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Friday 29 June 2012
Conservatism And Wildfires Don’t Mix

In the last several years, Colorado has had a problem even worse than its usual combination of dry and summer heat, beetle trees. Mountain pine beetles have been a major problem for Colorado. Any trip through the mountains will reveal thousands upon thousands of dead pine trees littering the landscape. Global warming is giving Colorado a double whammy for forest fires. It heats the land, making everything drier and more flammable, while encouraging beetle growth, which kills the trees, creating even more kindling.

The big problems, as usual, come when nature meets man. When houses sit atop the dry timber and within yards of the beetle trees, human lives are put in danger. I’m not blaming people for living in the mountains or foothills, but when you’re rooming with Mother Nature, she has ways of taking the whole house.

Sometime in the last 30 years, ‘taxes’ became a dirty word. People wanted all the government protections they were accustomed to, but didn’t want to pay for them. As taxpayer funding fell for schools, people vilified schools because quality fell. Voters are quick to blame the government as infrastructure crumbles but refuse to pay for upgrades. No one needs police or firefighters until well, they need them, then they sure as hell better be around, funding or not.

Colorado’s political landscape is as rocky as its peaks. The state is as well-known for the hyper-religiously conservative Focus on the Family as it is for the town often nick-named, “the People’s Republic of Boulder.” The urban center of Denver is as liberal as New York or San Francisco. Its surrounding suburbs can be as conservative as Arizona. Like much of the country, libertarianism has become the new catch-all political philosophy.

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