How to fight California's wildfires? It's an "all of the above" respond.
There might, indeed, be a need to make it easier to thin dying or dead trees out of thickly forested areas, reducing the fuel for wildfires. But the problem is actually more complicated. Even if dead trees are removed, the dry bushes act like kindling (引火物) when wildfires spread.
Even more to the point, thick forests were not a factor in these recent California's fires. "They're using these fires to talk about forest management that has nothing to do with the landscape in which the fires are occurring." says Chur Miller. W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Climate change is making wildfires worse. The resulting unpredictable weather patterns have created hotter, wetter winters in California, producing a sudden, heavy growth of brushes, grasses and trees. After winter, the state's ongoing drought and record-high summer temperatures draw water out of the plants, making them near-perfect kindling. With the hot and dry Santa Ana winds of fall, fires explode out of control.
Yet these tragedies can't be blamed only on global warming. Wildfires are actually a vital of the state's ecosystem. Lodgepole pines (松树), for example, grow well in fire-prone areas where millions of structures have been built in rural areas of California since the 1940s. When they burn, the cost in lives and treasures skyrockets.
Answering these disasters with a one-dimensional solution helps no one, although it might score short-term political points. The proper response includes placing limits on residential expansion into wildlands; better management and removal of dry brushes and continuously addressing the growing concern of climate changes.
In other words, the solution isn't either. It's all of the above.
