“I think what we can learn here is that we are guests in this landscape.”– Marissa Christiansen, Executive Director of the Climate and Wildfire Institute, Los Angeles
If you’re looking for one sentence that encapsulates the mentality and premise that underlines mainstream environmentalism in America today, these words from Marissa Christiansen, quoted in the closing paragraphs of a recent article “The Lost City” in New York Magazine, are a top candidate.
To be fair, nothing on Christiansen’s Climate and Wildfire Institute website is overtly calling for every wildland environment to be depopulated, or for “climate refugees” to then be relocated into mid-rise apartments where street parking has given way to bike lanes, or for every human being to have their “carbon footprint” remotely monitored in order to ration their consumption of water and energy. Much of this organization’s work appears to be focused on how to reduce the severity of wildfires by making greater use of prescribed burns.
But Christiansen stayed firmly within conventional environmentalist orthodoxy in the rest of what she told New York Magazine, saying that “the city has an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild in a more resilient manner with denser urban housing and wide firebreaks abutting the mountains.”
Denser urban housing. Wide firebreaks abutting the mountains. God help us if environmentalist bureaucrats are allowed to implement that vision. California is only 5 percent urbanized, and that is where 94 percent of the state’s population lives. California has the most densely populated urban areas of any state in America. So let’s make it even denser. The skeptics call that “stack and pack.” The environmentalists call it “smart cities.” […]
— Read More: amgreatness.com
