Wild Weather and Wild Fire in CA

The jet stream almost exactly traced the coastline today, not a typical pattern for us.

The Santa Cruz mountains wildfire injected a plume of smoke into the middle of the jet stream.

My sister says that there was no way I could have been feeling the effects of the smoke from the Santa Cruz fire by 8:30 AM when we IM'd. Jet stream speeds of 120-150 knots could travel between Santa Cruz and LA in 3 hours or so. The fire started around 5:30 AM. She's right. But what could it be?

Perhaps I was experiencing respiratory effects from the Santa Clarita fire closer to home? Santa Clarita is NE of me; the smoke from that fire is unlikely to travel this far west. It was such a small fire compared to the Santa Cruz one.

After discussion with my sister, I realized that the unusual wind pattern put me downwind of the Chevron refinery 5 miles NE of home.

It rained between 6 and 7 PM today and it sounds like the rain has started up again. Rain in late May in a non-El Nino year is rare. Could the soot from the fire have nucleated raindrops?

Links:

• CRWS Jet Stream Analysis (CA Regional Weather Server)
• MODIS Fresno (central CA) Subsets Moderate resolution imagery from NASA's Terra and Aqua Satellites
• Tornadoes, hail and snow in Southern California today
  

The ghosts among us, Part II

Speaking of the ghosts among us the recent fires have illuminated some of our dirty laundry. We like to keep our insatiable need for cheap, exploitable labor and throwaway people neatly hidden.

The NY Times wrote about how the Glare of Fires Pulls Migrants From Shadows.

Ms. Trujillo and others who help the immigrants said they saw several out in the fields as the fires approached and ash fell on them. She said many were afraid to lose their (agricultural) jobs.

“There were Mercedeses and Jaguars pulling out, people evacuating, and the migrants were still working,” said Enrique Morones, who takes food and blankets to the immigrants’ camps. “It’s outrageous.”

Some of the illegal workers who sought help from the authorities were arrested and deported. Opponents of illegal immigration, including civilian border watch groups, seized on news that immigrants had been detained at the Qualcomm Stadium evacuation center as evidence of trouble that illegal immigrants cause.

The Border Patrol also arrested scores of illegal immigrants made visible by the fires. Agent Fisher of the Border Patrol said 100 had been arrested since the fires started Sunday.

Migrants hide in the canyons at the urban-wildland interface. It appears that many (perhaps most) of the fatalities last week were migrants burned alive in their hiding places. Their remains are being found as the fires are slowly conquered.

Also don't miss another article, Rethinking Fire Policy in the Tinderbox. Here's a graphic from the story.

People outside this region are often not aware that LA is a broad basin ringed by mountain ranges. The basin is built out. The growth has largely been in canyons or in the mountains, at the urban-wildland interface (shown in yellow). The only reason that LA county's percentage is not as high as those of neighboring counties is because of urban infill developments such as the townhouse I call home.

I have mixed feelings about urban infill. I am collecting photos and other supporting documentation for a long post later.

You may want to visit Volker Radeloff's website. He collected the land category data for the map above. His website has a link to the paper, The Wildland Urban Interface in the United States.

Coincidentally (or maybe not), Radeloff and Yi-Fu Tuan are both at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Tuan writes short essays in "Dear Colleague" format. I don't always agree with him, but I enjoy reading him from time to time. When I reread him, I discover thoughts and ideas that I didn't see upon earlier reading. I highly recommend his website! I found this in his archives about the difference between science and magic.

Magic is knowledge and knowledge is power. Magic is full of esoteric knowledge, backed by test tubes, burners, and bubbling liquids, the end of which is power—that is, the ability to change the world or navigate effectively in it. In the sixteenth century came science, toted with great vigor by Francis Bacon. To him, science and not magic is knowledge and power. In the end, as we all know, science displaced magic, not because its knowledge is more esoteric or because it has fancier test tubes or because it is backed by a more prestigious social network, but because it has triumphed in the one area that truly matters to people—power.

At the end of this particular essay, he cautions against studying systems just so we can mess with change them.

