California Burning – How the Greens Turned the Golden State Brown

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In October 2016, in a coordinated act of terrorism that received fleeting attention from the press, environmentalist activists broke into remote flow stations and turned off the valves on pipelines carrying crude oil from Canada into the United States. Working simultaneously in Washington, Montana, Minnesota, and North Dakota, the eco-terrorists disrupted pipelines that together transport 2.8 million barrels of oil per day, approximately 15 percent of U.S. consumption. The pretext for this action was to protest the alleged “catastrophe” of global warming.

These are the foot soldiers of environmental extremism. These are the minions whose militancy receives nods and winks from opportunistic politicians and “green” investors who make climate alarmism the currency of their political and commercial success.

More recently, and far more tragic, are the latest round of California wildfires that have consumed nearly a quarter million acres, killed at least 87 people, and caused damages estimated in excess of $10 billion.

Opinions vary regarding how much of this disaster could have been avoided, but nobody disputes that more could have been done. Everyone agrees, for example, that overall, aggressive fire suppression has been a mistake. Most everyone agrees that good prevention measures include forest thinning (especially around power lines), selective logging, controlled burns, and power line upgrades. And everyone agrees that residents in fire prone areas need to create defensible space and fire-harden their homes.

Opinions also vary as to whether or not environmentalists stood in the way of these prevention measures. In a blistering critique published earlier this week on the California-focused Flash Report, investigative journalist Katy Grimes cataloged the negligence resulting from environmentalist overreach.

U.S. Representative Tom McClintock, whose Northern California district includes the Yosemite Valley and the Tahoe National Forest, told Grimes that the U.S. Forest Service 40 years ago departed from “well-established and time-tested forest management practices.”

“We replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect,” McClintock explained. “Ponderous, byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to ‘save the environment.’ The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts and our federal agencies ever since.”

All of this lends credence to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s fresh allegations of forest mismanagement. But what really matters is what happens next.

Institutionalized Environmental Extremism

California’s 2018 wildfires have been unusually severe, but they were not historic firsts. This year’s unprecedented level of destruction and deaths are the result of home building in fire prone areas, and not because of wildfires of unprecedented scope. And while the four-year drought that ended in 2016 left a legacy of dead trees and brush, it was forest mismanagement that left those forests overly vulnerable to droughts in the first place.

Based on these facts, smart policy responses would be first to reform forest management regulations to expedite public and privately funded projects to reduce the severity of future wildfires, and second, to streamline the permit process to allow the quick reconstruction of new, fire-hardened homes.

But neither outcome is likely, and the reason should come as no surprise—we are asked to believe that it’s not observable failures in policy and leadership that caused all this destruction and death, it’s “man-made climate change.”

Governor Jerry Brown is a convenient boogeyman for climate realists, since his climate alarmism is as unrelenting as it is hyperbolic. But Brown is just one of the stars in an out-of-control environmental movement that is institutionalized in California’s legislature, courts, mass media, schools, and corporations.

Fighting climate change is the imperative, beyond debate, that justified the Golden State passing laws and regulations such as California Environmental Quality Act, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, and numerous others at the state and local level. They make it nearly impossible to build affordable homes, develop energy, or construct reservoirs, aqueducts, desalination plants, nuclear power plants, pipelines, freeways, or any other essential infrastructure that requires so much as a scratch in the ground.

Expect tepid progress on new preventive measures, in a state so mired in regulations and litigation that for every dollar spent paying heavy equipment operators and loggers to do real work, twice that much or more will go to pay consultants, attorneys, and public bureaucrats. Expect “climate change” to be used as a pretext for more “smart growth,” which translates into “stack and pack,” whereby people will be herded out of rural areas through punishing financial disincentives and forced into densely populated urban areas, where they can join the scores of thousands of refugees that California is welcoming from all over the world.

Ruling Class Hypocrisy

Never forget, according to the conventional wisdom as prescribed by California’s elites, if you don’t like it, you are a climate change “denier,” a “xenophobe,” and a “racist.”

California’s elites enjoy their gated communities, while the migrants who cut their grass and clean their floors go home to subsidized accessory dwelling units in the backyards of the so-called middle class whose taxes pay for it all. They are hypocrites.

But it is these elites who are the real deniers.

They pretend that natural disasters are “man-made,” so they can drive up the cost of living and reap the profits when the companies they invest in sell fewer products and services for more money in a rationed, anti-competitive environment.

They pretend this is sustainable; that wind farms and solar batteries can supply adequate power to teeming masses crammed into power-sipping, “smart growth” high rises. But they’re tragically wrong.

Here the militant environmentalists offer a reality check. Cutting through their predictable, authoritarian, psychotically intolerant rants that incorporate every leftist shibboleth imaginable, the “Deep Green Resistance” website offers a remarkably lucid and fact-based debunking of “green technology and renewable energy.” Their solution, is to “create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary.”

These deep green militants want to “destroy industrial civilization.” At their core, they are misanthropic nihilists—but at least they’re honest. By contrast, California’s stylish elites are driving humanity in slow motion towards this same dire future, cloaked in denial, veiled coercion, and utopian fantasies.

This is the issue that underlies the California wildfires, what causes them and what to do about them. What is a “sustainable” civilization? One that embraces human settlements, has faith in human ingenuity, and aspires to make all humans prosperous enough to care about the environment, everywhere? Or one that demands Draconian limits on human settlement, with no expectation that innovation can provide solutions we can’t currently imagine, and condemns humans to police-state rationing of everything we produce and consume?

