Before all the bodies had been identified in the horrendous California fires, and while the known victims were being mourned by their heartbroken families, the tragedy was politicized by the left and right. 

At the same time, most journalists and commentators, totally ignorant of history due to a gross failing of schools of journalism, were incapable of putting the fires in historical context.  For example, there was no mention of the great fire of 1909, which consumed Western forests equal to the size of Connecticut.  More on that later.

What the hell is happening to the nation?  Shame on all of them.

A particular shame on President Trump for quickly pinning the blame on the mismanagement of forest lands by California and the feds instead of just expressing condolences to the families and saying that it will be important at the right time to have a bipartisan investigation on the causes of the tragedy to keep such horrific fires from recurring.  

He sure is superb at throwing gasoline on fires.

Governor Jerry Brown was almost as shameful.  He immediately blamed global warming for the fire, thus insinuating that those who don't share his superior understanding of meteorology were responsible for the tragedy.  

As is the case with other issues, ideologues on both sides then retreated to their respective ideological echo chambers and slammed shut the soundproof hatches so they wouldn't hear countervailing opinions and facts.

It was reminiscent of the recent row at a White House press conference between Trump and CNN reporter Jim Acosta.  Most Americans knee-jerkily took one side or the other instead of seeing the obvious: that both men are egotistical, obnoxious jerks whose intellectual and character development stopped in their twenties, just like too many other politicians, reporters, celebrities, business executives, and athletes at the top of American society.  

What the hell is happening to us?

Due to the politization of the fires, it will be very difficult for Americans to learn the truth about the causes of the tragedy.  Was drought the cause?  Was the drought caused by global warming?  Were uncleared underbrush and small trees the cause?  Was the uncleared tinder the result of environmental extremists stopping logging?  And should towns and homes have ever been built in such a fire-prone area?

The answers will depend on where people get their news and information—or more accurately, where they get their filtered, biased information.  The press has always played loosely with the facts and has had political biases; but the media have gotten far worse with the demise of traditional newspapers, which at least had a modicum of editorial standards, unlike new media that have none.

To paraphrase Santayana, those who don't read history are journalists and politicians.

Judging by their out-of-context pronouncements about the California fires, journalists and pols haven't read The Big Burn, which is about the fire of 1909 and the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service and national parks.  Of course, 1909 was before global warming, environmentalism, and conflicting government policies about underbrush in forests.

Considered the biggest in history, the fire consumed approximately 4,000 square miles of northern Idaho and western Montana, including the mining town of Wallace.   Spread by drought conditions and high winds (sound familiar?), it was fought by 10,000 firefighters.  Because the area was sparsely populated, the death toll was relatively low.  Imagine the death toll if such a huge fire were to take place today in California, where homes and towns have been built in the middle of forests where fires are a natural occurrence.

It's a similar story with hurricanes.  There has been an exponential increase in population in hurricane-prone areas over the last 100 years.  It's as if nothing was learned from the Great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, other than stronger building codes.

Many conservatives and libertarians blame forest fires on the government and say that if forest lands where privately-owned, they'd be managed better.  Well, yes, counter to what liberals believe, government can indeed be incompetent.

On the other hand, as The Big Burn explains in detail, public and private lands were being ravaged in the early twentieth century by monopolistic trusts that controlled the mining, railroad and timber industries.  It took the efforts of Teddy Roosevelt, John Muir and Gifford Pinchot to protect public lands from further ravishment.  Ideologues on the right who think that industrialists would have done this on their own are . . . well, ideologues.

A street near my house in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains near the City of Tucson is named after Pinchot.  Who was he?  He was a Pennsylvanian and heir of a fortune made, ironically, from the timber industry.  A naturalist, he was friends with Roosevelt and Muir and would become the first head of the U.S. Forest Service.  The three of them would travel together to western wildernesses and sleep under the stars.  Earlier, when Roosevelt was governor of New York, Pinchot would visit him in the governor's mansion and accept his challenge to fight him in wrestling and boxing matches.  They weren't confused about their gender and maligned for being men.  Nor were they flaccid like Donald Trump or emasculated like Barack Obama.  Today, they'd be considered unhip, or worse, for their manliness.

The 1909 fire gave Pinchot and other conservationists the political leverage they needed to increase the role and staffing of the Forest Service in the management of the nation's forests. 

So how has the government done?  Don't look to journalists, politicians and ideologues for an objective answer.

How do I know that they can't be trusted for an objective answer?   Well, I'm the former head of an environmental group and an executive with a natural resources/industrial company that owned 900,000 acres of timberland in Maine and southern Appalachia—a company that was very environmentally responsible, unlike some of its competitors.  For example, its forests were well-maintained and not clear-cut, which was not the case across the industry.

I had three learnings from that experience:  first, how easy it is for an environmental group to manipulate the media and how little fact-checking reporters do; second, how difficult it is as the head of an environmental group to keep board members and members from stretching the truth instead of sticking with the facts; and third, how unthinking and unprincipled most politicians are.

Thank goodness that Pinchot, Muir and Roosevelt were exceptions for their time when it came to the environment.