Advice from Idaho for the Smokey Northeast

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My sister said the pictures don’t do the scene justice.  Things are expected to be worse than the weekends.  She lives in a small town roughly 55 miles south-southeast of Buffalo, New York.  This is their second bout of heavy smoke in recent weeks.  She’s asthmatic.  She won’t be outside much until it clears.  The locals caught a break for a couple of weeks because they were getting drenched in rain.  The smoke is from the numerous wildfires burning in Canada.

Cindy, my sister, told me a few weeks ago she had never seen anything like this, aside from pictures I’ve sent from our often smoke-filled summers.

The mainstream news media is blaming climate change.  As if there were never any fires before this century.  Forests have been burning before any human beings walked this earth.  Some were more devastating than anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.  The greenies need to obscure the obvious because they’re trying to leverage the latest burns for political gains.

None of them are talking about a new direction for forest management.  If you log more trees, then you leave less fuel on the ground.  I’ve argued this before.  I'm not alone.  An old miner in Idaho's mountains makes the same point whenever we speak.  It’s not really about the trees.  It’s that someone else may profit from logging.

George H.W. Bush liked to tell the story of the Puritan who couldn’t sleep at night.  Because the guy was worried that someone somewhere might be having a good time.  Today, the fear is someone somewhere might make a buck, provide jobs and boost the economy without government control.