Sometimes, no matter what you do, people just get on your nerves. Wouldn’t it be nice to get away from everybody and move to a house in the woods, where you’d have peace and quiet?<\/p>\n
This isn’t a farfetched<\/span> idea. Henry David Thoreau<\/a> did it. Grizzly Adams<\/a> did it. In fact, thousands of people have done it in recent years.<\/p>\n There’s just one downside<\/span>, which you might see if you turn on the news. During this hot and dry summer, 50 wildfires<\/span> burning in 11 states consumed mountainsides, houses and considerable financial resources.<\/p>\n The fire that has been burning next to Yosemite National Park in eastern California has been getting the most headlines<\/span>, after more than 1,000 firefighters<\/span> were sent to combat<\/span> it. However, a fire in Idaho threatened the homes of several celebrities, and the fact that wildfires are happening in Alaska \u2014 not for the first time \u2014 is, by itself, eyebrow-raising<\/span>.<\/p>\n Large wildfires happen every year in the American West, so it may not be such a good idea to live in the woods after all. The firefighters are limited in what they can do \u2014 such as build firebreaks<\/span> \u2014 because houses are in the way and must be protected after their owners are safely evacuated.<\/p>\n In addition to impeding<\/span> the solution, the houses are part of the cause. While some fires are started accidentally in national parks by careless campers or smokers, a lot of the current fires are on private property, which often lacks proper forest management. If things get dry enough, it doesn’t take much to ignite<\/span> brush<\/span> that hasn’t been cleared out.<\/p>\n Wildfires are a natural phenomenon, and even without human settlement, they would still happen. They are just occurring more and more often. Here again, humans are to blame.<\/p>\n The Obama administration has said that climate change caused by human activity is probably contributing to the increasing frequency of forest fires. And after four years of occasional lip service<\/span> to climate change, the government says it’s finally ready to do something.<\/p>\n “The president’s main priority for me was to recognize when I was coming in here that this is going to be a significant challenge and one which the administration was going to begin to tackle<\/span>,” Gina McCarthy told reporters<\/a> in Alaska on Monday. McCarthy became the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency<\/span> (EPA) in July.<\/p>\n So what is the EPA doing? This week it published a series of online videos<\/a> about how individual Americans can fight climate change. The simple advice in them \u2014 to conserve energy, join carpools<\/span> and recycle newspapers \u2014 is the same advice Americans were given during the energy crisis 40 years ago. All this does is illustrate the size of the problem: if people haven’t caught on<\/span> by now, they never will.<\/p>\n As usual, the satirical newspaper The Onion<\/i><\/a> got it right \u2014 all the way back in 2009.<\/p>\n