(Newswire.net — May 31, 2020) —
The roaring wildfires which have consumed wide swathes of Californian wilderness (and more than a few Californian homes and businesses) have been receiving plenty of news coverage lately. As a direct consequence of the salience of this issue, politicians across the nation are being called upon to do more to prevent further wildfires, with many of the calls centering on President Trump.
More than a handful of liberal pundits and Democratic candidates have maligned the president for “not doing enough.” In reality, however, there’s little President Trump can do to mitigate wildfires which largely stem from severe mismanagement, some of which dates back decades.
Local mismanagement is rampant
It should go without saying that local mismanagement of the Californian wildfires is rampant, but many Americans appear to believe that the real source of the issue is a lack of federal attention. Local environmental regulations and simple forest mismanagement are partly to blame for the severity of the flames which have ravaged the countryside, for instance, yet critics continue to unfairly blame President Trump and other federal authorities for failing to allocation billions of dollars more to address this issue.
The president has taken to Twitter in an effort to explain this, but in the time since the news cycle has moved on and many Americans still wrongfully believe his unwillingness to take action is to blame for the destruction that’s resulted from the wildfires. When the president commented about raking the forest floor, many people intentionally misread his comments and disingenuously suggested he had little to no idea what he was talking about. In reality, however, the president was accurately suggesting that clearing flammable brush and preventing the accumulation of dead wood and other flammable trees not removed by tree removal companies would help prevent future wildfires from breaking out of control.
California has at least 102 million dead trees, for instance, and as of now there are few effective ways to deal with them. It should come as little surprise that the state is dealing with such severe fires when its local leaders have been incapable of addressing the slow but steady buildup of tinder and fuel which has been occurring for generations. Ever since the American logging industry forayed into the Pacific Northwest, forest mismanagement has spiraled out of control, and blaming the president won’t solve that issue at all.
Nevertheless, mainstream media pundits and biased commentators will gleefully point their fingers at the president as he tries his best to mitigate this serious issue. Could there be anything else more representative of the uphill battle this president is facing when trying to do good?
They need a strawman to blame
The politicians running California mostly stem from the Democratic Party, yet few people are willing to blame liberal governance for this issue. They’d much rather erect a strawman in the form of President Trump, as criticizing local governance in California would be tantamount to criticizing the liberal agenda in general. Nevertheless, the American people can’t allow themselves to be misled on this issue and should go to great lengths to support the president in his efforts to better steward the nation’s precious forests and wildlife.
The problem of living in blatantly unhospitable areas must also be addressed. While wealthy Californians would love to live wherever they please and expect President Trump to bail them out when the floodwaters (or in this case, the wildfires) arrive, the truth of the matter is that private citizens can’t foray into blatantly dangerous situations and then cry out when danger strikes. Northern California’s wildfires were drastically exacerbated by the presence of homes, many of which were extraordinarily expensive vacation homes, in wildfire-prone regions. Local officials should pay more attention to restricting where their residents can live before pinning the blame on the federal government and President Trump, whose hands are tied on that specific issue.
Pigs will fly before the liberal media confesses that it’s misrepresented the president on this issue, however, so we can wish for better Californian governance in vain. When pundits eagerly latch onto his comments about reducing the levels of flammable biomass in the region as being “unscientific,” the truth of the matter is that they’re just looking for another opportunity to sling insults his way. No matter what President Trump does, he’ll be accused of taking insufficient action and will never be rewarded for pushing for additional firefighting funds.
You’d think that the president’s championing of law enforcement officials and firefighters would give him some credit on this issue, but then again, the media is never going to give him a victory or admit that they’ve mischaracterized his remarks. The people of California are in desperate need of relief from these awful wildfires, but until they realize that local Democratic mismanagement is to blame more than the president, they’ll never be able to seriously address this crisis.