Washington, D.C. for months - and it''s almost dead. The bill has passed the U.S. House, but the old school environmentalists in the Senate won''t let the bill budge.
Obviously California isn''t the only guilty party in the hold up but we would suggest that as this is not the first time that Southern California has gone up in flames, maybe it''s time that the state looked at its forest management policy and began making the appropriate changes.