Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.

Night has fallen on the desert, the southern California mountains, a ring of fire.

The whole southwest choked in smoke.

We went from miserable heat wave to horrible wildfires.

But if not for these many blazes,

most intentionally started by lunatics,

we'd all be enjoying this sudden and welcome plunge and temperature.

Like many people these days, I am generally against crucifixion.

But the people who intentionally burned down our forest.

One thing we tend to understand is that we need the forest, the woodland.

Benjamin Franklin understood that two and a half centuries ago.

He understood when you scrape every living thing from the natural landscape, you kill it,

and you kill your natural watersheds, which require the forest and the woodland, and yes, the scrub oak and scrub brush,

to delay snow melt and filter the water that eventually ends up in our lakes, our rivers, our kitchen sinks.

England and Scotland and Ireland had lost nearly all of its dense forest cover long before

Benjamin Franklin noted that America had the luxury of a choice.

This is from a 1990 article on the NASA Earth Observatory website.

In 17 and 63, Benjamin Franklin took part in discussions with colonial scholars about the effects of

deforestation on local climate. As forests were cleared for farming in the early American colonies,

Franklin agreed with the other colonials that cleared land absorbs more heat and melts snow quicker.

And here we are in 2004, when the government of the United States is engaged in a wide-scaleust of ancient old-growth western woodlands,

pinion, juniper, Joshua tree for the short-term benefit of corporate industrialized solar installations

...