"Reality is literally lighting a fire under us."-Sailer.
- From: Bret Ludwig <bretldwig@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 14:51:44 -0700
Deja vu all over again
"As I wrote in VDARE.com right after the Southern California fires exactly four years ago:
Brushfires and mudslides used to seem more amusing because they
afflicted Hollywood celebrities significantly more often than average
citizens. This was not just a matter of God's good taste. Hoi polloi
lived in the cheaper and safer flatlands. The rich poised precariously
in the hills, where construction and maintenance costs are higher-
especially if you want your home to survive what Mother Nature keeps
up her sleeve.
But the plains of Southern California filled up long ago. So the
ever-growing population has been spilling into the more treacherous
wild areas.
This is regularly denounced as "sprawl," which implies that
individuals are wastefully consuming more and more land per capita.
But in California the driver has been population growth. According to
a 2003 Center for Immigration Studies report by Roy Beck, Leon
Kolankiewicz, and Steven A. Camarota, from 1982 to 1997 the total
number of developed acres in California grew by 32 percent, but the
per capita usage was up only two percent. Essentially all of
California's population growth in the 1990s was due to new immigrants
or births to foreign-born women. (Indeed, close to 1.5 million more
American-born citizens moved out of California during the 1990s than
moved in from other states.)
As low-income immigrants pour into Southern California's lowlands,
crowding the freeways and overstressing the older cities' public
schools, the middle class (at least the ones who don't leave the
state) have responded by taking to the hills.
The hill country's environment is benign most of the year. But the
local ecosystem evolved to require periodic blazes. Up through
American Indian times, these brushfires were frequent and thus
relatively mild.
Unfortunately, we modern people haven't really figured out how to
manage the chaparral and pine forests yet-especially when the canyons
and mountains are home to housing. The best-known remedy, controlled
burns, is disliked by people who live in the backcountry because they
pollute the air, and they can jump out of control. The 2000 Los Alamos
fire set by the Forest Service ended up destroying hundreds of
structures.
Thus the policy has been to try to suppress all fires. This,
however, causes fuel in the form of dry brush and dead trees to build
up each decade, inevitably leading to infernos like those of 1993 and
2003. ...
It's just California's problem? 'fraid not! Taxpayers across the
country always end up chipping in, through government disaster loans,
new federal firefighting and forestry management programs, lower stock
market prices for insurance companies, and other forms of burden-
sharing.
And, in some ways, that's fair, because so much of California's
current crisis traces back to the federal refusal to adequately
enforce immigration laws.
California desperately needs a slower population growth rate until
it learns how its current vast population can live with its lovely but
sometime lethal landscape. And the state's burgeoning numbers are
solely driven by immigration.
The logical solution: cut back on immigration.
Reality is literally lighting a fire under us."<<
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/10/deja-vu-all-over-again.html
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