Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Letter to the editor:

Politician should check her research

I was staying with my mother-in-law in Summerlin when I read the May 29 letter from Peggy Pierce, a Democratic state assemblywoman, who blames “climate change” for the fires experienced recently in my home state of Arizona.

Pierce is sadly misinformed about the true cause for the catastrophic wildfires experienced here in the Southwest. Once upon a time there was a timber industry in the Southwestern United States and thanks to overly zealous environmentalists, much of the necessary thinning to keep our forests healthy was abandoned, legislated out of existence.

You cannot practice fire suppression without thinning. Overgrowth feeds the wildfires we now have to endure. It is not climate change, it is legislative tyranny and the law of unintended consequences coming back to bite us all.

One need look no further than the aftermath of the Rodeo-Chediski fire, the largest fire in the history of Arizona, which burned more than 450,000 acres (as opposed to the 16,000 in this most recent Arizona fire). Years later, when you compare the Forest Service land to adjacent land on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, where thinning is practiced, the tribal lands are in far better shape.

Pierce would do her constituents a big favor if she did a little research beyond the talking points that place the credibility of climate change in the same category as the “flat earth” theory. Both are equally invalid.

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