I’ve been covering wildfires in the American west for three years now. On Tuesday, I moved outside of Denver to a property adjacent to Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests west of Boulder.
The first thing I did while unpacking was pack a bug out bag in case of an emergency when a nearby wildfire threatens to light my new place up in flames. Wildfires are no longer some faraway problem that pollutes lungs every once-in-a-while. They’re a very real risk to living at 9,000 feet, especially when surrounded by federally managed land. To Washington bureaucrats, forest fires are merely a consequential warning of a changing climate.
More than 61 million residents up and down the east coast got a rude education this week to the experience of their neighbors in the American west who choke on wildfire smoke every summer.
Western infernos have become so out of control in recent years that the California insurance industry is going up in flames along with Americans’ homes and livelihoods. While the beltway press is eager to blame climate change, the primary culprit is negligent land management.
[READ: Bad Governance, Not Climate Change, Jeopardizes California Home Insurance]
Maybe the wildfire smoke that cancelled classes and baseball games in the nation’s capital will now wake up Washington lawmakers to the annual haze that blocks out the summer sun in the American West. Western states have spent years calling on D.C. bureaucrats who manage a third of the nation’s land
