I have a lovely friend who lives in California who last year shared with me that, under Trump, funding for reforestation was cut and that all planting was effectively stopped. When she wrote to me, the limited staff available was having to deal with the worst wildfires they had ever seen. This was on top of a seven year drought and Phytophthora ramorum, Sudden Oak Death (SOD), a disease which kills oak and other species of trees. It has had devastating effects on the forest populations in California and Oregon and since 2008 there has been discussion academically whether trees lost to the epidemic have contributed to an increase of woodland fuel, most notably by the US Department of Agriculture in a paper written in 2012*.

Today my emails are full of pictures from many different sources of the orange skies in California. Trump has been trying to withhold disaster relief money because voters in the State opposed him politically, while today he and his posse zips from Washington to Michigan and back to Washington to deliver an address to ‘pre-credentialed’ journalists. Has he not heard of Zoom? Or Hangouts, Skype, or Facetime? Yesterday he went to Florida, and to North Carolina to visit a museum. And this is what he went there to say:

Fifty-six days from now we're going to win North Carolina, we're going to win four more years in the White House. This is a choice and I must say this is a choice for many, many decades. I don't think you have a bigger difference and maybe you've never had a bigger difference. This is the American dream and the other, I don't want to say it because I'll get myself in trouble with the fake news back there, but the other is a basic disaster for our country.

Disaster is already happening right in front of his eyes and it does not pertain to ‘fake news’.

* ‘The effects of sudden oak death and wildfire on forest composition and dynamics in the Big Sur Ecoregion of Coastal California’ Metz, et al

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