Magic predates science. But so did something else—wisdom. Wisdom strove for knowledge about reality, but not so much to gain mastery over it as to enable humans to adapt. Ecological science is thus more like ancient wisdom than it is like modern, technology-driven science. The word "community," which frequently crops up in ecology, suggests that one studies it not to control or change it to something better, but rather the opposite, to preserve or restore it. When "human" is added to ecology, as in human ecology, the word "community" is retained, and with such retention, the implied conservative posture of wisdom. Political ecology, on the other hand, is more dynamic. Implied is a need to alter the socio-political structure of a community. Alter to what? Do ecologists say that a mangrove swamp or a tropical rainforest ought to be something ecologically better? No. But political ecologists do say of any existent human community that, yes, it can and ought to be better. Ecology is like old-fashioned wisdom in that it studies what exists and how creatures ought to adjust and adapt. By comparison, political ecology is more power driven, and is in this regard like modern science. On the other hand, the power it interests itself in is not physical power, like the ability to throw things, but rather socio-political power. So what is political ecology? A science, a wisdom, an ideology? All of the above, none of the above?

Yeah, we are unique

Since we bought our blue Prius, we have been noticing them everywhere. In fact, there is another on our block, 3 houses away. There is another one at our workplace. Half the families of Iris' circle of a half dozen playmates have identical blue Priuses. See the photo at the camp bus stop above.

At work, I sometimes wander around the vast parking structure and lot, looking for my car. (Mark bicycles in most days and often takes the car out at lunch for errands. He doesn't always tell me where he left it.) I have mistaken the other blue Prius for mine, walked all the way across the parking lot and then discovered it was the wrong car. It is easy to be faked out; the other blue Prius has the same booster seat, but in a different color. That is not evident until I get right up next to it and the door doesn't automatically unlock for the smart key in my purse.

My solution is to park next to the other blue Prius. That way, we need to only walk to one area of the lot and we know our car is nearby. (This post is to inform Mark of our new system.)

Last night, I found out who owned the other blue Prius at work. I had to smile. They work downstairs from me and sent their two kids to the same day care center that Iris attended for 3.5 years. It was the same daycare center where I met the other 3 blue Prius owners. (I count the family that sold us their blue Prius when they moved across the country.) Of course their son, the same age as Iris, has the same booster seat.

6 families, one daycare center, and 5 blue Priuses. I better send them email to let them know that I am not stalking them, I just want to minimize the time it takes me to find the car.

Aside:
I heard one commentator say that we don't really meet people by chance any more. We think we do, but we meet people who share our values and interests because of the places we hang out. Mothers who meet at daycare centers bond because we already had something in common by virtue of selecting that daycare center.

Because we can afford this particular center, we have to have a certain level of income and education. The location of this center implies that we live or work nearby; housing segregation by class and income is commonplace. This center charges about as much as one of LA's cheaper (usually undocumented with little or no English) nannies for the same amount of hours. The fact that we chose the center over one on one care in our homes says something about our values.

Fire Update:
We are fine. Mark's parents in San Diego are fine. The current fires are farther from them than in 2003. The smoke level at our house finally became tolerable this morning. My breathing is less ragged now. There was a bit of coastal fog that precipitated out much of the fine particles in the air. I am even hanging laundry outside today.

The LA county fires are mostly out. The San Diego fires still pose a danger. Go to the KPBS website for the latest news and fire maps for SD.

Please Send Rain

We are burning up.

This image of the wildfires in southern California was taken by the NASA Terra satellite during this afternoon's overpass. I am not sure if the plumes in northern Mexico are dust or smoke. The color shift occurs when images from two satellite overpasses are stitched together. Areas which are very bright in the infrared (hotspots) are marked in red.

The largest and waviest plume comes from the Witch Fire in Poway.

See more imagery by visiting the NASA MODIS Rapid Response System website:
Global Subsets: click on your region of interest
USA5 Subset
The subset data has a slight time delay. For the latest imagery, use the Near Real-time Imagery Browser page.

