The United States Forest Service manages the nation's 154 national forests and 20 national grasslands. That doesn't mean they always do it well. Controlled burns are something that have been done for thousands of years, to prevent wildfires, and they were done primarily by people not paid to do it, so it's baffling that government union employees who have this as their career can't do it properly. And create the wildfires they are meant to prevent.

Twice. Where did they get these government do-nothings? Uvalde?

Once rain season hit baffled government employees got some help and the 342,000 acre fire they caused was suppressed. In California we also count on mudslides putting out the wildfires, because environmentalists have lobbied for so many regulations we can't really prevent them or put them out.

However, runoff due to the New Mexico fires is poisoning drinking water. And the giant swath of ruined land is causing flooding.


Looking south from NM518 towards burn scars from the Calf Canyon-Hermits Peak Fire. Photo was taken just north of Holman, New Mexico on 16 August, 2022. Credit: Matthew.kowal - Own work. CC BY-SA 4.0

The government is blaming climate change instead of their own incompetence, of course but fires have been happening forever. There is not some new breed of flame because America uses natural gas. Trees are not different. It is no drier. Natives who never learned to read or write 2,000 years after most of the world still did controlled burns better than the modern US government. That can't be blamed on Chinese and Russian CO2 emissions.

Natives did it because prevention matters. Well, competent prevention matters. Without competent government employees, local communities are on the hook for a new $100 million water treatment system due to a problem caused by government employees who don't realize weather stations aren't on, or that firefighters aren't even using the same radio frequency.

And don't know how to do a controlled burn despite having virtually unlimited funding for training and prevention. Didn't any of that $3 trillion stimulus package for government union workers and their contractors go to the Parks Service?

By relying on nature to fix the problem government created, they are doing even more damage. Runoff from rains sends debris into rivers and kills fish. It pollutes them. State and local governments won't have the budget for new water filtration systems.

Meanwhile, the federal government has spent time campaigning to gain more power for their political party in November. The way to do that would be taking some leadership to help the people whose taxes are being sucked up into a bureaucracy that doesn't even know how to do something my family showed me how to do at 10 years old.