The $1 Billion Fire

The current California wildfires are taking up all of the news channels, especially the 24 hour feeder channels like CNN and Fox News, both of which are tired to me. The AP has reported that more than $1 billion worth of damage has already occurred because of the blazing fire. The governor has declared it a federal disaster area, and more than a half million people have had to flee their homes, including many many famous people because it includes Malibu.

I'm not sure if the building codes in the southern parts of the state include the kinds of precautions that they do in LA to prevent earthquake damage or in Florida to survive hurricane damage, but the areas of southern Cali that are getting hit are areas that have desert conditions, that's why the forest fires occur, and have been occurring every year for the past millennium. The idea that these are all of a sudden a greater issue seems as absurd to me as saying that people weren't expecting to get hit with tornadoes when they live in Nebraska or Kansas, or to say that they weren't expecting to be flooded when they live on a floodplain.

If people insist on not just building, but re-building in areas that have consistently suffered natural disasters, we should question whether those people should be allowed to be insured when they know from geological history that property in those areas are going to suffer damage from the frequent and consistent natural disasters over time. These are just as much a drain on the health of a private insurance industry as frequent medical malpractice suits.

The learning curve seems to not have reached those people who don't realize the effects of their increased drain on the natural resources of the area have caused. Part of the increasing dryness leading to the severity of these fires may include global warming in general, but it would seem that the more ground water that is used by human beings in the area and taken out of the natural precipitation cycles, the dryer the ground, plants, air and loss of rain. That means all those rich people with huge houses, which have to be heated, and the spa's that use so much water in cleaning, in products and services for their clients, all the hotels and homes with pools, all of those are putting further stress on an environment which was naturally arid to begin with.

We as a culture still seem to operate under the archaic and ridiculous notion that we can somehow control or master nature, which time and again we are proven to be wrong, whether it's because of the undersea earthquake that causes a tsunami that devastates a quarter of the globe, or try to run huge SUV's with luxury everything, on board DVD players and enough room for a football team on fossil fuels which are of course a limited resource. Instead we should be building in areas that have a good supply of available resources to support the people living in the area, find alternative fuels or alternative means of gaining the resources we need in order to curb the already horrifying environmental damage we've done. Why should someone be paid years of money from taxes or private companies that then raise rates, when they refuse to leave the coastal area that has had hurricanes several times a year since anyone could remember?

When we are smart enough to build houses made to survive the local environmental phenomena, and build in areas that can support us with resources, maybe we'll be able to get in control of the constant drain on property insurance, and return to important issues like international geo-political economic policies, whether we can support increased trade with China when they still zealously oppose any sign of Tibetan independence, or refuse to take any significant political action against their abuses of human rights.