Coastal fires continue to barbecue the wildlife in another of those “victories” we can chalk up to the environmentalists. As with the insistence upon wind power leading to chopped up birds, so, too, the demand for pristine and unmanaged forests leads to the burning of both the trees and anything living in or among them.
As I’ve mentioned before, the size and viciousness of the current fires are precisely and exactly because the well-meaning officials — I assume some of them must have meant well — refused to allow any controlled fires for half a century. The coastal environment is built to burn regularly, and refusing to let it do so has caused today’s disaster.
In a British journalistic pantheon, Bernard Levin occupies a place similar to that of H.L. Mencken in the United States. Levin warned us against the “single issue fanatic,” which is the issue at point. People might well be right that something needs to be done, but the adoption of an attempt at perfection is doomed to failure, as well as the ruining for the rest of society.
Yes, tobacco kills, and we shouldn’t smoke it for our own sakes. Today, we have people who insist that no one should vape — an activity that weans people off of dangerous cigarettes — because tobacco is bad. Sure, recycling valuable things is a good idea, but this has morphed into the idea that we must recycle plastic to save scarce resources. But the resource we have too much of, not too little, is gas and oil, as climate change shows. Just because some recycling is good doesn’t make all of it so.
That’s the fanaticism of the single issue. Any and every bit of evidence that we can have too much of a good thing, like too much cake or too much gin, is swept aside in the fervent attempt at perfection.
It’s also such a strange thing for an environmentalist to get caught up in. The entire point of ecology is to note that everything in nature is interdependent. Take away the apex predator, the wolf, and Scotland’s red deer starve as they outbreed the food supply. Knock out the moa from New Zealand’s fauna and that condemns the specialist predator, Haast’s eagle, to extinction.
That one part of the system depends upon the others is the very lesson of ecology itself. How did California and Oregon ever get to the position that a fire-dependent ecology shouldn’t ever have fires? That’s the single issue fanatic all over. Grasping onto the one point, burnt birds are bad, to the exclusion of that rounded and mature view that it’s the total environment that matters, not any one constituent part of it.
It really is true that fires burn so wildly because officials don’t allow them to burn even a little bit. The solution going forward is to make sure that all of it burns a bit now and again by controlled fires.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
