Development meets public lands: “It’s like a tsunami…”

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Posted on June 27, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Deep ecology, Consumer culture, Environmental disasters

Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:

That’s how one forest ecologist from the Univ. of Wisconsin described what is going on the the Sierra Nevadas and around Lake Tahoe — the flood of people building their million dollar homes in places where they should not be — where forests are already damaged, thrown out of balance, and ready to burn.

We should get the h… out of those forests and let them recover, heal, become what they once were.

The headline quote comes from this article in yesterday’s NY Times, “On Fringe of Forests, Homes and Wildfires Meet.” It’s long and I highly recommend it. It describes another egregious example of human beings living wrongly on the planet.

We do not have a divine right, even by our wealth, to live where we please.

This is the quote that really set me off — Ron Ehli, a volunteer fire fighter in Hamilton MT, where in the magnificant Bitterroot Valley, something similar to the development around Lake Tahoe has begun:

The federal government is there to protect the community from disasters… Where Florida might have hurricanes, or California earthquakes, we have wildfires… And the federal government should be there to protect us.

Well, no, Mr. Ehli, actually it should not. Wildfires caused and fed by bad forest management, forest exploitation, and the desire of humans for pretty views is not the same as an earthquake. And no human beings should have to risk their lives to save the homes of those living inappropriately in these places.

And you know what? People should not be living on active fault lines and in the path of hurricanes unless they are willing and able to absorb the risk, financially for starters.

Insurance companies are likely to make some of these decisions for developers and prospective homeowners in days to come, and as tragic as it is to see homes destroyed, they wouldn’t be destroyed if they hadn’t been there to begin with.

All across the country, the boundaries of public parks — federal and state — are becoming magnets for new housing developments. Where else can you guarantee a pretty view that won’t go away? And with them come roads, shopping malls, lots of human traffic and congestion, air pollution in those parks, and more. Habitats are damaged, ecosystems are weakened and become more prone to harm from these unnatural natural disasters.

In California and Colorado, according to this article, more than FIFTY percent of new housing areas are in severe-fire zones.

Check out last night’s story on NBC Nightly News, where this was also discussed (click on “Progress in containing Lake Tahoe fire”). They report that, since 1982, 8.6 million new homes have been built in the west within 30 miles of national forest land.

And all these people expect us to pay to protect their homes from fire while contributing through this very development to the weakening of the entire living forest system.

Well, at least with this fire we’re having the conversation. But in this culture of individual property rights and the aggressive greediness and assertion of rights of the wealthy, I wonder if we have within us the capacity to do what we need to do to restore a right relationship with nature.

If we think that human rights and dignified life are the same as rights to do whatever we want — and the federal government should be there to protect — not the uninsured kids of our society, or the Social Security of our older citizens, or the rights to a good education for inner city kids, etc. — but the property rights of the wealthy, we can all sit back and continue to watch this kind of destruction on the evening news — with the skyrocketing costs of protecting those folks coming out of your tax dollars.

I’m a bit cranky today. Something I love is being destroyed by selfishness and profit. Yes, a bit cranky.


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