The Wildfires and Mother Nature

RUSH: Interesting story here from the San Francisco Chronicle today by a couple columnists: ‘When it comes to greenhouse gases, Mother Nature and her forest fires like the ones raging through Southern California can be some of the biggest polluters out there. According to the California Air Resources Board, the blazes raging from Malibu to the Mexican border will send some 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, plus 200,000 tons of methane and nitrous oxide. That output of global warming gases is equal to what 440,000 cars would pump into the atmosphere in a year, said Richard Bode, chief of the Air Resources Board’s emissions inventory branch. ‘In terms of global warming, it is a sizable chunk,’ Bode said. ‘But you have to remember that overall, the state puts out about 470 million tons of gases every year — so it’s about a half a percent’ of California’s yearly contribution to global catastrophe.’ (laughing) Now, I have a question for you, folks, about these fires. Let’s just look at this as the environmentalist wackos want to see the planet, and that is without us on it.

The fires started. Now, they shot a suspected arsonist who was trying to get away out there the other day, and they’ve got another one that they’re hunting down, they think. But there are a lot of fires and they don’t know that arson is responsible for all of them. But since we’re taking human beings out of the equation, it’s just a think-piece question I’ve got for you. Let’s say these fires are started by lightning or some other natural thing, we’ve got mother nature going here, right? If there were no human beings to put out the fires, would you not say that Mother Nature intends for these fires to happen? And Mother Nature intends for these fires to keep going, and going, and going until they go out, because of Mother Nature’s causes, and reasons, and methods of putting them out, such as, the fire runs out of stuff to burn, or it reaches water or some such thing. Now, the reason I ask this is because, we, of course, put these things out. We put them out because they do great damage to us and things that we have built, like businesses, homes, highways, bridges, roads, schools, hospitals, illegal immigrant check-in centers, all these things that we have built.

There’s a theory being bandied about today that one of the reasons these fires become more frequent is that we put them out, and by putting them out, we preserve future fuel for fires to burn, that Mother Nature, when these fires start, they just let it go. The environmentalist wackos, who have made the point here that Mother Nature is Mother Nature and we should not do anything, human beings are just causing all the problems here, are the same ones that will not allow all of this deadwood to be cleared out of there, which adds more fuel for these fires. In the midst of all this the Democrats are still in the process of trying to blame Iraq, President Bush, or some other domestic policy priority. It is laughable to watch.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I don’t think based on e-mails that I received — I checked here during the break — I made my point. When I was asking you to think about the fires without us here, which is what the environmentalist wackos want — they would just burn, and burn, and burn. Who knows how long they would go? They would burn, and burn, and burn, and burn. You know, there is some vegetation that needs fire in order to thrive, in order to germinate and this sort of thing. Nature is an amazing thing. But the point that I didn’t make well is this. The environmentalist wackos, the global warming crowd say that it is manmade activity that is causing this catastrophe of global warming, and that we should just leave the environment alone, just leave nature alone. It’s not our business and so forth. The point is that every species has to alter the environment in order to thrive. What are we supposed to do? Just sit back and say, ‘Okay, there’s a fire. Yep, there’s my house. Well, let the house burn because this is nature.’ No. We don’t thrive by purposely letting our property be destroyed. We try to save it. Now, we may make dumb decisions in deciding to put these structures in certain areas where disasters are known to occur, but people take risks.

The point is that we and every other species cannot exist and thrive. We cannot thrive. ‘Thrive’ is the key. We might be able to ‘exist,’ but what’s the point of existence when you’re a human being? Most species are not even conscious of their own existence. Have you ever held an animal up to a mirror? Most people think the animal doesn’t see itself because it’s something about its eyes. It has no self-consciousness; it has no self-awareness. It’s not aware of its own existence. They’re aware of you, and they’re aware of their presence, but, in terms of themselves, they’re not. But we are, as human beings. We are totally. Many of us are so absorbed with our own existence that we are idiots and we rub people the wrong way: Me, me, me, me. But the point is, you cannot thrive as a species without altering your environment. Are we supposed to just sit out and let it snow on us and rain on us and let the wind blow without building shelter? It takes environmental materials, wood and this kind of thing to build shelters. Are we not supposed to do that? So the idea that manmade activity is causing mass destruction and catastrophe can be just knocked out of the ballpark, as big a grand slam as we hit against Dingy Harry, if you just think about it.