As California Burns, Trump and Zinke Use Catastrophe to Benefit Industry

As California Burns, Trump and Zinke Use Catastrophe to Benefit Industry

The Trump administration and House Republicans are using the fires across the West as an excuse to chip away at bedrock environmental laws.




A car passes through flames on Highway 299 as the Carr Fire burns through Shasta, Calif. U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has falsely suggested that more logging would help prevent the devastating fires raging across the West.

A car passes through flames as the Carr Fire burns in Shasta, California. U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has falsely suggested that more logging would help prevent the devastating fires raging across the West.

Noah Berger / AP

U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke wrote recently that “radical environmentalists would rather see forest and communities burn than see a logger in the woods.” In Zinke’s zero-sum equation, the devastating wildfires in California would stop if those radical environmentalists would let the timber industry cut down more trees.

The truth is that Zinke and House Republicans are using the destruction across the West as an excuse to chip away at bedrock environmental laws created to ensure that science drives decisions about the future of our nation’s forests.

Everyone agrees that we must protect homes and lives from the catastrophic effects of fires, but Zinke’s argument is dangerously oversimplified, cynically disingenuous and downright false. And that’s not the worst part. He also proclaims that climate change has “nothing to do” with these wildfires, even as scientists and firefighting officials unanimously assert that climate change is creating the conditions that allow destructive wildfires to thrive. These types of fires will only grow in intensity and frequency if we do nothing to address climate change.

With increasingly warmer weather, forests are becoming drier and prone to burning throughout the year. Over the past 30 years, climate change has doubled the area affected by forest fires in the western U.S., according to a study that appeared in the 2016 Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences.

This year alone, there were 63 large, uncontained fires in the U.S. in the first week of August, according to the Washington Post.

As Daniel Berlant, assistant deputy director Cal Fire, the state’s fire agency, told the New York Times: “Let’s be clear. It’s our changing climate that is leading to more severe and destructive fires.” 

Climate change isn’t the only culprit. Historic firefighting practices, increased grazing and commercial logging also have created the conditions for increasingly devastating wildfires. In many Western forests, naturally occurring wildfires every five, 10 or 20 years historically helped to clear debris on the forest floor and make room for stronger, healthier growth. However, in the late 19th century, government agencies adopted a policy of complete fire suppression – and the fuel that is feeding today’s fires has been building up for a century.

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke

Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke arrives at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing.
Jacquelyn Martin / AP

Livestock grazing on public lands has also reduced the frequency of the low-intensity fires that helped keep the forest strong 150 years ago. Without grasses and ground vegetation left to fuel such fires, forests now burn only when there is a significant buildup of woody debris, which leads to more severe fires.

At the same time, commercial logging operations have removed the largest and most fire-resistant trees. These trees are replaced by dense groups of younger trees that act as fire ladders, providing fuel for fire to burn intensely and travel high up into the forest canopy.

Established wildfire risk reduction strategies that include encouraging “defensible space” and prescribed burning and thinning that selectively removes smaller trees and brush have helped to counter these impacts–especially in forested areas near communities, which are known as the Wildland-Urban Interface. One recent study in Colorado’s San Juan National Forest showed that selective thinning and burning helps to restore the forest back to its natural state and reduce the severity of fires. However, these wildfire risk reduction strategies rely on public funds, which are in short supply these days.

Zinke’s preferred strategy is not about being selective. Instead, it involves bowing to special interests and clearcutting large swaths of trees, following the false logic that aggressively eliminating trees means fewer trees to burn. Clearcutting also happens to be the way that the timber industry turns a profit.

Zinke has been espousing this argument as Congress negotiates the 2018 Farm Bill, which funds our nation’s food security, nutrition and conservation programs. The House version of this bill includes provisions that would exempt large-scale logging in our national forests from environmental review and public input while reducing Endangered Species Act consultation requirements.

If these proposals were to make it into the final bill, they would change the way that our national forests are currently managed, pushing aside science and public input to push forward timber industry interests above the interests of communities, recreation and ecology. Provisions in the House bill that aim to fast-track commercial logging and road building could increase fire risk and create additional dangers for surrounding communities, such as erosion and mudslides.