Hint: Aura flies overhead at roughly 1:30 local time. Convert your local time to UTC time to obtain an approximate time to browse first. Then go a little earlier or later until you find what you want. Remember that visible imagery will be available during the early afternoon overpass but not the post midnight one.

The CIMSS Satellite Blog shows an animation of smoke plumes seen from the GOES (geostationary) satellite. It is kind of mesmerizing to see the smoke plumes undulate.

Wildfire Season Again

The wind abruptly switched on and changed directions yesterday evening. The dewpoint plumeted. Look at this nearby (uncalibrated) personal weather station.

Today, the dewpoint dropped even lower; it is currently at -4 °C.

Is it any wonder that Malibu is on fire again? Actually, all of southern California appears to be on fire. See this map of current SoCal fires. When I went out today, my eyes stung from all the smoke. The LA Times has an informative flash animation showing that Fire is a river that runs uphill.

I noticed with dismay that there are a bunch of fires in the vicinity of Cindy Rinne's home. Four years ago, her family lost almost everything in a wildfire that took out hundreds of homes. She grabbed her art quilts and her husband grabbed her Bernina. Her entire stash was wiped out. Yet, life goes on and she is continuing to create.

There are also a bunch of fires near Victorville. I hope they are contained before the DARPA Urban Challenge semifinals next week. We are going to cheer The Golem Group on. Their vehicle is a souped up Prius. How can we not cheer for them?

Home is a State of Mind

I have been thinking about the idea of home for the last week. I had such a sense of homesickness as I drove the (San Francisco) Peninsula. Although I have lived in many places, I still think of myself as a mid-Peninsula girl. As I drove between San Jose and San Francisco last week, the sense of homecoming was palpable. It wasn't because I was driving to my mother's house; she moved there after I finished college. It was the familiarity of the landscape.

The sunsets of my youth haunt me. We never even saw the sun at sunset, but no matter. The fog banks poured like molten lava through gaps in the coastal range. The setting sun lit the fog up in Technicolor hues of orange, yellow, hot pink, violet, indigo and every shade in between. The mountain backdrop appeared cloaked in a dusky blue-black, deepened by the complementary colors of the sky. I used to take evening history classes at the College of San Mateo, near the top of one such gap in the mountains. I felt like Dorothy driving into the Technicolor dream world.

One summer in the middle of high school, I took Field Biology. We spent 3 days a week in the field and two days in the lab. We explored the entire bay area that summer. I can make out the rock formations and tell you how they formed. I can't remember the names of the plants any more, but I can tell you their distinguishing characteristics and how they are adapted for their home. Over there, my fellow students, hunting for wild orchids that grow by artesian springs in the coastal range, stumbled upon an ingenious pot farm, complete with a drip irrigation system. We slowly backed away and I never did get a good look at the orchids.

Behind every exit of I-280, there is another memory. I found myself pointing out every landmark for Iris. See that monolithic rock over there, that is serpentine, the state rock. She looked up from her book and said that it looked more like a mountain than a rock.

Look, the ridge above Stevens Creek is on fire! She was not impressed. She has seen a wildfire on every SoCal-NorCal trip. This was a two alarm trip because we saw a fire on the I-5 in the central valley on our return drive.

Remember that lake? We stopped to view it after my stepmother's funeral and before we interred her ashes at the top of the ridge over there. Actually, I choked up just thinking about that and didn't point it out to Iris. Her nose buried in a book, she was blissfully unaware of the sadness of that freeway exit.

Each California Mission Bell Marker triggered more memories. They mark the route of El Camino Real, "The Royal Highway", that connects the Spanish missions between San Diego (Mark's hometown), through Los Angeles (our current home) and San Francisco (my hometown), and terminates in Sonoma. Our route crosses the "El" north of Los Angeles and follows it for a short stretch along California Highway 82.

In a land where everyone is from somewhere else, that's how you can tell a native Californian. We ask each other which mission we recreated for our 4th grade California mission unit. Every student, in public or private school, would have made one. Most would have visited at least one mission with their parents as homework. Mom and I went out to visit Mission Santa Clara. I procrastinated and then turned in a shoe box turned into a "generic" mission.

