Some of you may have seen the news about the huge California wildfires. One of the biggest started just outside of Chico, but has been moving up toward Paradise, about 10 miles away. 5000 homes are at risk and much of the city has been evacuated. It is also very close to the junior college. As of this morning, the fire is only 10% contained. The expected shift in the winds will blow the fire up the canyons causing enormous damage. Part of the problem is the inadequate rainfall we have had. Maybe we could make a trade with the midwest.
35 miles an hour winds kept much of the smoke away until this morning. Visibility is now very bad. I do not know how many pack-of-cigarettes-equivalents I am getting from breathing the air.
On Sunday morning, I will be on my NAFTA tour, giving a talk in Mexico City and then attending the History of Economic Society meetings in Toronto.
5 comments:
I'm very sorry to hear about the fire disaster in California.
Here in the North West of Tasmania the weather is getting dryer (year round), colder in winter and hotter in Summer. Forest and tree plantation fires are now far more frequent than they ever used to be. And fire is now used as a tool by the 'forest' industry to clear native forests before replacement with monocultures that are then harvested every 12-20 years. When that happens fire is, again, used to clear the unwanted debri and prepare the area for the next crop. [the Australian Greenhouse Office does not measure the CO2 and nitrous emissions from this industrial exercise, btw. Even when it entails the burning of pristine old-growth forest with many hundreds of years of debri layered on the forest floor itself.]
Here at West Calder the large agribusiness tree farm next door is placed about 30 metres from our house; in an area that was once grazing pasture with large areas of wet Eucalypt and rare temperate rainforest.
The tree farm in extremely close proximity despite state guidelines that recommend a 50 metre clearing and regardless of bush fire risk assessments that say a house within 80 metres of (native) forest has a 60% chance of being burnt to the ground in the event of a fire outbreak.
The risk of fire is constantly on our minds. It is so easy to imagine the trauma that people in California are experiencing today.
Testimony of a friend:
www.treasury.gov.au/documents/1122/PDF/018_Evelyn_DeVito.pdf
Ha! The other comment being from Tasmania, it's apt I comment on Western Australia about 15 years ago. They had a huge fire that just about wiped out an old growth forest. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of the teeth about how long it would take to grow back (estimates ranged up to 25 years) but lo and behold; 5 years later it was booming better than it ever was much to the surprise and delight of the government's ecological departents. For sure, it's a tragedy to those losing property but (given adequate rainfall) nature seems to thrive on being burned back.
Where I am in Wisconsin there have been disasters of a century level, just in time for my family's annual get together. Some did not make it and others were much delayed, interstates cut (still now), and worse, such as the disappearance of Lake Delton, with its 20 resorts and the Tommy Barlett Water Show, knocked out for at least this summer as the lake now does not exist. The dam did not burst, but the high water forced a new passage, draining the lake rather suddenly, "catastrophically" according to the huge headline in the local Madison paper (btw, the long running progressive Capital Times is no more, model for the Onion, cheers from those who approve of the "death spiral" of the print media; this is a real and very deep loss.)
Barkley, from Madison, about to go incommunicado
daro said: "..They had a huge fire that just about wiped out an old growth forest. There was a lot of wailing and gnashing of the teeth about how long it would take to grow back (estimates ranged up to 25 years) but lo and behold; 5 years later it was booming better than it ever was much to the surprise and delight of the government's ecological departents..."
The definition of 'old growth' used by the 'forest' industry in Tasmania is native forest that has never been logged at all. They clearfell this type of forest here. This incredible desecration also occurs in many other nations across the Southern Hemisphere, particularly since the 1970s; escalating even further each decade since. So to speak of '25 years' when we speak of pristine wilderness is nonsense. See: www.wrm.org.uy
What are the CO2 implications of the act of piling up hundreds of years of biomass, spraying it with napalm and setting it alight?
"...some of those native forests, the wet forests of Victoria [Australia], for example, have over 2,000 tonnes of carbon per hectare in the above-ground biomass. Now, these are astronomical numbers that are far larger than, for example, the IPCC was using as its default value of 90 tonnes...
Business leaders discuss climate
ABC Radio National Science Show
7 June 2008
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/
with respect to the now routine use of fire for industrial purposes (profit maximising) in the 'forest' indusry. It's not as straightforward as many people think. Native forests in Australia have adapted to fire on a much less frequent basis. The regular use (with napalm, btw) weakens the living forest (and the wildlife). They simply are not recovering as you declare.
Barkley, so sorry to hear about the disasters at Wisconsin. (...I had imagined the place so green and moist.)
"cheers from those who approve of the "death spiral" of the print media; this is a real and very deep loss."
Barkley, my objection is not against the 'print media' per se. If many local groups created and distributed their own print media using materials that were produced and recycled sustainably (tree-free paper recycling agricultural waste?) I would be delighted.
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