The “Dixie fire” in northern California has consumed some 500,000 acres and over 400 structures, including most of the town of Greenville. More than 5,800 personnel are fighting the fire. Several other large fires are blazing in the region.

Environmentalists, climate alarmists, and mainstream media predictably blamed climate change for them.

But it’s likely they’re wrong. Instead, Gary Maynard, an adjunct lecturer in “environmental sociology” who has taught at Santa Clara University and Sonoma State University in California, has been charged “with willfully setting the Ranch Fire in Lassen County on Saturday, and could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on that count.”

According to Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Anderson, “Over the course of the last several weeks, Maynard has set a series of fires in the vicinity of the Lassen National Forest and Shasta Trinity National Forest. … The area in which Maynard chose to set his fires is near the ongoing Dixie fire, a fire which is still not contained despite the deployment and efforts of over 5,000 personnel.”

His bio page at Sonoma State (since taken down by the university) said his teaching and research focused on “sociology of technology/social media, social psychology, sociology of health, deviance and crime, sociology of the mass media, youth and adolescence, global sociology, environmental sociology, the sociology of sports, the sociology of drug abuse and alcoholism and quantitative research methods.”

National Public Radio showed sufficient balance to report that though climate change perhaps contributed to the hot and dry conditions that made the Dixie Fire so difficult to contain, human mismanagement is more to blame.

… the large California fire is also benefiting from decades of forestry management decisions that prioritized suppressing wildfires rather than limiting the amount of flammable fuel in the forests, as Kate Wolffe from NPR member station KQED in San Francisco reported.

“We have so much fuel, we have high tree densities, we have vulnerability and then we put climate change on top of that,” Scott Stephens, the head of the Fire Science Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, told Wolffe. “It actually just makes a difficult situation worse.”

Fix America’s Forests, a study by Holly Fretwell and and Jonathan Wood and available from the Cornwall Alliance, explains how decades of fire-suppression tactics have left trees so close together and undergrowth and fallen branches so thick that fires that could have been extinguished quickly in the past now rage out of control and burn vast areas.

Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash.