Leaf it as is?

In my town everyone was raking and blowing (and blowing and blowing) leaves to the side of the street. Guys were out with leaf blowers and flashlights in the dark. We don't do a pickup of leaf bags; what we do is, starting this year on November 5, have crews go around with a street sweeper and suck up all the leaves on the side of the road. There's no way to know what day they will show up. You have to get those leaves out ASAP and keep adding to the pile until they come by. After they've been down your street, any remaining leaves are your problem.

Well, they hadn't gotten down by my house yet, and now it's all gone to hell. The snow we got last night and into this morning required the town plows to come out of storage, so all those piles of leaves along the curb just got thrown back onto everyone's lawns.

This is why I use the lawnmower and mulch. It helps that I don't have a lot of tall trees.

Meanwhile, in California there are terrible wildfires killing people and razing entire towns, and the finger of blame is being spun around like the spinner in the Game of Life. Some people say it's global warming, and until we reduce carbon emissions to zero, wildfires will keep raging out of control. Others point to the more down-to-earth problem of poor forest management; when President Trump suggested that, all the smart people in the media had a collective cow. But he did not just make this up; serious foresters have suggested that the budgetary and environmentalist turn from thinning forests and removing brush is the obvious change that preceded the years of terrifying fires we see now.

I guess we'll find out, or not. The United States keeps lowering its emissions of carbon, but India and China and plenty of other countries keep pumping out more. So, if that's the real problem, better move out of California because there's nothing we can do.

Then again, there are memes like these that make the rounds:

Yep, all those dead leaves provide places for the butterfly larvae to chill out over the winter, I guess. And you know what else dead leaves do? Burn.

Dead leaves don't burn as well as dry grass, it's true -- like the grass that California has with its antiquated water system -- but there's more life in grass even this late in the year than there is in the fallen leaves. I wonder if a forest ranger would look me in the eye and say that a lawn with the leaves cleared off is in more danger of spreading fire than one with dead leaves thick on the ground.

Anyway, I can hardly trust the pop environmentalism one sees about. "Don't kill the dandelions!" they say. "Save the honeybees!"

Well, guess what? Dandelions are a poor source of food for honeybees. But they seem to be great for wasps. I don't have honeybees. I haven't poisoned the dandelions in a couple of years, but only because my doggone dogs keep eating the grass and I don't want them getting sick. But all I see are a scattered few bumblebees and an enormous number of yellow jackets, and I'm allergic to wasps, so to hell with them.

Besides, as Glenn Reynolds says of global warming (among other celebrity crusades), "I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who keep telling me it's a crisis act like it's a crisis." Those folks will have to give up their big houses, their private jets, their big cars. Hell will freeze over before that happens, so if it does happen I guess there'll be a cooling trend somewhere.