[Mick]

What I'm smoking is wood ash right at the moment. Monstrous fires are a wonderful educational tool.

Strange, me too, and not by choice.

One thing that really bothers me is that when you look at an arial photo of the Sierras you see large patches of dead trees. Those trees are doing nobody any good, and if they catch fire, they will do lots of harm. Yet as I understand it, the Sierra Club always opposes removing those trees because they fear the damage logging roads through healthy parts of the forest will cause. It seems that all the stakeholders, the BLM, the loggers, and the Sierra Club should be able to get together on this and come up with a solution that is acceptable to everyone, at worst the "lesser of may evils". Yet it doesn't happen and we get massive fires. Who wins then?

Well, Trump suggested that there was too much fuel that could catch fire.  So even if the Sierra Club et al were inclined to reduce the amount of flammable material throughout California, the fact that Trump mentioned it means that it is an invalid statement.  It's axiomatic.  And I do recall the loud and long intra-state amusement in the local media at Trump the Rube's statement during the last set of uncontrollable CA fires, that maybe, just possibly, if you get rid of all this stuff that catches on fire easily, perhaps California won't have so many uncontrollable fires.

[Mick]

What I'm smoking is wood ash right at the moment. Monstrous fires are a wonderful educational tool.

Strange, me too, and not by choice.

One thing that really bothers me is that when you look at an arial photo of the Sierras you see large patches of dead trees. Those trees are doing nobody any good, and if they catch fire, they will do lots of harm. Yet as I understand it, the Sierra Club always opposes removing those trees because they fear the damage logging roads through healthy parts of the forest will cause. It seems that all the stakeholders, the BLM, the loggers, and the Sierra Club should be able to get together on this and come up with a solution that is acceptable to everyone, at worst the "lesser of may evils". Yet it doesn't happen and we get massive fires. Who wins then?

Well, Trump suggested that there was too much fuel that could catch fire.  So even if the Sierra Club et al were inclined to reduce the amount of flammable material throughout California, the fact that Trump mentioned it means that it is an invalid statement.  It's axiomatic.  And I do recall the loud and long intra-state amusement in the local media at Trump the Rube's statement during the last set of uncontrollable CA fires, that maybe, just possibly, if you get rid of all this stuff that catches on fire easily, perhaps California won't have so many uncontrollable fires.