I keep getting emails from friends asking if I'm okay. The national news has been saturated with reports of the flooding in western Washington. I'm fine, largely because I live within the long-established urban footprint of Seattle (downtown, happily). Most of the damage has come in the exurbs, and much of it is human-caused. This is our second straight year of unusual flooding. It won't be the last.
This reminds me of my return to Arizona in 2000. Every year forest fires would erupt threatening cabins on the Mogollon Rim (pronounced Mug-e-on) in the High Country. One particularly devastating fire began in 2002 when a woman had a fight with her boss (boyfriend?) while they were on a trip to service his vending machines (I am not speaking in euphemism here). She stalked off into the forest, wearing only shorts, tank top and flip-flops, carrying a towel, cigarettes and lighter — a survival kit I never learned about as a Boy Scout. When she became lost, she lit a "signal fire" that turned into one of the worst conflagrations in state history. (And you wonder why Arizona is rated America's dumbest state). Comedy aside, I was puzzled because these areas of the High Country had been mostly uninhabited National Forest land when I was a boy. Then I drove up and saw the "cabins" were mostly subdivisions plopped down amid stands of combustible pine trees.
These disasters, repeated around the West and indeed the nation, bring large public burdens, from relief efforts and firefighting, to higher insurance costs. Yet nothing is being done to address the cycle of disaster. And with climate change and other environmental degradation, we ain't seen nothing yet.
In the case of the great 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona, then-Gov. Jane Hull, a Republican, blamed environmentalists for allegedly stopping logging that would have thinned the forests. This sounded as odd to my Arizonan sensibilities as the notion of large populations on the Rim. I used to joke that Arizona has two environmentalists, and one of them has a contractor's license — it's not too far off the truth.
In fact, the fires were mostly a result of policy-driven sprawl. Land swaps were quietly moved through Congress to give developers prime sites adjacent to national forests. All across the state, this created an "urban-wilderness interface" that had never existed before. I was heartbroken to see the mini-Maryvales, complete with Wal-Marts, strung across what had been pristine backcountry. For their relative sizes, the sprawl in places like Show Low and Payson made Phoenix look like Portland as a land-use model.
In Washington state, 1.2 million acres of forest land — which is ideal for handling rain runoff — was converted to other uses, including development, from the late 1970s to 2002. Industrial-scale logging — the kind many Arizonans long for — has also denuded hillsides, vastly increasing flooding. According to the Seattle Times:
Every year in Western Washington, about 24,000 acres, or an area of
working forests almost half the size of Seattle, mostly on private
land, is converted to rural-residential and urban development,
according to Luke Rogers at the UW College of Forest Resources.
The rivers themselves also have been altered, reducing their ability
to manage high water. In King County alone, more than $7 billion worth
of development was built over time in the floodplain, according to a
county estimate in 2007.
In both states, and others around the country, the profits from these ventures go to a small number of private players. Some short-term benefits seem to appear for people looking for cheap housing, a big box with giant parking lot or the chance to "live out in the country." But the real and enduring costs are pushed onto the public. They will rise as global warming changes weather patterns, something we've likely seen in recent years with the sprawl fires of California.
The disasters will only multiply as long as we keep putting relatively large concentrations of people where they should not be, working the land in unsustainable ways, paving wetlands for Wal-Mart parking lots and disrupting a saving ecology. Our prayers must go out to the people who have been immediately harmed. But what of the public harm. We're not willing to deal with the real problem: land use. So far, the absolute religion of "property rights" and the big money of developers are stopping reform. When will the bill get too high?
When the bill does get too high, they’ll blame environmentalists anyway. There’s no requirement in right-wing America that arguments be made with logical consistency or even with semantic rules. Rather, the Other must be remain a figure of menacing intent and shadowy powers. It helps if he’s gay and Jewish like Barney Frank. Or if he has an Arab middle name, or if she has fat ankles and wears pant suits.
The “real” victims are those who want a nice house they can afford in a pleasant environment. They’re made to feel guilty. They’re told to believe “scientists” who talk about global warming even when it’s freezing outside. They’re told to share even though no one ever shared with them.
So, when the bill comes due, the decent folk who listen to talk radio and vote Republican will want to know which liberal is doing this to them and why. Whereupon, Bill O’Reilly can spit out Al Franken’s name and the decent folk will know.
Oh, but wait. It gets much worse. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of acres of dead and dying coniferous forests in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. The insects have decimated these once-lush mountainsides.
Now, they are nothing but millions of board-feet of tinder. We’ll see, as the summers get drier/hotter, and the bugs hungrier and hungrier.
We won’t necessarily lose *entire* towns and cities – this is pretty isolated country – but we will lose (or have already lost) part of the beauty of the West.