One Californian’s opinion….
Both of the big Los Angeles fires started on federally managed land. Instead of blaming California, the Trump administration should follow through with disaster aid and make a massive fire safety investment in our state's public lands.
timesofsandiego.com
The blaze that turned Altadena to ash burned through the Angeles
National Forest, managed by the U.S. Forest Service, which is part of the United States (you again!) Department of Agriculture.
Let’s be clear: Our firelands are actually your firelands. And you’ve managed your California land so poorly for so long — suppressing fire instead of managing it, letting fuels accumulate, providing insufficient personnel to handle our national parks, forests, wilderness, and recreation areas — that you’ve helped turn California into a tinderbox.
When you and your leadership —
President Trump,
House Speaker Mike Johnson, members of Congress — blame California’s land management for our fires, you aren’t just lying or playing dirty politics. You’re trying to shift blame.
And we can see through you and your bad faith.
Now, if you had any honor — which you don’t, but let’s just say you did for the sake of argument — you wouldn’t just provide us with all the disaster aid we need, right now. You’d announce that you were going to make major new investments in federal land management in California and across the country. After all, you own more than a quarter of all the land in the United States.
Instead, you are shamelessly working to make your land management even worse.
Project 2025, the governing blueprint devised by the leaders of the new administration, outlines deep cuts to the already-diminished number of federal workers, which would exacerbate understaffing and poor management on federal lands. The cuts are now beginning, with a federal hiring and funding freeze preventing the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies from filling positions, including wildland firefighting roles, and putting public lands projects in jeopardy. Project 2025 also calls for boosting the number of gas and mining leases, reducing prescribed burning, and increasing logging — all measures which will make public lands more fire-prone and less resilient.
You propose to do all this, while your administration, run by climate deniers, rolls back green energy infrastructure and investment, and encourages more climate-altering burning of fossil fuels.
You and your current regime better hope hell isn’t hotter than our mega-fires.
