I am from Oroville, CA, but moved six years ago. Last year, I watched an entire town full of friends burn down and worried as my sister and my wife’s family were put on evacuation notice after evacuation notice. This year, just after my wife’s family in Sonoma were allowed to go home, Red Bluff — a city close to Paradise and Chico— woke up to fire.
These areas are farmlands that provide food for the entire nation. The Red Bluff area has almond orchards that provide almonds to Blue Diamond. If we try to move everyone from Northern California, we’ll lose tons of food that’s both exported for cash flow and sold across the US to keep supermarkets stuffed with fresh produce and wine.
The adaptations that need to happen are better forestry management with the proper amount of funding (most of the land is Federal, so this is their jurisdiction), more regulation of PG&E whose equipment has been responsible for setting many wildfires in the twenty years, and education/regulations for private land owners with fines for not caring for their land to prevent fires. In twenty to thirty years, even with climate change, California can have healthy forests and easier to manage fires.
Solutions are hard to get the government to agree to, and an even harder to sell to private land owners who’ll have to put in more work, when many don’t believe climate change is a problem
