Yes. Everything is connected. Just as Chief Seattle
said, over a century ago, "whatever you do to the Web
of life, you do to yourself." Here is another outrage,
compounded of course by another moral failure from the
"US mainstream news media." With all their "coverage"
of the fire story, nothing about this...
Richard Reeves: "...last April 16, the governor wrote a letter to President Bush requesting $430 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to clear the deadwood and attack the beetles. The answer -- No! -- came back from FEMA in Washington on Friday, Oct. 24, about when the fires began. The feds said they were already spending $40 million to attack bark beetles in the national forests of California. FEMA added, in its own words, the thought that its job is to help clean up after emergencies, not try to prevent them. "
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/uclicktext/20031102/cm_ucrr/thefiresofoctober
THE FIRES OF OCTOBER
Sat Nov 1, 7:59 PM ET Add Op/Ed - Richard Reeves to
My Yahoo!
By Richard Reeves
LOS ANGELES -- Well, they are finally saying some good
things about Gray Davis (news - web sites). He is
having a "Giuliani moment" commanding firefighters and
comforting the afflicted as the largest wildfires in
recorded history sweep through the mountains, hills
and canyons of Southern California. More than a
million acres were burned out and thousands of homes
were gone by this weekend. At least 20 people have
been killed.
Gov. Davis saw it coming. Hell, everybody in
California knew it was coming. The southern part of
the state is essentially a continuing fight against
nature. God has been trying to take all this back for
a very long time. This time higher forces had three
evil allies: four years of drought; a bark-beetle
infestation that had already turned more than 400,000
acres of pine forest into big kindling; and the greed
(and hope) that makes men think they can build homes
where angels fear to tread, on canyon rims, beaches
and flood plains.
The first European who passed through, Father Juan
Crespi, a Spanish explorer-priest, wrote in 1769 of
the beauty of the place he called "Los Angeles," but
said there was evidence everywhere of past drought and
fire, flood and earthquake (news - web sites).
Southern California then was home to tens of thousands
of Indians, the number nature could support in what
was (and would be again if the sprinklers were turned
off) almost a desert. Since then we have changed the
number to tens of millions, importing water, food and
conditioned air to make the place a very crowded
paradise.
Davis, the recalled governor who will turn his title
over to Arnold Schwarzenegger (news - web sites) in a
few days, is now the man energetically rallying the
troops trying to hold back nature for another little
while. He has reminded his few friends that New York's
Rudy Giuliani was a disliked lame-duck mayor when he
became the rallying point on Sept. 11, 2001. There has
to be a dark angel (news - Y! TV) in Davis that wakes
up in the middle of the night and says, "If only ...
if only this had happened a month ago."
It might have. Last March 7, Davis declared a state of
emergency in California because of the dry weather and
trees and brush piled up in the woods and hillsides
near homes and towns. Years ago, a Los Angeles fire
chief named Ernie Hanson calculated that 100 acres of
"brush" -- gnarled little trees and dry little bushes
-- piled 5 feet high had more latent explosive power
than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Then, last April 16, the governor wrote a letter to
President Bush requesting $430 million from the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to clear
the deadwood and attack the beetles. The answer -- No!
-- came back from FEMA in Washington on Friday, Oct.
24, about when the fires began. The feds said they
were already spending $40 million to attack bark
beetles in the national forests of California. FEMA
added, in its own words, the thought that its job is
to help clean up after emergencies, not try to prevent
them.
(Bark beetles, by the way are dark, brown or black,
quarter-inch-long uglies that lay eggs in tunnels they
bore between the live wood and bark of pine trees.
Their issue then survives by eating the bark until
they reach daylight and fly away to look for their own
trees. Healthy trees can kill the buggers by
suffocating them in pitch. But many California trees
are not healthy because fires have been suppressed and
small trees and brush have not been cleared. It is
fire that clears and provides the room and fertilizer
for healthy trees. Along come men, who build houses
and towns and put out small fires -- then, eventually,
there is a big fire. Welcome to sunny California.)
Truth be told, if Davis had had his way and Washington
had sent the money, it could only have postponed the
fire storms raging in four counties here. The burned
area is larger than Rhode Island and is moving in on
Delaware. And no matter how much or how little burns,
the fires of October will be followed by floods and
landslides this winter and spring. Without trees and
root systems in place, the snow melt and winter rains
from the mountains will create a slippery slope to the
sea, passing over more towns and homes on the way.
Then life will go on until the next one. Californians
will rebuild with houses and towns just a little
bigger. That is how the home of thousands of Indians
became the homes of 30 million Americans. The White
House will pour hundreds of millions, billions
perhaps, into California. The president and the new
Republican governor will tour the devastated areas
amid signs of new growth, and Arnold will say that his
friend George Bush saved California. This has nothing
to do, of course, with the fact that it is virtually
impossible for a Democrat to win the presidency
without carrying California, a strongly Democratic
state in recent national elections.
Where, oh where, will the federal government get all
that new money? Oh, did I forget to mention that the
feds added $500 million last Thursday to the $87
billion appropriation for Iraq (news - web sites) and
Afghanistan (news - web sites)? Now, California can be
rebuilt, too. Until next time.