That is the stark choice that underlies the current consensus of California’s elites, backed up by dangerous and growing cadres of fanatical militants.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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Agroforestry is Regreening the Sahel

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The African Sahel is the arid belt of land that forms a buffer between the Sahara desert to the north and the more temperate savannahs to the south. From the coast of Mauritania and Senegal to the west, the Sahel stretches over 3,500 miles to Sudan and Eritrea’s Red Sea coast to the east. Over 500 miles wide, this vast area forms the biggest front line on earth in the relentless battle against desertification.

For decades there has been nothing but bad news. Population increase led to overgrazing and unsustainable harvests of fuelwood. Equally if not more harmful to the Sahel ecosystems were the imposition of western methods of agriculture and forestry, techniques that began under colonial administrations and have been perpetuated over the past 50 years by well-intentioned aid agencies. A fascinating article by Burkhard Bilger in the December 19th issue of The New Yorker, entitled “The Great Oasis (subscription required),” documents a new and hopeful trend in the Sahel that may reverse over a century of environmental decline.

Back in the 19th century and through the first half of the 20th century, French colonial administrators in the Sahel attempted to develop commercial agriculture according to Western techniques that worked well in temperate zones, where sunlight needed to be maximized, but were disastrous in the arid Sahel, where crops responded better if they were beneath a protective tree canopy that attenuated the sunlight. The areas designated as forest were considered state property and were protected, but because farmers were prohibited from allowing trees to grow on in their agricultural fields, they would poach the trees in the protected woodlands because it was their only source of firewood. The new independent governments, backed by NGOs, continued these policies. The practical result was there was no incentive for people to sustainably nurture the forest reserves because they had no legal right to the trees, and since it was a crime to grow trees on farmland, the farmers had no choice but to steal the trees in the forest. And because the trees were necessary to preserve topsoil and filter the sunlight to crops, absent these trees the topsoil blew away and the crops failed.

In “The Great Oasis,” Bilger recounts the experiences of an Australian missionary, Tony Rinaudo, who recognized the destructive impact that well-intentioned aid efforts were having on the Sahel when he was working in northern Niger in the mid 1980’s. Here is Rinaudo’s insight:

“What if things were backward? Every year, the villagers cleared the brush to make room for crops, and planted trees around them. And every year the plantings failed and the brush resprouted from its old rootstocks. What if they just let it grow? What if they cut back only a portion of the native trees, let the rest mature, and planted crops between them?”

For over 25 years this reviving of the traditional practice of farming beneath a canopy of valuable trees that protect the crops by filtering the sunlight, preserving the topsoil from wind, and absorbing runoff has slowly caught on. So much so that just in Niger, over 12 million acres (nearly 20,000 square miles) have been reclaimed.

The photo below shows a satellite image of the Seno Plains in Central Niger, about 400 miles east northeast of the capital Bamako. In this 600 square mile image, the reforested areas can be seen as small nodes of green surrounding the towns. If you zoom closer, using Google Maps, you can see stands of trees spreading literally everywhere on this plain. Twenty five years ago the entire area was denuded of vegetation. The darker area in the upper left of the image is the Dogon Plateau, which is separated from the plains by the cliffs of Bandiagara. Standing on those cliffs today, Bilger writes:

“I could see the thatched roofs of a village tucked among some mango trees below. Beyond them, to the south and west, airy groves of winter thorn and acacia stretched to the horizon. The wind whipped across the plains so steady and sharp that it made my eyes water. But there was no sand in it.”


Another fascinating insight to emerge from Bilger’s report is the hopeful reality that more people did not equate to more environmental stress. Merging traditional agroforestry with access to modern agricultural techniques, the land reclaimed in Niger – and also in Mali and Burkina Faso – supports a far larger population than could have survived there in the past. As Dennis Garrity of the World Agroforestry Centre told Bilger, “It’s counterintuitive, but it’s true; the more people, the more trees.”

Agroforestry has proven potential to reclaim arid regions everywhere. When editing EcoWorld, I reported on successful examples of agroforestry reversing deforestation in India’s Rishi Valley (India’s Rishi Valley Renewal,  1996), El Salvador (Reforesting Central America with TWP, 2000), and Costa Rica (Profitable Reforesting, 2005).  Back in the 1990’s I enthusiastically wrote about agroforestry as a financially sustainable way to restore deforested regions, with posts such as “What About Sustainable Nurseries?” and “Autarky After the Roar“. Indeed, the stated mission of EcoWorld for the 14 years that I was editor was “To double the timber mass of the planet within 50 years” (by 2045).

Not only is agroforestry a financially sustainable way to reverse deforestation – with all that implies: enthusiastic local adoption, profitability, ability to increase the land’s carrying capacity, improved and sustainable agricultural output – but reversing deforestation may help increase rainfall in arid regions. In the post “Hydraulic Redistribution” references are provided to theories that mingle the disciplines of forestry and climatology. By extending the canopy of trees that transpirate water vapor, cloud formation is stimulated. When these clouds condense into rain, low pressure is created in the inland areas above these forests which pulls in maritime winds, bringing more clouds. It would be interesting to explore and hopefully uncover additional research in this area.

Meanwhile, agroforestry is a proven way to improve the quality of life for people living in the Sahel, at the same time as it restores the water tables, moderates the climate, and slowly revitalizes the Sahel as the vast buffer against the encroaching Sahara.