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?
This isn’t a farfetched idea. Henry David Thoreau did it. Grizzly Adams did it. In fact, thousands of people have done it in recent years.
There’s just one downside, which you might see if you turn on the news. During this hot and dry summer, 50 wildfires burning in 11 states consumed mountainsides, houses and considerable financial resources.
The fire that has been burning next to Yosemite National Park in eastern California has been getting the most headlines, after more than 1,000 firefighters were sent to combat it. However, a fire in Idaho threatened the homes of several celebrities, and the fact that wildfires are happening in Alaska — not for the first time — is, by itself, eyebrow-raising.
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 — such as build firebreaks — because houses are in the way and must be protected after their owners are safely evacuated.
In addition to impeding 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 brush that hasn’t been cleared out.
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.
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 to climate change, the government says it’s finally ready to do something.
“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,” Gina McCarthy told reporters in Alaska on Monday. McCarthy became the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in July.
So what is the EPA doing? This week it published a series of online videos about how individual Americans can fight climate change. The simple advice in them — to conserve energy, join carpools and recycle newspapers — 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 by now, they never will.
As usual, the satirical newspaper The Onion got it right — all the way back in 2009.
