‘The Resources Exist’: California Wildfires Rage as Corporations Block Preventative Practices

On Tuesday, Cal Fire reported some 2,200 square miles had burned, including more than 1,200 structures, killing seven people and forcing nearly 200,000 more to flee the destruction. 

More than 7,000 fires rage across the state, and while the area is prone to the seasonal blazes, the steady spread of farmland and housing developments have put humans in harm’s way, while human-driven climate change is making the fires stronger and more common, Tina Landis, environmental and social justice advocate and author of "Climate Solutions Beyond Capitalism," told Radio Sputnik’s Political Misfits on Tuesday.

Landis told hosts Michelle Witte and Bob Schlehuber that the second- and third-largest wildfires in California history were burning at the moment in the San Francisco Bay area.

“We’re seeing, every year, more and more extreme wildfires that are bigger, that are more long-lasting, that are just spreading out of control. These fires particularly were started by this weather anomaly: there was this tropical cyclone coming up the coast of California, there was an extended heat wave in California, so when those two things collided, there was atmospheric disturbances. We had over 12,000 lightning strikes in the Bay Area region within 72 hours - these are dry lightning strikes, no rain, or very, very little rain, because we’re in the dry season right now. We’re also in a drought, so everything was, like, ready to ignite.”

“Obviously, the firefighters cannot deal with that number of fires in that short of a time,” she noted.

​“This year, there will be no way to make even a dent in the fires with our tools,” journalist Daniel Boguslaw wrote on Twitter on August 22. “There is no small chance that vast swaths of major cities there will burn. I know, because I've fought wildfires, and everyone on my crew agrees: this month is the beginning of the end.”

Landis also noted that fire crews rely heavily on prison inmates to bolster their ranks, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of those prisoners have been sent home on early release.

“They are not able to serve as firefighters now, because once you get out of prison, you have a felony charge and you can’t actually get a job as a firefighter, even though they have extensive experience fighting California fires,” Landis told Sputnik.

“We’re going to see more of this with climate change,” she said. “Every year we have more and more fires, and they’re just being these mega-fires, which are really impossible to control,” which is all the worse when they occur in close proximity to densely populated areas, as is now happening in the Bay Area.

​“Really, there needs to be more money put into prevention. There needs to be more thought put into land use, where development’s happening, more and more impeding on these forested areas and putting people, really, in harm’s way. These are really high, fire-prone areas, and then when fires start and people try to get out and they - it really needs to be addressed on a serious level, because we’re going to see this more and more,” Landis said.

“Deforestation, logging, expanding agriculture - this monoculture, agriculture practices - definitely drive the climate,” she said, noting they “use up water resources, increase heat, and [are] overall terrible for the ecosystem and climate change. But that’s, of course, under capitalism just continuing.”

Landis noted that “Florida put all of their power lines underground because of hurricanes, because they were having issues with fires when hurricanes happen,” which she said should happen in California as well, since so many fires are sparked by electrical lines.

Local power company Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), she said, “hasn’t even been forced to upgrade. Most of their transmission lines are from the ‘50s - they’ve never been upgraded.”

​“Just to put it in perspective, if California was its own country, it would be the fifth-largest economy in the world. So, the resources exist, but they’re really not put into prevention. It’s like, the government just reacts when things, when catastrophes like this happen, but they don’t put enough into prevention, to really protecting people in advance of these crises,” Landis said.

“We need to go back and look at Indigenous practices of living within the ecosystem in a reciprocal way instead of the Western way of seeing nature as a barrier, something to be conquered. We need to really look at how to live in harmony with the ecosystem instead of fighting it,” she said, noting that “with climate change, there’s new challenges. But just going on with business as usual, building houses wherever you want - I mean it’s really money for the big developers, that’s what it’s about.”

Landis noted that a major barrier in the US is that corporations “write the laws” and “control the narrative” about prevention efforts, so “if they don’t see it’s economically feasible to make changes, they aren’t forced to. They just claim bankruptcy and give out millions to their CEOs but then go on with business and not actually shutting down. The system fosters that; the system allows that to happen. It protects corporations.”

“Half the giant tech companies in the Bay Area - there’s more billionaires in the Bay Area than anywhere else in the world per capita. A lot of these big tech companies, they actually get money back every year. Not only do they not pay taxes, but they get money back, millions of dollars back from the federal government. So we really need to seize their funds and pay for things that protect people, that protect humans and life. That’s really the only way we’d be able to really deal with climate change and issues of wildfires and floods and things.”