Zinke’s false assertion that large-scale logging is our best fire prevention strategy hasn’t been the only attempt by the Trump administration to use the deadly California wildfires to misinform the American public. Last week, President Trump tweeted incorrectly that firefighters faced a shortage of water in what appeared to be an effort to insert himself into debates over how best to allocate the state’s water.

All of this is nothing new for Zinke and the Trump administration, which continues to wage an all-out campaign to subvert science and deny the existence of climate change. For the tens of thousands of people forced to evacuate their homes, and the many firefighters who are risking their lives, climate change is very real. They are counting on us to fight for wildfire risk reduction strategies that address the real reasons these fires are burning – before it’s too late. 

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Oleg Sentsov se meurt, Poutine reste de glace

Le monde s’est mobilisé pour obtenir la libération d’Oleg Sentsov. Chacun a espéré un geste, sinon de justice, mais de miséricorde de la part de Poutine. Bien au contraire, l’homme du KGB est resté insensible à toutes les supplications les plus diverses. Plus de cent personnalités du monde de la culture et des arts ont imploré la grâce de leur collègue Oleg Sentsov. Parmi les signataires, on retrouve le metteur en scène Jean-Luc Godard, le metteur en scène britannique Ken Loach, le Canadien Devid Kronenberg et la ministre de la Culture française Françoise Nissen. On a cru naïvement que la grande fête fraternelle du Mondial de football en Russie aurait été couronnée par une amnistie en faveur des prisonniers politiques. On s’est trompé. La libération de Oleg Sentsov aurait pu justifier les familiarités que s’est permises Emmanuel Macron avec Poutine en le tutoyant publiquement. Même pas ! Le Kremlin est resté de marbre. On n’attendrit pas aussi facilement les bourreaux.

Le 14 août, la journaliste Zoïa Svetova a été autorisée à rencontrer Oleg Sentsov dans la prison « Ours blanc » au nord de la Sibérie. L’entretien a duré deux heures. Elle était accompagnée de trois membres du personnel pénitencier, dont un colonel. La journaliste a trouvé Oleg Sentsov très affaibli. On savait par son avocat qu’il ne se levait plus depuis le 8 août.

Le 9 août, Oleg Senstov est entré dans la dernière phase qu’endure un gréviste de la faim. Au début, on s’habitue à la faim. Ensuite, des transformations apparaissent dans le corps. Troisième étape, le gréviste vit avec ces changements. Lors de la quatrième étape, les organes commencent à refuser de fonctionner. Il s’agit de problèmes de cœur, d’anémie causée par la baisse du taux d’hémoglobine et d’une faiblesse générale. Son avocat a dit qu’on lui perfuse un mélange nutritif qu’il accepte, mais cela est insuffisant pour le sauver.

Oleg Sentsov a perdu 17 kg. Les organes intérieurs peuvent refuser de fonctionner à tout moment.  

Poutine devrait se rappeler le destin du dissident d’Anatoly Martchenko et le sort du régime soviétique qui le maintenait au Goulag. Le 4 août 1986, Martchenko avait entamé une grève de la faim pour exiger la libération de tous les prisonniers politiques en URSS. Il a jeûné 117 jours et est mort d’épuisement quelques jours après sa libération. L’Union soviétique a ensuite disparu très rapidement. La condamnation de Oleg Sentov est une violation du droit et de la justice aussi criarde que l’ont été celles des dissidents soviétiques, tels Alexandre Soljenitsyne et bien d’autres.

La mansuétude grandit ceux qui la prodiguent. La cruauté condamne les bourreaux et leur régime. Poutine a déclaré que la chute de l’Union soviétique a été une catastrophe. C’est son Goulag qui a condamné l’URSS. Puisse-t-il tirer, les leçons de son passé pour ne pas avoir à le revivre !

Émue par le martyre d’Oleg Sentov, Marie-Claude Chevalier a écrit une lettre à Poutine. Je la joins. avec sa permission.

