The California Wild Fires are typically reported as being caused by a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental factors. Mainstream news reports tend to focus on how a conflation of a lack of rain, humid conditions, and fierce winds results in these dramatic, and unpredictable fires.
California wild fires certainly appear to be newsworthy, in that they tick many of the news values used by news agencies to determine what should be aired. California fires are dramatic, visual, involve an elite nation, and are often personable: if they’re not threatening a town, we can always focus on the brave bush firemen.
Challenging the envirocentric narrative
However, I think we need to challenge the mainstream narrative that California wild fires are purely natural events.
If we dig a little deeper, we find that this ‘environment centric’ view is misleading as human social factors are just as much a cause.
Gegory L Simon argues that wildfires in California are just as much a result of reckless human development decisions as they are due to environmental conditions.
Authorities all around California have agreed permission for development to take place on areas they new were high fire risk. He further argues that authorities turn a blind eye to the fire risks because of the huge profits to be made from building houses in California.
Evidence for this lies in the simple fact of the increasing costs of dealing with fires in California…
One would have thought it sensible to stop developing in areas where there appears to be an increasing fire risk. Or if not, at the very least, we could be more honest about the fact that there is a human cause’ to these fires, rather than it just being purely down to environmental factors!
Then again, I guess deluding ourselves with the later explanation is more comforting.
This post will also be published to the steem blockchain.
Sources
If you want to explore this issue further, I suggest reading the following two critical articles
The Conversation – Don’t Blame California Wild Fires on a Perfect Storm of Weather Events
The Atlantic – Power Lines are Burning the West
