ROME — Pope Francis expressed his solidarity with the victims of West Coast fires on Sunday, while praising firefighters and volunteers working to minimize the damage.
“I would like to express my closeness to the populations impacted by the fires that are devastating so many regions of the Planet, as well as to the volunteers and firefighters who risk their lives to extinguish the blazes,” the pontiff said to the faithful gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for his weekly Angelus address.
“I am thinking of the West Coast of the United States, particularly California, and I am also thinking of the central regions of South America, to the Panatal zone of Paraguay, to the banks of the Paraná River in Argentina,” the pope added, before turning to the sources of the conflagrations.
“Many fires are caused by persistent drought, but there are also those caused by man,” he noted. “May the Lord sustain those who are suffering the consequences of these catastrophes and make us careful to preserve creation.”
The blame game for West Coast fires has raged for months, with many insisting that forest management has been seriously deficient and others blaming arsonists or climate change.
Last month, National Public Radio (NPR) observed that “California and Oregon in particular are far behind stated goals of treating millions of acres of forests and wild lands through restoration projects, selective thinning of trees and brush and prescribed burning.”
“The treatments they’ve been implementing for years haven’t really been at the scale that they need to be to offset a wind-driven, climate change-exacerbated event,” said Andrew Sánchez Meador, director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University.
Similarly, Chuck DeVore, the vice president of national initiatives at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, wrote in Forbes that “it’s not climate change that’s burning up the forests, killing people, and destroying hundreds of homes; it’s decades of environmental mismanagement that has created a tinderbox of unharvested timber, dead trees, and thick underbrush.”