However, a non-native made me feel especially Californian. She met a Californian and followed him out here. At first, whe wondered why so many people want to live in a place so crowded and so expensive. Then they settled in, bought a house and joined a church. She raved about her parish priest. As a bridesmaid, I would get to meet him at her wedding.

As we followed her directions for getting to the wedding rehearsal, we saw some mission bell markers. Mark remarked that Mission San Jose was in the vicinity. As we got closer to the church, the realization came to us at the same time. We were headed for Mission San Jose! My friend, who hailed from the other side of the country, was getting married in not just her parish church, but one of the oldest churches in the new world. I always cry at weddings, but this one was especially poignant because of the history of the place.

Perhaps home isn't San Francisco, Los Angeles or San Diego. All of California is our home.

Asides:

• Iris brought 3 books along for the northbound drive which would have been exactly the right amount. However, she lost one of them and had to read one of the remaining books twice. I later found the book under the front passenger seat.
  
• I drove our new (to us) Prius and only used 9 gallons of gasoline each way. The brief patches of stop and go traffic only served to increase our gas mileage.
• What is it with Californian priests and their Birkenstocks? Mark and I have been in the wedding party for two CA weddings in which the priests (one Buddhist, one Catholic) officiated in Birkenstocks.
• I made my bridesmaid's dress. The bride and I shopped for fabric in LA. She sent each bridesmaid (scattered across the country) some heavyweight Thai silk dupioni, china silk lining, a pattern, thread and zipper. Each of us made our own dresses or hired a seamstress.
  
• Missions are like presidential libraries. If Mark and I are in the vicinity and not in a hurry, we always make a detour for a visit. It doesn't matter how we feel about the conquistadors or the individual presidents' legacies, we are history buffs.
• I cruised the "El" once and only once with a friend from high school. I didn't see why she would want to do that every weekend. It looked as lame as American Graffiti.
• Environmental monitoring is truly dual use. A helicopter pilot, making a routine inspection for possible wildfires, found an elaborate pot farm near Glendale, CA. Read about it here.
  

Political Firestorm

There is so much in the news about Katrina right now. Sadly, our nation's failure is not unique. Read A Political Crisis Brews in Greece as Fires Rage. Note how the fires spread uphill, but unusually strong winds blew it up and over a ridge.

Science is easy, the political will to do something about it is hard. Keeping equipment, supplies and staff "just in case" is not wasteful. It could save your life and livelihood someday. In the words of one survivor who stayed and saved his home and that of his neighbors:

“I was disappointed, honestly,” he said. “Because not only was there no one to help me, there was no one in sight. ‘Am I just standing here alone? What happened to all my townspeople? What is the purpose of life if I am all alone?’ ”

The Woods are on Fire

Remember my rant in Fire is a river that runs uphill? Don't miss the NY Times article, On Fringe of Forests, Homes and Fires Meet.

A new generation of Americans (snip), in moving to places perched on the edge of vast, undeveloped government lands in the West, are living out a dangerous experiment, many of them ignorant of the risk.

Their migration — more than 8.6 million new homes in the West within 30 miles of a national forest since 1982, according to research at the University of Wisconsin — has coincided with profound environmental changes that have worsened the fire hazard, including years of drought, record-setting heat and forest management policies that have allowed brush and dead trees to build up.

Not only are there more fires, but the number of structures in the trees is going up. Who pays? You and I do. (And let us not forget that firefighters pay with their lives all too frequently.)

About 45 percent of the Forest Service’s proposed budget for 2008 is designated for firefighting, compared with 13 percent in 1991. Last year, the agency spent $2.5 billion, a record, thinning fuels and fighting fires that burned 9.9 million acres, also a record.

California, braced for what fire officials have said could be one of the worst seasons in history this year, has set aside $850 million for wildfire suppression.

The Department of Interior, which includes the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management, the country’s largest landlord, spent $424 million fighting fire last year.

