California Madness This is why Trump said what he did about our forest situation.  Naturally Governor Brown and the Media jumped all over him.  They would rather blame it on global warming.  Why the increase in explosive wild fires? The summer of 2003, while serving as a Boy Scout forestry merit badge counselor, I took three of our scouts to a National Forest Ranger Station in Northern California to interview a forest ranger. We were ushered into a high-ranking ranger office where all four walls were covered with book shelves filled with thick binders floor to ceiling. The ranger sadly explained that he spent three quarters of his time dealing with injunctions that environmentalist groups have filed against logging companies to keep them from going into the forest to harvest dead trees. Pointing to his walls, the ranger quipped that the binders were filled with all the injunctions. The ranger detailed for the scouts that the environmentalists tie up the logging companies in court for so long that eventually the trees become full of beetles and no longer profitable to harvest and then the injunction is dropped. He said it will now cost billions of dollars to clean up the forests, whereas, if the loggers were allowed in, they could clean up the forests and generate a revenue stream for State and National forests. The ranger, while shaking his head, indicated that the environmentalists have been doing this for years and are hurting the forests as it has caused an extraordinary number of dead trees in the forests. He explained that this not only provides more tinder for catastrophic crown fires (vs. healthy and regularly occurring creeping fires which clean out the forest floor), but also attracts bark beetles which causes the trees to die. The ranger further explained that because of environmentalists not allowing for controlled burns in populated areas and fire suppression in wilderness areas that a disastrous situation has been created in the forests. He glumly predicted that when, not if, a major fire gets out of control in the Tahoe basin, that it will be explosive with fast moving fires with large loss of life since there are only three major ways in and out of Lake Tahoe area. Bottom line, the devastation we are seeing in CA right now is man-made…by the leadership of your environmentalist groups and their fellow traveler friends in government…NOT the myth of global warming.