California wildfires: Why did things go so wrong?
Americans coast to coast have been horrified as wildfires have swept across greater Los Angeles in the past few weeks. Some of the most iconic and luxurious neighborhoods in America have been consumed in flames and almost 30 people have died as of this date with the death toll certain to rise. Approximately 14,000 structures have been consumed and horrific amounts of deadly toxins have been released into the atmosphere.
How did this terrible tragedy happen? Was it inevitable? Was it the result of “climate change”? As people grieve the terrible loss of life and neighborhoods, these questions need to be asked. Can Californians and Los Angelenos take steps to mitigate against a recurrence of this destruction in the future?
Former California legislator Chuck DeVore explained in a 2019 Forbes article that “climate change” is not the culprit, but rather government policy meant to combat climate change combined with massive government incompetence.
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“This is California’s big secret: it’s not climate change that’s burning up the forests, killing people, and destroying hundreds of homes; it’s decades of environmental mismanagement that has created a tinderbox of unharvested timber, dead trees, and thick underbrush.”
As Scott Dittrich, the Malibu Public Works Commissioner acknowledged in The Wall Street Journal, “attributing the recent fires to climate change is disingenuous. The climate doesn’t shift so measurably in 10 or 20 years….”
In fact, the climate history of the greater Los Angeles area reveals that “Annual wildfires fanned by Santa Ana winds are nothing new in Southern California,” according to Rep. Tom McClintock in the WSJ opinion article, “Bad Policy Served as Kindling for California’s Wildfires."
“Prior to 1800, California lost an average of around 4.5 million acres to fires every year. As we introduced scientific land-management and fire-suppression measures, by the end of the 20th century that average dropped to around 250,000 acres.”
By 2020, as a result of California’s “recent extreme environmental and social policies” the state lost 4.3 million acres to wildfires.
In fact, California had so mismanaged its forests and water resources that in 2018, in the midst of the terrible 2018 wildfires, DeVore in Forbes declared that “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.”.
When it comes to water and the most recent wildfires, Joe Klein writes:
“Infrastructure that could have provided more water for those fires has been on hold, tied up in red tape. Ten years ago, California voters approved spending $7.5 billion to build water storage and improve state water facilities—but by 2023 not one dam had been finished, per the Los Angeles Times….‘But a decade into various environmental regulations and reviews, they are moving.’”
The explanation for the current human tragedy unfolding in Southern California is found, not in ecological explanations, but in the philosophical or theological principles upon which they are based.
It has often been noted that politics is downstream from public policy and public policy is downstream from religion (or alternatively, one’s “ultimate concern” as a secular alternative to religion.
Unfortunately, at the local and state levels in California, public policy prioritizes species other than human beings. Even as wildfires decimated Los Angeles and Southern California, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration focused on an endangered species of trout.
“California progressives don’t believe in leaving any fish or wildlife species behind. Homo sapiens, meantime, are on their own. The state employs about 5300 workers in conservation and wildlife protection vs. 570 in the fire agency’s wildland management. Every species needs a public advocate, even if it is a common nuisance.”
Policies that proceed from evaluating human beings as any less than uniquely valuable and important in the pecking order of importance is a direct challenge to the Judeo-Christian worldview which has dominated Western Civilization since at least St. Augustine and the mid-4th century A.D.
It reminds us that, as I have noted before, “The most compelling moral and ethical question facing modern man is, ‘who and what is a human being?’”
Fortunately, God has revealed to us the place of human beings in His created order. He does so in Genesis, “the book of beginnings.” In Genesis 1:26-27, God reveals to us:
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” (Gen. 1:26-27)
The Bible further informs us that He created “a garden eastward in Eden, and there he put the man whom he had formed.” (Gen. 2:8) Then God gave human beings their marching orders: “and the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it.” (Gen. 2:15)
These foundational Bible verses furnish the basis for a biblical environmental ethic. First, human beings take precedence in God’s creation. God created the earth for human habitation. Man is not the enemy of nature. Second, human beings have a responsibility to “dress” or till the earth and “to keep it.” These two Hebrew verbs mean man is to both develop the earth for human blessing and betterment and to protect or “keep” the earth.
In other words, human beings are to cause the earth to yield its riches for human betterment, but also be good stewards and not treat the earth as if it was their own to do with as they please. God owns the earth and He expects human beings to be good stewards of the earth God has entrusted to their care. Human beings will give an account of their stewardship of His creation.
Too often human beings have assumed they may treat the creation any way they desire—they may not. On the other hand, they are not to worship the Creation in an idolatrous manner, or to treat nature as if human beings were the enemy that nature must be protected against.
The key words are to develop nature (“to dress it”) and to do so in responsible and renewable ways (“to dress it”).
A neutral observer would probably conclude that these twin responsibilities have been honored more in the breach than in the observance in the centuries that human beings have inhabited Southern California.
We should all resolve to do better in the future.
Dr. Richard Land, BA (Princeton, magna cum laude); D.Phil. (Oxford); Th.M (New Orleans Seminary). Dr. Land served as President of Southern Evangelical Seminary from July 2013 until July 2021. Upon his retirement, he was honored as President Emeritus and he continues to serve as an Adjunct Professor of Theology & Ethics. Dr. Land previously served as President of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (1988-2013) where he was also honored as President Emeritus upon his retirement. Dr. Land has also served as an Executive Editor and columnist for The Christian Post since 2011.
Dr. Land explores many timely and critical topics in his daily radio feature, “Bringing Every Thought Captive,” and in his weekly column for CP.
