Ignition

So yesterday I went to Malibu and I passed the areas that were burnt during the fire a few months ago. As I passed these not only did I see the skeletons of trees but I found new homes being built in the same areas. The first thing that came to my mind was "how could these people continue building on these lands knowing what happened? Are they really idiots?" Moreover this reminded me of a comment made by a person in the Los Angeles area on the radio station KIIS FM when the Malibu fires were going on. He asked a very provocative question: why should I be paying with my hard earned cash to put out these fires for these rich people who chose to be in a place away from the rest of the people? If they decided to be there why can't they just pay for it themselves. It is a risk they decided to take on their own. At first I found this argument very absurd. I couldn't believe how seeming selfish it was. But now thinking about it, its quite true.
To explain a little bit about why I'm writing this is because of this article I read on National Geographic the July issue. The title is "Why is the West burning". (The link to this article is posted at the bottom of this entry.) Also, since I live in California, the wildfires are extremely close to me. I remember when the fries were going on about a few months ago and I thought to myself how Southern California was practically in flames. Now, the North is in flames. You have a huge fire in Goleta in Santa Barbara Country and the worst one in Big Sur which is at the end of Los Padres National Forest. A lot of people don't know how insanely gorgeous Big Sur is. I have a few pictures that I pulled up from Google Images but I don't think you can actually see it unless you have been there. That is why it is such a shame to see it all go up in flames. A few days ago our California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger went to Goleta to see the damage and he proposed a new bill to help aid the fire. He calls for a $10 to $12 increase in insurance to pay for better firefighting equipment. I believe this is a good idea however it does not address the root of the problem. The fact is that we should stop building in fire prone areas. The number one cause of fires especially in the West is homes. I just find it idiotic that we keep building in these areas where we know that the ground just wants to go up in flames. At least in California which is all Chaparral, the vegetation needs to go up in flame once in a while to live. If we do decided to build in these areas then we should invest a little bit more money and buy fire proof materials for our homes. The cheapest one is adobe. This helps to minimize the amount of damage and possibly help combat these wildfires. Its not a bad idea at all.

The other idea I found interesting was that we should allow the fire to just keep going. The land needs to ignite. Many of our native trees need to have fire to reproduce because the seeds are covered in wax that has to be melted by fire to come out. Our stance on fire since Pinchot was the US Forestry department head was to combat fires at all costs but because of this we destabilized the environment. We were never supposed to have so many trees in such a small place. So the best way is to have controlled fires and burn off the excess shrubs that do cause massive fires.
But anyways, I don't want to write more about it because I would prefer if you would read the article on National Geographic. I highly recommend it.



http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/07/fire-season/shea-text

The American Idea by Theodore H.White

In the midst of all these problems we face in our nation, I found it fit to remind us how we started. The beauty of America is all of the freedoms that we enjoy. The fact that I can even sit down right now and write about the politics and the history of the United States is what makes us so special. Today, we tend to take for granted all of those rights and we disregard them as unalienable rights but when absolutely think about it, we are incredibly lucky. We don't realize the world is not as just as we think it is. We don't realize that the a good percent of the world is burdened by the absence of these rights. In fact, just today we find out how the elections in Zimbabwe were "rigged".
For this reason, I decided to post the last unfinished article of Theodore White. He was one of the most accomplished writers in his generation. He was a journalist, essayist and historian. His gift for storytelling was shown when he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Making of the President, 1960. This article named "The American Idea" as put by the American Reader, was written to commemorate the two-hundred-tenth birthday of the United States.

"The idea was there at the very beginning, well before Thomas Jefferson put it into words--and the idea rang the call.
Jefferson himself could not have imagined the reach of his call across the world in time ot come when he wrote:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness"
But over the next two centuries the call would reach the potato patches of Ireland, the ghettoes of Europe, the paddyfields of China, stirring farmers to leave their lands and townsmen their trades and thus unsettling all traditional civilizations.
It is the call from Thomas Jefferson, embodied in the great statue that looks down the Narrows of New York Harbor, and in the immigrants who answered the call, that we now celebrate.
Some of the first European Americans had come to the new continent to worship God in their own way, others to seek their fortunes. But over a century-and-a-half, the new world changed those Europeans, above all the Englishmen who had come to North America. Neither King nor Court nor church could stretch over the ocean to the wild continent. To survive, the first emigrants had to learn how to govern themselves. But the freedom of the wilderness whetted their appetites for more freedoms. By the time Jefferson drafted his call, men were in the field fighting for those new-learned freedoms, killing and being killed by English soldiers, the best-trained troops in the world, supplied by the world's greatest navy. Only something worth dying for could unite American volunteers and keep them in the field--a stated cause, a flag, a nation they could call their own.
When, on the Fourth of July, 1776, the colonial leaders who had been meeting as a Continental Congress in Philadelphia voted to approve Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, it was not puffed-up rhetoric for them to pledge to each other "our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor." Unless their new "United States of America" won the war, the Congressmen would be judged traitors as relentlessly as would the irregulars-under-arms in the field. And all knew what English law allowed in the case of a traitor. The victim could be partly strangled; drawn, or disemboweled, while still alive, his entrails then burned and his body quartered.
The new Americans were tough men fighting for a very tough idea. How they won their battles is a story for the schoolbooks, studied by scholars, wrapped in myths by historians and poets.
But what is most important is the story of the idea that made them into a nation, the idea that had an explosive power undreamed of in 1776.
All other nations had come into being among people whose families had lived for time out of mind on the same land where they were born. Englishmen are English, Frenchmen are French. Chinese are Chinese, while their governments come and go; their national states can be torn apart and remade without losing their nationhood. But Americans are a nation born of an idea; not the place, but the idea, created the United States Government."

-Excerpts from an unfinished article here entitled "The American Idea" by Theodore H. White. Copyright 1986 by the New York Times