After the fires

By Lance Olsen, Unfiltered 8-18-07

As fires sweep through American forests, and closely related fires sweep through the nation’s finance industry, most headlines focus on the here and now. And, so far, none have seemed to connect the proverbial dots.

The focus on here and now is understandable, though unfortunate. Breathless television news crews succumb to the excitement of the fires closest to their viewers homes this season, with nary a word of the fires to come in future seasons.

But this year’s forest fires aren’t the first, won’t be the last, and almost certainly won’t be the worst.

We may not see steadily increasing severity of fires each and every year, but the trend will be a worsening one where the trees that didn’t burn in the fires since, say, 2000 will be gone up in smoke over the next decade. And more will be turned to smoke in the decade after that.

Alas, it won’t be fires alone that steadily thin our already endangered forests. Thanks to rising world temperatures, all tree species will be consequentially reduced thanks to insects, water stress, heat stress and, yes, fire. These four forces of forest decline will interact to insure that the forests we see today will be radically reduced.

The media, for whom news is not news until it happens, will continue to discount the future of forest decline, and so the unwarned public will continue to build new homes in fire’s path until enough thousands of homes are leveled.

But more forest fires are not the only thing we should expect after this year’s fires. For many years into the future, there will be floods. And many a new home built during America’s recent real estate boom will be affected by these foreseeable floods.

Again thanks to rising global temperatures, extreme downpours will be hitting the ground with deluges. Here in the Northern Rockies, these deluges will rush down from the slopes, fill the streams to overflowing, and fill basements galore. Some of these predictable floods will sweep some boom-built new homes away, removing them as effectively as any foreseeable fire.

Fire and flood will plausibly deliver a double whammy to plenty of boom-built homes when foreseeable summer fires are followed by equally foreseeable winter floods. But the homeowners who borrowed heavily from the lending industry will be as blind to the risks of fire and flood as many were to the risks of borrowing from the irrationally enthusiastic lenders. After all, not one of the many organizations posing as defenders of property rights is warning the innocent that the new climate is bringing a wave of threats to property placed in harm’s way.

There is already talk of bailout for the nation’s reckless lenders, and some talk of bailout for witless borrowers who make up a large portion of Mr. Bush’s much-boasted “ownership” society – only now revealing itself as a borrowship society instead. And we’re already seeing talk of bailout for the naïve folk – rich and poor – who bought or built new homes where fire and flood will inevitably transform boom-driven dreams into climate-driven nightmares.

Montana Senator Max Baucus, for example, wants to reward individuals for putting homes in increasingly fire-prone forests. Max, who has likely never seen a logging road he didn’t like, has proposed giving these folks a tax cut. But Max’s bailouts will only aggravate what is already become a bad situation all ‘round.

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