To put this in perspective, California budgeted $5.1 billion of the University of California and $4.0 billion for the California State Universities for this year. $.85 billion is not chump change. I would also argue that state spending on higher education has the potential to pay back the state many-fold because graduates (relative to those who never went to college) will likely earn more and hence, pay more in taxes.

Aside: The article does end with a newly transplanted (to the woods) couple deciding to join the volunteer fire department. That's showing the right self-sufficient pioneer spirit!

I knew a woman who moved from the city to the mountains. Not only did she join the volunteer fire department, but she eventually became the fire marshal. She was always complaining about the part-time residents in the fanciest and biggest homes. It appeared that those owners were much less likely to clear their brush or thin trees too close to their structures; they almost never joined the volunteer fire department.

It drove her crazy. Up in the mountains, you depend not just on yourself, but on your neighbors to do their part for mutual safety. What could she do? She cited and fined them. They could afford to pay her fines and ignore her requests .

A Sense of Place

Mark and I debated the merits of returning to vacation spots versus exploring new places. We decided that we couldn't decide. Well, he is more for the latter and I am split evenly. I don't find revisiting places boring at all. There are always subtle changes. The lupines, and all the wildflowers, up at Sonora pass look so dessicated this year, compared to last year (normal precipitation) or the year before (record high precipitation).

Returning to old stomping grounds also give me a sense of place. When I see the lupines on the highway by Camp Blue Road, I know that we have arrived at the lair. They were less abundant this year than in the past. The trees had also been thinned and the forest floor cleared with a proscribed burn. If the lair can avoid the fate of South Lake Tahoe, it will be worth the effort. Click here to see the smoke plume from the Angora Fire, captured by the NASA Aura satellite.

By coincidence, Grandma Ann over at Sitting Knitting wrote about lupines while I was busy painting lupines on my Lair commemorative tile. The old kiln gave the new art shack counselors a great deal of trouble. They couldn't get the kiln to a high enough temperature for long enough. Hence, the clear glaze came out milky.

Almost every day, I hiked up (and up!) to Vista Lodge.

Usually, I joined others for yoga, Pilates or dance class. Sometimes, I would arrive early with a book. Always, I stayed late, dragging my mat to my favorite corner of the deck. I lie in the dappled alpine sunlight and look at this.

My mother says that I should be able to meditate while staring at a blank wall. I prefer to look at the branches of this tree.


Links:
See other Lair commemorative tiles at Back from Camp

Wildfire Season ad Nauseum

Although it is only May 11, we have already had quite a busy wildfire season already. I am worried about how the summer and fall will shape up. Fall is traditionally our most active fire season.

Take a look at the MODIS visible spectrum imagery of Catalina today taken by the Terra and Aqua satellites. Terra flew by in the mid-morning. The area lies near the edge of the image so the resolution is not optimal.

Aqua flew by in the early afternoon. The marine layer had burned off a bit. Catalina is near the center of the image so the resolution is better than Terra's today. (This coverage changes daily and Terra gives better coverage than Aqua some other days.

The smoke plume gives you a pretty good idea of the wind direction. Now, take a look at the terrain. (I just love the tilt feature in Google Earth.) See if you can predict where the fire will go next based upon Fire is a river that runs uphill.

There are several species that live on Catalina island and nowhere else on earth. I hope they will survive.

Links:
You may also want to look at the USDA Forest Service Wildfire Maps. Click on California/Nevada. Click anywhere on the map to zoom. See how many fires have burned since January 1, 2007 in California. Yipes.

Allstate has decided to halt writing homeowner's insurance policies in California, citing the fire danger. They've been writing policies and collecting premiums here for years. The policies even have clauses excluding flood damage. So, if they collected premiums during the wet years and now want to stop covering the state because they might have to pay out fire claims this year, then why do we carry insurance?

Wildfire Season 2007

Take a look at the photo galleries from the LA Times story about the Hollywood fire. Why does the fire burn only on one side of this ridge?

Remember that fire is a river that runs uphill? Do you see the wind direction? Note that the fire spread uphill and flowed into another "fire basin" only in the downwind direction? You can see it clearly in the Europa Technologies/Google Earth annotated map below.

