Wildfires Quotes

The spirit of L.A. is untamed wilderness. It's earthquakes and wildfires and oceans and mountain lions and fog. There's great physical beauty.

Wildfires can leave the land with burn scars that last for years.

Atheism is spreading like wildfire.

When it comes to wildfires, 2013 wasn't a good year, which is why I'm especially proud that the majority of my wildfire prevention legislation was signed into law today.

And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet - because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They're a threat to our children's future. And in this election, you can do something about it.

Of the over 100,000 wildfires that happen in the U.S. each year, not a single one would get started without the fire triangle: Oxygen, heat and fuel. Fire needs all three to exist. It's like the three branches of our government: Legislative, judicial and executive. The fewer there are, the safer we are.

The Middle East is literally going up in flames, as is California, and Katrina's problems haven't been solved, and Congress' response is to criticize Federal judges.

During the time I was in office we have seen the beginning of the elimination of the fire season completely and are having fires all year round. I think we have seen the major problem of the destruction of land and property and lives that is a major problem because we don't have the resources for that many fires and we don't have the resources and the manpower to fight those fires throughout the year.

For 10,000 years, Native Americans lived on this landscape, and they intentionally burned it -- a lot. They used fire to burn meadows and to thin certain forests so they could grow more food. They used fire to increase graze for the deer and the elk and the bison that they hunted. And most importantly, they figured out if they burned in the spring and the fall, they could avoid the out-of-control fires of summer. European settlement -- it occurred much later, in the mid-1800s, and by the 1880s, livestock grazing was in high gear. I mean, if you think about it, the cattle and the sheep ate the grasses which had been the conveyer belt for the historical fires, and this prevented once-frequent fires from thinning out trees and burning up dead wood. Later came roads and railroads, and they acted as potent firebreaks, interrupting further the flow of fire across this landscape.

California must be a really big fan of the 'Hunger Games.' Because it's always catching fire.

This [increasingly severe large forest fires] is actually a social problem. It's got ecological and climate explanations, but it's a social problem, and it will take us humans to solve it. Public support for these tools is poor. Prescribed burning and managed wildfires are not well-supported. We actually all simply want fires to magically go away and take that pesky smoke with them, don't we? But there is no future without lots of fire and lots of smoke. That option is actually not on the table. Until we, the owners of public lands, make it our high priority to do something about the current situation, we're going to experience continued losses to megafires. So it's up to us. We can spread this message to our lawmakers, folks who can help us manage our fires and our forests. If we're unsuccessful, where will you go to play when your favorite places are burned black? Where will you go to breathe deep and slow?

The Amazon is still burning; we just don't hear the smoke detectors anymore.

There's not really much destruction in New York besides the weather and it's a natural force so it's not like any destruction. But LA gets leveled (laughs). That's my comment to Hollywood.

If you take 67 brush fires times 10 years, that's almost 700 right there. Those brush fires are incredibly dangerous, all those homes going down proved that.

The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor only to break out again later.

This was what a lot of us, mainly young men, did in the summers in northern Arizona. This is how I put myself through college. I fought fires in the summer, and then I went back and did it again when I went to graduate school.

The forest fires are the worst disaster in California since I was elected.

When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms.

For millions of Americans, climate change is no longer just a chart or a graph. It's the smoke on our tongues from massive wildfires. It's the floodwater invading our homes and record-breaking hurricanes and heat waves.

East and Gulf Coast states are at risk of hurricanes; prairie and other central and southern states are constantly threatened by tornados; and western states commonly face damaging droughts. Extreme weather does not discriminate by American geography.

For Australians, climate change is no longer a distant threat. Our rivers are dying, bush fires are more ferocious and more frequent and our natural wonders - the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu, our rainforests - are now at risk.

Climate scientists have long pointed to the Southwest as one of the places in the U.S. that is most vulnerable to global warming impacts, especially drought. And if there's one thing that even climate denialists don't dispute, dry things burn.

The great wilds of our country, once held to be boundless and inexhaustible, are being rapidly invaded and overrun in every direction, and everything destructible in them is being destroyed. How far destruction may go it is not easy to guess. Every landscape, low and high, seems doomed to be trampled and harried. Even the sky is not safe from scath-blurred and blackened whole summers together with the smoke of fires that devour the woods.

It is known that wildfires behave unpredictably - this is fundamental - but it is my experience that humans in the presence of wildfire are also likely to behave in aberrant and unpredictable ways.

Burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares.