Zadekpedia“Fire” appears in them in several unrelated senses: a 2007 California forest fire and the litigation that followed, wildfire policy in Australia and California, a municipal fire department and its union, and a therapist’s example of being fired from a job. No excerpt supplies a founding date, a founding principle, a headquarters, or a membership for any body called FIRE.
The Moonlight Fire and Scorched Worth
Journalist and author Joel Engel discussed his book Scorched Worth with Bob Zadek. Engel said the book begins with a forest fire that started on Labor Day 2007 in the Plumas National Forest of the Sierra and ended up burning about 65,000 acres 3 (2018). Two investigators, one from the California Department of Forestry, aka Cal Fire, and the other from the US Forest Service, set out to find what had happened. Engel said they almost immediately determined, without really doing any investigation, that Sierra Pacific Industries, described as one of the largest lumber suppliers in the United States headquartered in Redding, California, had been responsible, because one of its subcontractors cutting land for it had started the fire when the grouser of a bulldozer went over a rock, igniting a spark that landed in forest duff and spread. The excerpt ends there.
Zadek’s introduction to the episode said the book details the legal battle following the 2007 Moonlight Fire in California, that government investigators fabricated evidence to blame Sierra Pacific Industries for the fire to secure a massive settlement, that an illegal off-the-books government fund was discovered, and that the judicial system failed to hold government actors accountable for fraud on the court. Zadek told listeners the story involved a spark from a tractor, 12 years of litigation and ongoing fines of hundreds of millions of dollars, and what he called unbelievable deceit and corruption by the government. He said Engel had authored or co-authored nearly 20 books, including The Oldest Rookie, which he said was made into a movie, The Rookie, that he believed starred Robert Redford.
Wildfire policy in Australia and California
Myron Ebell, whom Zadek described as handling environmental issues at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told Zadek that the global warming folks were very quick to blame the catastrophe in Australia on global warming, but that there were two factors What’s Really to Blame for California and Australia Wildfires? (2020). The first was that Australia’s forests are mainly eucalyptus, very prone to fire in droughts, and that Australia is subject to periodic bushfires. The second was that the environmental movement in Australia had convinced successive governments, including the conservatives, called the Liberal Party, to stop and prohibit the policies that minimize and control these fires. The main such policy, Ebell said, is land clearing, which involves prescribed burns in certain areas very strategically, done in the winter when it is wet and cool, so that a big fire cannot get going. He said the environmental movement in Australia has basically banned that practice.
Ebell said the same thing is going on in the West and in California, where fuel buildup caused by gross mismanagement of public lands, including stopping timber production in national forests, has led to the same kind of environmental catastrophe. He said that if you do not cut the timber it eventually will burn down. On CO2, Ebell said levels have gone up from 270 parts per million in 1800 to 400 parts per million today, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, and that the direct effect of higher CO2 levels is a greening of the Earth. He said people like Al Gore deny that the Earth is greening up, but that satellite photography on the NASA website shows it.
On personal protection, Ebell said people need to be allowed to clear the land around their houses and keep it clear. He recounted a story of a rural firefighter in Australia who went against the law and cleared the land around his house, was fined $50,000 Australian with $50,000 court costs, and whose house was the only one in the neighborhood that survived when the fire came. Zadek said the firefighter was doing something on his own land to protect his family and that the government responded by fining him $100,000 Australian. Zadek also recalled a story he said he had told on the show years ago about a landowner on a mountain in one of the Western states who collected rainwater off his roof into cisterns and tanks; Zadek said the state, which he thought was Colorado but was not certain, fined him and convicted him of a crime for collecting rainwater, on the theory that the rainwater belongs to the state. Zadek said firefighters told the man they used the water he collected when they had to put out fires in his area, and that he was sentenced to jail because he said he would not stop.
A California city’s fire department
Jeff Hewitt, speaking with Zadek, described a battle while he was mayor over his city’s fire service Commonsense COVID Response (2020). He said most cities in Riverside County contract for fire service through the county, which uses Cal Fire, a state agency, to supply firefighters, and that Riverside County has the largest Cal Fire fire department in the state with 100 different stations and over 1,000 firefighters. He said the union was forcing Riverside County Cal Fire to staff all engines with three at all times, while his city had always had a staffing of two, and that adding the third firefighter would cost another $750,000 per year without really increasing safety. Hewitt said he refused to raise taxes, citing retired residents on very low Social Security income, and that the fight lasted a year. He said that on January 1st, 2017, at midnight, Cal Fire drove its engine out and the city brought in its own newly purchased engine, that its firefighters had 401(k) defined contribution pensions, that staffing was four instead of two or three, and that the city was saving a million dollars a year in current costs. Zadek said the episode showed the importance of local government, arguing Hewitt’s per capita effect on his constituents exceeded that of representatives in the House.
Across episodes
Fire appears in four separate treatments: Engel on the Moonlight Fire litigation, Ebell on Australian and California wildfire policy, Hewitt on a municipal fire department and its union, and Dr. Michael Edelstein’s ABC method, in which the activating event used as an example is being fired at work How to Stay Sane in a Statist World (2017). No excerpt connects these treatments to each other or to any organization called FIRE.
Guests and episodes
3 appearances by 2 guests, 2011–2022. Guests A–Z by first name.
- Harvey Silverglate ×2 (Co-founder and Chairman of FIRE) — Is Your Alma Mater a Soviet Gulag? (2011) — Erosion of free speech on college campuses.; The FBI: Our Uninvited Federal Police Force (2022) — Abolishing the FBI and federal criminal code reform.
- Joe Cohn (Director of Legislative Policy at FIRE) — Do you know your rights? (2022) — Due process and Title IX on college campuses.