Fire is a river that runs uphill

Remember the "dreamscapes" homes featured in the Los Angeles Times' west magazine? When I asked what the four homes had in common besides killer views, no one guessed that the homes are all in harm's way.

The ocean view home in Pacific Palisades was built after the previous house slid down the hill. The Malibu home replaces one that burned down in 1993. The hilltop studio is just that, and situated amid a grove of oily, fire-prone eucalyptus trees. The Palm Springs house does not look like it is in imminent danger, but it is essentially a glass box sitting next to an active earthquake fault.

Years ago, I listened to a fire modeler from Los Alamos National Lab. The takeaway message from his talk was that fire is a river that runs uphill. On flat land, in the absence of winds, a fire will burn itself out after it has exhausted the fuels in the fire perimeter. To fight the fire, you need only create a firebreak which denies the fire of the fuel it needs to maintain itself.

Flames and hot embers rise. On a hill (still in the absence of winds), the fire will keep moving uphill, picking up fresh fuel, until it can climb no further. Living on a ridge line is doubly dangerous because you are in not one, but two firesheds. A mountain top compounds the danger even further. But that is where the killer views are.

Living below the ridgeline, say on the ocean side, is not a guarantee of safety. Strong winds (can you say Santa Ana?) can blow a wall of flames over so that it curves up and over mountain ridges.

After the LANL scientist had his say, I turned to the fire chief (of a major metropolitan city with many people living at the urban wild land interface) sitting next to me and asked, "Why do you give people building permits for those homes?". He replied that he didn't. He denies them the first time because they are unsafe.

But the people who have the financial resources to build those homes are not used to hearing no. They call their buddy, the mayor, and then the mayor calls to ask the fire chief to chew his hide. To save his job, he gives the rich and powerful what they want, even though he knows it is a bad idea.

It costs a lot of money to fight fires in those mountainous subdivisions. That cost is subsidized by people living in the flatlands with views of the apartment building 10 feet away. The fire chief doesn't want to expend his department's meager resources on defending yet another home deliberately put in harm's way. But he feels like he has no choice.

Similiarly, the land in Malibu has a habit of sliding away when it rains. Caltrans does a bang-up job, continuously clearing the rocks that fall on the Pacific Coast Highway so that the rich and powerful are not inconvenienced in their commute. (The same goes for "Devil's Slide" near San Francisco.) That is money that is not spent fixing potholes in the flatlands, home of plebian chumps.

Some will say that those people pay a lot of taxes for their expensive homes. That may be, but more taxes are paid in the flatlands simply because more people live there. Yet, the cost of providing services, on a per capita (or per dwelling unit) basis are disproportionately high for the extreme view neighborhoods.

Perhaps it is time we institute something like Boulder's "blue line". Above that line, you can build a home, but don't expect any city water or fire protection. That preserves personal freedom, but doesn't ask someone else to shoulder your risk. (Well, unless you count the insurance risk pool.)

Read Heat Invades Cool Heights Over Arizona Desert.

Since 1990, more than eight million homes have been built in Western areas that foresters call “the urban-wild land” interface, also the focus of recent federal firefighting efforts...

Last year, wildfires burned nearly 10 million acres in the United States — a record, surpassing the previous year. The Forest Service has become the fire service, devoting 42 percent of its budget to fire suppression last year — more than triple what it was in 1991.

One major reason that fire fighting in the western forests has become more expensive is the number of structures (homes) being built in the trees. One Colorado newspaper had the guts to run a story questioning if our firefighters should risk (or lose) their lives protecting the vacation homes of the rich after twelve firefighters died in the Storm King Mountain fire.

It is an issue of fairness. Why should poor and middle class people subsidize the requirement of the rich to have their views?

(Of course I am jealous. I would love to have a killer view and a glass house to frame those views. Alas, my scientist salary does not allow that anywhere within bicycle commuting distance of my job. Maybe I can paint a mural on the apartment building next door to improve my view.)

