2020 presidential race hot air won’t put out Washington, Oregon, California wildfires
Over the past several days, the West Coast has been the national center of attention as wildfires have scorched millions of acres of public lands and swept through rural and suburban communities with astounding ferocity and velocity.
Not surprisingly, the mainstage of the 2020 presidential election also briefly shifted to the Pacific time zone. Or more precisely, to California, which routinely serves as a proxy for all things West Coast related.
President Trump visited the Golden State Monday, and he correctly touched on an acute problem: land-management practices that leave forests chronically ready to ignite.
Then he fell down the rabbit hole of global-warming denial. “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch,” Trump quipped at a roundtable with California emergency management officials — an absurd comment befitting a man who’s also said that coronavirus will “just disappear.”
As to whether science corroborates the threat of climate change, he added: “I don’t think science knows, actually.” (To find out how serious he really takes the threat, maybe someone should ask Bob Woodward.)
For his part, Biden brought his own match to the political fireworks show. Speaking in Delaware while Trump’s plane flew through smoky skies toward Sacramento, the Democratic nominee called Trump a “climate arsonist” who, if given four more years, will increase the tempo and magnitude of these “hellish events.”
Never mind that the forest conditions that stoked this week’s megafires were generations in the making. And if Donald Trump has some presidential accountability for the 2020 fires, then so did Barack Obama for the 2015 blazes that burned 1.1 million acres in Washington — a record that may soon be broken.
To be clear, we appreciate the sympathy, prayers and well wishes from around America. While California and Oregon deal with devastation on an even larger scale, Washington needs all the support it can get.
An estimated 600,000 heavily forested acres burned in 72 hours. Flames destroyed homes on both sides of the Cascades, from Malden in Whitman County to Graham in Pierce County. Lives were turned upside down, none more than the family of Uriel Hyland, the Renton toddler who died in a fire near Omak. And smoke particulates have joined COVID-19 in a two-front assault on Washingtonians’ respiratory health.
Nor do we mind that the West Coast wildfires have seized the attention of both presidential candidates, if only temporarily and mostly south of the 40th Parallel. Climate change and public-lands preservation ought to have prominent spots in the party platforms.
But the inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail this week leaves much to be desired.
“Hot air is not something that suppresses a fire, but that’s what we have right now,” Washington Public Lands Commissioner Hillary Franz said Tuesday in a meeting with our Editorial Board, lamenting the politicization of the Western fires.
Franz said all the finger pointing detracts from Washington’s call for federal firefighting resources, some of which are being diverted to California and Oregon. She cited an immediate need for incident command help, air resources and hand crews to support the 2,200 fire personnel working to control 13 large blazes.
What’s lost in the Trump Administration rhetoric is that the federal government is responsible for most public land, including around 6 million acres in Washington, roughly double what the state manages.
No matter who’s president, it’s imperative for the feds to take a leading role in prescribed burns, tree thinning and other proven forestry practices. They must help residents establish resilient property and defensible spaces in the wildland-urban interface. And they absolutely must confront the urgent threat of human-generated carbon emissions.
Presidential campaigns have short attention spans. Trump and Biden will keep busy chasing headlines and focus on the ones that lead to battleground states, none of which are named California, Oregon or Washington.
The West’s best hope is that the next president brings competent and influential people to the White House, leaders who understand the clock is running down.
Meantime, our public lands management crisis will keep simmering when it’s not burning.