" But there are other factors that have contributed to the devastating wildfire season in California, and, if we actually want lives to stop being destroyed every summer, we need to take those into account as well."

Wasn't Charles just saying that climate change was the sole cause of these fires?

If the aliens are waiting until peak population to come harvest the food crop of humans, they better get on it before we incinerate ourselves and they make that long trip for nothing. Humans as a group, being a dangerous virus, are incapable of stopping their relentless population increase and destruction of the planet. We're effed either way.

@1: yes, that's exactly what he said. only ACC causes fires. you read really well.

"humans still have not figured out how to sustainably exist on this planet"

I disagree. At some point, our cleverness allowed us to escape the bonds of nature, but prior to that, humans were subject to the same rules as any other animal.

"Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish." W.C. Williams

Good episode of 99% Invisible on wild fires: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

"some of that money goes to fix broken infrastructure like bridges and power lines, but some of it goes to rebuilding homes in the same locations where they were just destroyed."

To be clear, the amount allocated for individual assistance (i.e., money for folks to rebuild homes) is a small fraction of the federal funding that comes with a disaster declaration. So, while it is true that "some" funding goes to rebuilding homes, this is in the form of relatively small FEMA grants (capped at $32,000) that are unavailable to most homeowners.

For instance, the federal relief granted for last year's wildfires in California included $280 million in funding for "public" assistance--the bridges and power lines. But only $16 million in private assistance--rebuilding houses--was issued. In other words, only about 6% of federal disaster relief went to rebuilding homes.

@6 Meant to include this link: https://www.fema.gov/disaster/4344

@6 Thanks, never knew those numbers.

Great piece. Another factor that belongs in the lost: habit disturbance and invasive species. In Washington, cheat grass is a potent fue and a non-native species. Another factor worth mentioning: humams directly. Isn’t it 80% of wildfires that are human-caused?

In the lost = In the list, fue = fuel, and humams = humans. Geez - my spelling! Sorry.

@5 Yeah, that was a really eye opening episode, so much so that I posted about it in Katie's last wildfire article.

Stop breeding, voting RepubliKKKan and feeding the gluttonous fossil fuel industry, people!!
@9 seanat: Agreed, and thank you for aptly pointing out another additional contributor to the global warming epidemic.

@1, @3

According to Charles Mudede, the cause of the wildfires is Christianity:

www.thestranger.com/slog/2018/07/31/30034751/trumps-100-billion-tax-cut-explains-why-god-is-killing-us

Me, I figure it's Global Warming. Has to be, it's the only environmental problem that exists today. All the other ones just kind of went away in the past 40 years, somehow.

I must say, it's much easier to think about ecology and sustainability and all that now-- it was way harder when we had noise pollution and heavy metals in the groundwater and nuclear waste and erosion of arable land and wetlands draining and a hole in the ozone layer and antibiotic-resistant pathogens and oceans without any cod in them.

But now? Global Warming, and bam, you're done thinking, whether it's about Polar bears or Wildfires or whatever. So much better!

"... After 200,000 years as a species, humans still have not figured out how to sustainably exist on this planet...."

Disagree. Humans totally figured out how to sustainably exist on this planet and did so quite well for thousands of years.

But then the population got larger, and expansionist-capitalist exploitation came along, followed by Science! and smarty-brain planning with All The Answers, having forgotten all the previous answers, deciding that there must be new answers and only those were the right ones.

Now we have to figure out how to live sustainable again.

@14

Homo Sapiens were hunting entire species to extinction long before agriculture, let alone modern science or the preoccupation with blaming Capitalism-with-a-capital-C for all of everyone's problems.

Go look up "Late Quaternary Extinction Event." That's not what sustainability looks like.

If you want to talk about Humans (that is, members of the genus Homo) who migrated out of Africa a million and a half years before Homo Sapiens arrived, though... well, you'd have a much better case there, provided you manage to avoid wondering why Homo Erectus isn't wandering around Eurasia any more.

Good article, Katie. And you're right: we humans should only live in the most climatologically predictable and stable areas--areas not prone to fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, powerful storms, tidal forces, mudslides, volcanic activity, droughts, or other natural disasters. Therefore the only safe place for humans to live in any large, collective sense, is actually no where at all really.