Addendum
The Hollywood Hills fire behaved just like a computer modeled fire!
Read Wildfire Weather to find out why I am so obsessed with wildfires.

Thousand Oaks Wildfire

Check out the fantastic eyewitness photographs of the fire last night in Thousand Oaks at Are you cereus? (I cribbed the photo from his blog; visit his site for more dramatic photos.) Amazingly, no one got hurt and no structures burned down. Equally amazingly, Rob managed to make our 10 AM telecon this morning on time, despite the hectic and exciting night.

Read the story in the LA Times for more.

That's all folks.

Here we go again, another wildfire

I was wondering why I had upper respiratory problems today. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why. But one did ask me today if I noticed any effects of the fire upon my asthma. Another duh. Why hadn't that occurred to me?

The NASA Aqua satellite's MODIS instrument took a spectacular image of the Cabazon fire in Riverside county, near Palm Springs, this afternoon. Check out this and other images at the MODIS rapid response system website.

More about southern California wildfires here and here.

The Day Fire II

While driving home from SF on Labor Day, we passed by the Day Fire. Just in case you didn't have insomnia and didn't search the MODIS real-time imagery archive for pictures of the fire, I will post it for you. The fire fell on the bottom edge of one of the imagery tiles. You can see the area outlined in red at the bottom of the image. The fire plume extends northwards from the fire area.

This satellite was launched from Vandenberg AFB which is also in the image. Doubly interesting. However, the Day Fire was not the most impressive fire in the image. Take a look at northern California below.


Earlier posts: a picture of the start of the Day fire in Home Sweet Home and Plunging Birthrates, another impressive MODIS image of California wildfire in Wildfire Weather

Home Sweet Home and Plunging Birthrates

We drove home from San Francisco to Los Angeles yesterday afternoon and evening. Driving Interstate 5 at the end of a holiday weekend is not a bright idea. We sat in bumper to bumper stop and go traffic through the grapevine. The air quality was also not great.

At first, I thought that the sunset was really spectacular. Then I realized that was not the soft backlight of the sun setting over the coastal mountain range, but a wildfire. My little point and shoot camera got a couple of images of the brightest part of the fire. Click here to see a map of CA wildfires. Then click on the big red area north of LA to see the extent of the fire. [You can manually edit the link http://activefiremaps.fs.fed.us/fireplots/cgbYYYYDOY_HHMM.jpg where YYYY is the year, DOY is the day of year from 001-365, HH is hour from 00-23, and MM is minute and should be left at 00.]
Addendum: This has been dubbed the Day Fire because it began on Labor Day. I post more about that on September 15.

We did show Iris the exact spot that mommy and daddy met. Unfortunately, the laboratory was all torn apart and not very photogenic.

I rest my case.

Now the plunging birthrates part

There was another article about plunging birthrates (in eastern Europe) over the weekend. Read it soon before the link disappears. Notably, the governments put their main focus on changing the behavior of women. There didn't appear to be any attempt to change the behaviors of the men who father children or the employers who make life so difficult for mothers. Linda Hirshman is right. Maybe, if the birthrates plummet enough, there will be more than band-aid changes.

When we were in Australia in 2003, I read an article in one of the papers about the low birthrate in Australia. The government there had surveyed birthrates in industrialized countries around the world and found a strong correlation between the amount of time fathers spent on housework and childcare and the birthrate. Australian men fared very badly compared to American and Canadian men, and so did their birthrate. I wonder why that was not a bigger international news story?

Maybe they should bring back mandatory home economics classes in high school for both boys and girls. Equal participation in family work would be much more character and nation building than sports programs for boys. I am not advocating getting rid of sports entirely. A study of the factors that influence girls to earn doctorates in the sciences found that childhood participation in competitive sports was the second greatest influence (only slightly less influential than the encouragement of a teacher or parent). ;-)

keyword: modern motherhood

Wildfire Weather

Years ago, I worked on a NASA RESAC project to study wildfire at the urban/wildland interface. I can instinctively feel wildfire weather coming on. See what I mean?

I write about wildfires often. Click on the Wildfire tag below to see all the posts.