News stories don’t even make sense anymore

I wasn’t going to write today–it is my day off, after all.

But my heart rate jumped after I saw this story and I had to spew some bile, lest it build up to an unhealthy extent.

My local paper posted a story–in their “sports” feed–that literally made no sense at all. They are so desperate to push their climate change propaganda that they not only shoehorn it everywhere (sports?), but the premise needs no longer to make sense.

Behold:

Climate change virtually ensures future fires in the BWCA — something Indigenous people survived for eons. Can we learn something from their ancient practices? Feature from @StribOutdoors https://t.co/B8OMdF1FwL

— Star Tribune Sports (@StribSports) July 8, 2023

The underlying issue is poor forest management practices which lead to worse forest fires than would be normal. OK, fine. Public policy problem.

But the framing?

“Climate change virtually ensures future fires…”

Uh, what? Without climate change, there would be no forest fires. Is that what they are saying?

Yeah, well, no. Not exactly. Because forest fires are “something Indigenous people survived for eons.”

So forest fires have existed for eons (obviously so)…

In which case WTF does climate change have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing, of course. Not one damn thing.

But climate change has to be in the story because…climate change has to be in the story. In the sports section.

So my local paper writes a story about bad fire management practices in the sports section because the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) is used by sportsmen and finds a way to bring in both climate change and Indigenous people–two of their favorite topics–for no apparent reasons.

So we get the “Indigenous people know better” meme and the “climate change is dooming us” meme and the “stupid White people” meme all in one story.

Smokey the Bear was culturally appropriated or something.

The story begins with a long and ridiculous lesson on how the danger of fires is much worse today due to climate change, and about how the Forest Service regularly puts out fires due to the danger to life and property. Then it does an about-face and tells us that the Indigenous people actually set fires to keep the forest safer than it is today, in order to clear out the dry kindling that if left to accumulate would lead to major forest fires.

Even more amusing, the story points out that the Indigenous people moved in after the glaciers retreated–due to a massive global warming a few millennia ago–telling us that global warming both created the forest now supposedly threatened by global warming, and that cleaning out the dry kindling that creates out of control fires is the secret to preventing the more disastrous fires we are seeing today.

That’s when Indigenous people first migrated into what is now the BWCA, following a host of wildlife that inhabited the region after the retreat of the last glaciers.

“The archeological record shows there was a continuity of human use throughout the border region dating back that far,” said Johnson, a research forester at the University of Minnesota’s Cloquet Forestry Center.

Those long-ago people living in what is now the BWCA not only endured fire, Johnson said, they regularly set strategically placed fires. Often these were on south-facing, pine-cluttered points of land they inhabited — the same points that BWCA paddlers seek out today for their Northwoods beauty and for the breezy, often bug-free campsites they provide.

Periodic burning not only removed combustible brush and other understory that otherwise would ensure calamity during a firestorm, it provided a steady supply of blueberries and raspberries while encouraging game — perhaps caribou, moose, deer and hares — to inhabit the burned-over area.

Importantly, this practice also preserved the pines, some of which even today in the BWCA date to the 1700s. Without the fires, which pines need periodically to blacken their lower trunks, the towering trees would have been lost to fire long ago.

This is an intellectual mess, needless to say. Brainless.

As far as I can understand, the narrative they are pushing is this:

The global warming that allowed the land to get out from under a mile of ice was good, allowing the forest to grow and animals to thrive. Indigenous people moved in and managed the forest using smaller fires, helping the forest thrive and limiting the size of fires.

Now global warming is dangerous because fires are possible or something, but we can learn from Indigenous people to use fire to manage the forest. 

Huh, what? Warming good, fire good, warming bad, fire bad, but fire good. Do I have that right?

Real lesson: just quit burning fossil fuels.

Make it make sense! Because it makes no sense as written.

An easier narrative that does make sense: we like the forest, so we fought forest fires. That was stupid, because fires are necessary for the forest to remain healthy. Let’s quit fighting fires and let nature take its course, with an occasional assist from planned fires to keep things from getting out of hand in a way we dislike. 

No need for climate change at all. The problem is wildfires that get too big for our liking, so best to allow small fires, and set a few to keep things from getting out of hand. The kindling problem is nothing new–it is how forests have always been.

The only thing really interesting about this story to me is this: I wonder if the writer actually believes this drivel or whether it was written by somebody with such contempt for his audience that he just assumes that we are too stupid to see how idiotic the narrative is.

Are they stupid, or just cynical? You decide.