Le Club est l’espace de libre expression des abonnés de Mediapart. Ses contenus n’engagent pas la rédaction.

“I’ve lived here my whole life.  I’m ready to leave.  I just…

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“I’ve lived here my whole life.  I’m ready to leave.  I just graduated college and I’d love to experience a new city.  But I’m stuck.  My dad is trying to become a citizen, and I need to stay in the city because I’m the one petitioning on his behalf.  We’ve been waiting for five years already.  We’ve spent so much money.  But it’s the least I can do for him.  I’ve seen where he lived in Mexico: tiny houses, dirt floors, no shoes.  He was the youngest of twelve.  His family couldn’t afford to educate him.  So he came here when he was seventeen and worked as a migrant worker in California.  He slept in train cars and ate food out of the trash.  Even now he works fourteen hours a day.  He comes home, we talk a bit, and he goes to sleep.  It’s been that way my entire life.  He’s turning fifty soon and he’d love to start his own business.  So I hope he gets his citizenship.  It’s a little dangerous because he’s on the radar now.  They have his fingerprints.  But he’s got a son that fought in Afghanistan.  And now he’s got a daughter that graduated from NYU, so I think he deserves to stay.”

Alzheimer’s-Stricken Lee Baca, Currently Appealing Felony Conviction, Gets a New Job as Professor

It’s not even WTF Friday!

On Monday, the University of Los Angeles College of Divinity in Compton announced it had selected former Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca to join its ranks of professors.

Baca is currently out on bail as he pursues an appeal of a conviction for his part in what is colloquially known as Operation Pandora’s Box, a series of orders and actions that attempted to derail a federal investigation into brutality and corruption by deputies in LA County’s jail system.

(Six members of the sheriff’s department were convicted of obstruction of justice—along with Baca, and former undersheriff Paul Tanaka—ostensibly for following orders handed down from Baca and Tanaka.)

In May 2017, Baca was sentenced to three years in federal prison after a jury found him guilty of one count each of conspiracy to obstruct justice, obstruction of justice and making false statements to federal investigators.

Interestingly, in October 2017, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals approved Baca’s motion for bail pending his appeal based, in part, on the fact that they believed one portion of Baca’s appeal could have merit—the claim that U.S. District Judge Percy Anderson “erred by excluding expert evidence” of Baca’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Baca’s lawyers claimed that the ex-sheriff’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis meant that he did not have the requisite mens rea (criminal intent or knowledge that his conduct was illegal) to be charged with and convicted of making false statements to the feds.

Yet the college, and the now 76-year-old Lee Baca, appear to believe that the former sheriff has the cognitive strength to teach students.

Baca has, in fact, worked as a college professor in the past, at both Cerritos College and the University of Laverne, and has had the reputation as a talented, if oddly wandering, public speaker.

The evangelical Christian college’s Vice President of Academic Affairs, Dr. Michael Miller, praised the ex-sheriff as a “gifted teacher” who “changed the dynamics within a workforce of over 18,000 people” and who has just the right skills to “greatly benefit our students and the community we serve in Compton, Watts, South Central Los Angeles and parts of Long Beach, as a University.”

In its announcement, the college pointed out that with Baca at the helm, the LA County Sheriff’s Department saved the city of Compton—home to the University of LA College of Divinity—more than $8 million when it took over the policing of Compton from the city’s local police department in 2000.

Baca also “believes that fundamentally that there is a greatness to every human being and that God is involved with every person’s life, whether they think so or not, and this belief makes him a perfect teacher and role model for Christian students,” Dr. Miller said.

Regarding Baca’s felony conviction, Miller indicated that he believed the prosecution was “politically based” and pointed out that, in his first trial, Baca “was voted 11-1 not guilty.” In the second trial, Miller said, “several former sheriffs testified against him in order to gain favor for themselves.”


Image courtesy of University of Los Angeles College of Divinity: Former LA County Sheriff Lee Baca and University of LA College of Divinity Vice President of Academic Affairs Michael Miller after signing Volunteer Agreement to become a professor at the Compton institution.

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