The obvious answer in terms of tinder-dry flammable materials, the Santa Ana winds, etc. does not cut deep enough. Ideologically, nature idolatry plays a major role in the ferocity, force, and human impact of the L. A. fires. Their source is in radical environmentalism. Radical environmentalism, as opposed to a wise stewardship of nature, is an anti-humanism. This species of wokery issues in extreme misanthropy. By radical environmentalism I mean positions like that of David Foreman, founder of Earth First. His extremism is displayed in the following quotations:
- “Our environmental problems originate in the hubris of imagining ourselves as the central nervous system or the brain of nature. We’re not the brain, we are a cancer on nature.”
- “Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on earth, social and environmental.”
- “Humanity is the cancer of nature.”
- “I believe that human overpopulation is the fundamental problem on Earth Today” and, “We humans have become a disease, the Humanpox.”
- “The optimum human population of earth is zero.”
This AI-generated list may be verified at AZ Quotes.
Now not every environmentalist on the Left embraces the late Foreman's absurdities. But the mitigated forms of leftist environmentalism are also objectionable. Here is a paradox worth thinking about. A sane environmentalism cannot be anti-human. It must promote human flourishing. But this will require various violent interventions in nature including drilling, mining, farming, dam-building, tunneling, road-building, and the like. These are anti-environmental actions. To refuse to manage nature for the sake of human flourishing by engaging in these anti-environmental actions will lead, as it has in the case of the California conflagration, to a worse environmental outcome.
That is the paradox. A sound environmentalism must be in some measure anti-environmental. But a paradox is not a contradiction, and this is one that must be accepted.
So, even apart from arson, the L. A. inferno is in large part man-made by the likes of Governor Hair-Style and Mayor Dumbass. (Those choice epithets courtesy of Kurt Schlichter.) Wildfires there will always be. Their benighted policies, however, have made things worse than they had to be.
Recent Comments