With reports that some of the fires in California may have been started by arsonists, some people have speculated that all the fires were set by ecoterrorists. What these accusations seem to overlook, however, is that the nation has long faced a much deeper and more insidious philosophical ecoterrorism.

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This philosophical ecoterrorism envisions and strives for an mythical, pre-settlement America — while ignoring the fact that we have 300 million people living here. This philosophy, combined with governmental inefficiencies, has created the conditions under which forest fires flourish and eventually spread out to destroy private property, as has occurred with the most recent catastrophe.

Every one of this month’s 15 major southern California’s fires started on government lands — mainly in the three or four National Forests that stretch 250 miles from Mexico into Ventura County. These are the Cleveland National Forest, the San Bernardino National Forest, Angeles National Forest, and Los Padres National Forest. Also the Malibu fire came down out of the infamous Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area. The eighth-largest fire was at Camp Pendleton Marine Base, which is now run largely as an inviolate Endangered Species Preserve.

These fires have burned out of control for a number of reasons. First, the federal government has mismanaged all the National Forests for a century — believing fires were unnatural and evil, the government sought to extinguish at all costs. The Smokey the Bear era — beginning in the 1940s — exacerbated that policy, pushing to stop every fire within 24 hours.

By contrast, the pre-settlement, open, park-like forests naturally were characterized by relatively frequent ground-hugging low-intensity underbrush clearing fires. However, the action on the part of the feds to stamp these out for about 100 years, filled the forests with duff, needles, cones, deadwood, and downed wood, and thousands of small undergrowth trees — what amounts to a tinder box. In addition, these conditions stressed and weakened the entire forest.

Then the nation let the Greens and “deep ecologists” move us from the era of mismanagement into the trendy era of no-management. This idea they dubbed “natural regulation.”

The “natural regulation” philosophy allowed forests to whither and die from drought, over-crowding, insects, beetles, diseases, and eventually fire. Greens and federal bureaucrats accepted this result simply because they deemed it “natural.”