CaldorFire is larger than the city of Chicago

This is seriously hard to fathom: #CaldorFire is now larger than the city of Chicago. South Lake Tahoe is under mandatory evacuation: Twin Bridges, Echo Lakes, Kirkwood. The Caldor Fire has burned over 177,000 acres and containment dropped to 14%.  Keep battling.  CalFire fighters are WALKING those heavy fire hoses in to Echo Lakes. No other choice.

We are fast losing all our historic lodges and summer camps in the Sierra Nevada range. Apparently Strawberry Lodge is still standing but there are conflicting reports on Camp Sacramento. The outbuildings at Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort are gone, but not the main lodge. 

The radicalization and blame game on various news posts—especially vociferous are those who comment in the PD posts— is astoundingly simpleminded. 

California has never existed under these current man-made conditions. Because of climate change, each fire season is exponentially worse than the previous one. Also, our aquifers have been pumped dry, much productive land has been paved over, and fuel loads are at a record high. It’s not solely about mismanaging the forests or tree huggers or the EPA.

The thing is, that unmanaged, overgrown forests are natural. This idea of “managing” our forests is an anthropocentric notion. And the forest service position will always point to mismanagement and outside blame. There is a quaint notion that Native Americans took care of all the forests of California, and didn’t let them get overgrown—but that’s hyperbole. 

Right now, climate change is the main culprit, a profound lack of precipitation, and even more dire, is the lack of normal seasonal snowpack, which has desiccated the wilderness. Climate change is also responsible for the diseases ravaging our forests—especially the pine borer beetle which has decimated thousands of acres of forest.  Winters are shorter, milder, allowing the insect to flourish. 

It is ironic that so much of California has burned, that wildfire is now taking care of our “mismanagement.” It’s a much more complex picture than that. If you need to lay blame, try PG&E, solely responsible for the majority of our wildfires.