Thoughts and prayers go out to the people of California, Oregon and Washington who have been ravaged by a heat wave and subsequent forest fires.

Dozens of lives have been lost and a multitude of homes and businesses burned to the ground. The loss of wildlife is incalculable. Thanks to the brave firefighters who are overmatched by the scope of these tragedies.

The really sad part is that these fires could have been minimized without political intervention.

The governor of California is blaming the fires on “climate change.” The truth is that forest mismanagement is mostly to blame. Groups like Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology have been issuing warnings since 1980 about the environmentalist policy of not clearing the forests of fallen trees and brush. The environmentalists have successfully halted the removal of these wildland fuels that just keep piling up. When lightning strikes or a power line goes down or a lit cigarette is tossed out a car window, there is a gigantic source of fuel that feeds a devastating forest fire.

The U.S. Forest Service and state agencies in California are suddenly more open to prescribed burns and managed burns. The plan should be to burn a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. That would diminish the intensity of any fires that pop up.

Scientists say that between 4-11 million acres of forest burned each year before California was populated. From 1982-98, California government burned about 30,000 acres a year. By 2017, that dropped to 13,000 acres a year.

The magazine Nature Sustainability concluded that California would now need to burn 20 million acres – roughly the size of Maine – to make the situation controllable.

Firefighters think the state should let the fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles but the strategy has been to fully extinguish every fire.

Progressives like to say they believe in science. They haven’t followed science or common sense in California and that has destroyed lives and massive property.