Climate change is natural

Re. Fred Robillard’s letter Deal with climate change (Castanet, May 15)

Everything is being fobbed off on climate change. What an easy scapegoat, and so topical.

Anyone who does this—and that includes our elected officials—doesn’t know (anything) about the environment. The climate has, and will continue to, change for all time, regardless of anything we can or should do?

The boreal forest in its natural state is a mixture of species and has evolved that way over millennia.

Enter man. He proceeded to clearcut those forests, creating all the problems that result from water flowing over a bare surfaces and then pretended to patch it up by planting a single preferred species. What could possibly go wrong?

Those single coniferous species are full of resin. The forest floors are choked with underbrush. Local self-contained fires, which cleared out the tinder, were discouraged.

The problem as (comic strip character) Pogo astutely observed many years ago, is us. More specifically, it’s the logging industry and the Ministry of Forests.

With their lobbying and sinecures, they are not about to go into history like the beaver and muskrat industries of Canada’s past. Even court jesters got other jobs when their trade went defunct.

The more things don’t change, the more they will stay the same. Our responses don’t work.

Wildfires can now be confidently predicted every year.

Steve Friedman, West Kelowna