A Brilliant Plan to Solve the Wildfire Crisis AND Migrant Crisis
This weekend President Donald Trump let the world know what is causing all the wildfires in California. We should have been raking the forest more like they do in Finland.
Ignore for a second that the President of Finland says he can’t remember telling Trump anything like that and let’s just assume that casino owner and noted forestry expert Donald Trump knows what he’s talking about. Also, let’s ignore the fact that Finland has year-round rain and California has year-round drought. What if raking the nation’s forests really IS the way to prevent wildfires? First of all, they’d have to re-record all those Smokey Bear PSA’s to say “Only RAKES can prevent forest fires”. Also, we’d need to mobilize a MASSIVE work force to go about the business of raking California. And manpower is going to be in short supply if Mr. Trump’s 2019 budget, which drastically reduces funding for forestry services, goes into effect.
There’s also the issue of the migrant caravan coming up from Central America through Mexico. Appearantly, that thing is still on! I know…Trump quit tweeting about it the day after the mid-term elections for some reason so I thought maybe they’d decided to go back home. Nope! They’re still headed this way.
So here’s how I think we could kill two birds with one stone (although I’d be careful about throwing ANY stones as the president has said that would be a capital offense). Here’s my idea:
We let the migrants in the caravan come in. When they cross the border they get two things: an ankle monitor and a rake. We tell them, “Look, if you go rake 100 acres of forest in California, you can stay. For six months. Then, if you want to stay six more months, you’ve got to go rake another 100 acres”.
We’d have this licked in no time! The migrants would get to take refuge in America and California’s millions and millions of acres of forest would be neat as a pin, with nary a stray leave or pine cone in sight.
Except that the experts say that’s not how wildfires work.
So, in addition to the president of Finland and “known facts” let’s also add “experts” to things we need to ignore to make the president’s pronouncements make any sense.