Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News 8/06/2024

Scenery changes; reality of Park fire

With each move to another 2-week’s camping site, we end up with some opposite surroundings. We exchanged the thick, tall forests and dunes of a state park, for an open field with defined camping spaces; our site has the Alsea River and estuary on two sides. We view up to a mile or so of calm or choppy waters bordered by forested hills.

Waldport, Oregon, has some very productive crabbing areas; the little critters seemingly multiply endlessly. “Crabbers” drop their “crab pots” (wire mesh, generally round enclosures with an entrance for bait-seeking crabs), and keep a quota of legal-sized crabs. People can rent the boat, the traps, the bait and, in our RV park, huge cooking pots where a helper will boil your catch.

Over the years we’ve been coming here, we never go without benefiting from someone’s excessive catch. Meticulous extraction yields a meals-worth of delectable crab meat; add a bit of butter and garlic salt (my preference), and you can easily say it was worth it.

We’ve seen people in tents with a generator to run a vacuum sealer, and folks with battery operated ice chests to keep their catch fresh on the way back to Montana (really!). No crab meat goes to waste, whether it’s crab cakes, salads, sandwiches, omelets or burritos.

We dropped in on some friends we made at the RV park a few years ago, to say hi and see their “project” (a modest house needing remodeling to sell); the proceeds were going towards building their new home on a hillside overlooking the bay. Sure enough, when we left, Larry handed us a bag of crabs.

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Observations on the Park fire: First, as we’ve read limited internet-sourced news from the Daily News page, our hopes and prayers have been that no one was hurt. “Structures burned” sadly includes 69 homes (8/02 Daily News).

It has pained me to think of communities where I listed and sold homes, and roads endlessly traversed showing folks what we hoped might be a next, or a dream, home. The beauty of Paynes Creek, Manton and Mineral was not lost on clients, even while I would sometimes direct their gaze in a different direction from some hovel we drove by to get to the home I scheduled to see.

I’ll just put it straight: Climate change had nothing to do with the circumstances or rapid spread of the fire—just local weather and a criminal act by a 2-time felon, sex offender and arsonist who should have still been in jail (my opinion). Dry grasses, terrain unburned for many years, a heat wave (no kidding, it’s summer), and those pesky winds—not unlike the “Diablo” winds in Southern California—are just nature being unforgiving.

I experienced the vicious, unpredictable nature of such fires when a church in Malibu Canyon, in which I was an employee, was being threatened. We staff members and volunteers had the benefit of open spaces around the buildings but I was sent to some rooftops to remove accumulated vegetation debris that could have caught fire and burned into a roof. It was scary but together we prevailed. I wish it had been so for the town of Paradise, God rest and heal those souls. Kudos to the Merry Mantonian’s fortitude and will to deal with the uprooting of her life over the Park fire. Woman, you’re brave.

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Non-apologies to those offended that their “religion”—climate change causes all catastrophes that befall humans—is rejected by this writer. When every disaster is caused by global warming/climate change—nothing is caused by global warming/climate change. Climate changes over thousands of years; we’ve had one basic climate—the inter-glacial period—for about 12,000 years.

Previously, for tens of thousands of years, glaciers covered much of North America. Since the glaciers retreated, there have been eras warmer than now—the Minoan, the Roman, and the Medieval periods—and the “Little Ice Age” out of which we emerged a couple of hundred years ago.

No dire predictions of sea rise or increased catastrophic events have come to pass: neither hurricanes, tornadoes, nor even fires. Contrary to the demonization of fossil fuels, abundant, inexpensive energy has been singularly responsible for extending human life, rising incomes, and plentiful agriculture.

Heat waves aside, “The area where the fire ignited, Butte County, California, and the most-burned area in Tehama County are not in drought conditions according to the U.S. Drought Monitor for July 23 – the day before the Park Fire was ignited by a criminal arsonist” (“Don’t Buy Into the Hysteria—Here’s What Really Caused the Park Fire,” Heartland Institute, Redstate.com).

Finally, NASA satellites have documented a global long-term decline in wildfires. “Forest Ecology and Management” documented that more than 4.4 million acres of California burned annually prior to the arrival of Europeans. Only 90,000 to 1.6 million acres burn in a typical year now. It’s just nature, weather and fate, folks.