[7.01] A Beautiful Morning
Blue skies just after rain (or wildfire smoke), my favorite weather.
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Thanks everyone for your well wishes from last time, and for anyone else also in the West, please stay safe. I am hoping to keep updating as normal throughout the week. We are drowning in smoke, but not in any immediate danger of being burned over.
For those of you outside the US the entire west coast of the country is on fire. As someone who happens to work for the U.S. Forest Service which manages most of the land these fires are burning on, I will say this is a prime example of the failure of America’s government to invest in our own country, to manage our resources properly, and to care for the well-being of the people. Specifically the failure of Congress to appropriate more than a pittance of money for these things.
The Forest Service has been doing all it can to manage 193 million acres of land (a tenth of the country’s land area) on a $5.3 billion budget, or $27 per acre. About $2.4 billion goes towards fire suppression alone, so really only $15 per acre available for the actual forest management that might reduce future fire risk, so it’s a deadly cycle that repeats year after year.
$5.3 billion is not a lot of money. The fire in Paradise, California two years ago took 85 lives and caused $16 billion in damage, which might have been prevented if the forest had been better managed to reduce fuel build-up and the consequent fire risk.* (And if authorities had forced PG&E, the utility company whose powerline sparked the fire, to upgrade its deteriorating system before paying fat bonuses to the executives and shareholders.)
This is just one tiny part of the massive disinvestment in resource management, infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc. that is making life worse for nearly all Americans. I can only hope both our government and business leaders will wake up to the obvious fact that waiting for things to fall apart isn’t fiscal responsibility, it’s just stupid.
*In 2018 the President erroneously blamed the state of California for forest mis-management, when actually the fire started and burned off federal land. It was not the state’s responsibility or authority to keep that land well maintained, though California’s extremely strict regulations on logging/forest thinning may have made things worse in Paradise itself.
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7.01 Transcript
Kiro: What a beautiful morning!
Kiro: Where are Daisy and A?
A: Where is Daisy?? We have a big problem!
Kiro: Don’t ask me…
Maybe educate the ‘protesters’ who prevent proper management “for the trees” and the judges who let them ?
Do you have a source for this being an issue? I’ve heard nothing about this from family in Washington state and Oregon.
Well it is also true that environmental laws aimed at protecting endangered species from rampant logging are also getting in the way of other Forest management activities. The forest I work on is actually one of the few in California that still allows significant timber cutting. In a lot of the other forests the dead wood and shrubs are piling up so thick you couldn’t walk through it.
Of course, that didn’t stop us from experiencing a massive fire this year, so that’s where the other side of the coin – climate weirdness – comes into play.
SFX:
My question is: Was A coming back from looking for Daisy? Or was he out and found something that he wants her for?
With A it could be anything, but I expect bears….
That’s really useful (and tragic and sad) information. There has been a lot of right of center rhetoric about this being a case of bad forest management by left of center politicians and leadership, and that it couldn’t possibly be due to climate change. From your post, it sounds like a complex issue and typical of our changing world where yesterday’s funding isn’t cutting it for today’s world. We can only hope that the US as a collective understands the need for better funding of its forests… if for nothing else, but to stem the cost of disaster aid!
I think it’s both climate change and bad management, equally. But like all American politics this had to be made into a black and white issue. Both sides would rather let the country burn than admit the other side has a point.
I find panel six hilarious XD
I don’t know if anyone else does; I probably just have a weird sense of humor :p
Same here, I.T.B.! Lol just look at A run! XD
I didn’t think I’d get an interesting insight into american forest fires by reading this webcomic^^. As European that doesn’t have especially much to do with forests, I don’t really know details. But it’s not exclusive to america to invest to little into infrastructure. In german we actually have a word for that. “Investitionsstau” the literal translation would be “investment (traffic-)jam”.
I don’t want to participate in conspiracy theories, but it probably doesn’t help, that the west coast probably won’t vote for your president on the next election anyway…
I was actually thinking of bringing that up. Trump didn’t say a word on these fires for three weeks. Even though there are millions of Republicans living in the west coast, they don’t matter politically, because of how the lines are drawn. The electoral system is ridiculous and needs to burn in a fire.
Please stay safe. I won’t comment on the rest because it might Start A Thread. tl;dr: I agree with you, we are being very short-sighted.
Is that a rainbow in panel one? I kinda doubt it, as it seems completely monochromatic. I guess even with your color perception, that’s not how it would look.
So … lens flare, maybe?
Hey, storm’s over! I though it would go on forever, like a magical storm or something.
What are those blue lines behind the mountains in panel 6?
They shouldn’t be there. I will address that shortly…
Now the image is supposed to be at https://detoxcampcomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/1-A-Beautiful-Morning-01-fixed2.png which gets a 404 error.
Kiro: Hey, where’s A?
A: AAAAAAAAA