EDITORIAL: Views from the nation's press

Aug. 13—The Bangor Daily News on mourning for Maui:

Many Americans think of Hawaii as a tropical paradise, a place they dream of visiting.

That may be true, but images from Maui this week conveyed a different sentiment — anguish. Anguish for the dozens of people who died in massive fires on the island. Anguish for the thousands of people who lost their homes and businesses. Anguish for the communities that were destroyed and forever altered by the flames.

"Tragedy that hits one of us, is felt by all of us," Maui County Mayor Richard Bissen Jr. said in a recorded statement. Although we are thousands of miles away from Hawaii, we share this sentiment.

We also share in the horror at the lives lost and properties decimated by the fast-moving fires, which were fanned by a hurricane south of the Hawaiian islands. A fire in Lahaina, a historic community that was once the capital of the Kingdom of Hawaii, spread so fast that people jumped into the ocean to escape.

The fires on Maui were the deadliest wildfires in the U.S. in recent years. Officials said 36 people perished in the fires but warned that the death toll in Maui is likely to grow. Fires were also burning on the Big Island of Hawaii.

"With lives lost and properties decimated, we are grieving with each other during this inconsolable time," Bissen said in his message. "In the days ahead, we will be stronger as a 'kaiaulu,' or community, as we rebuild with resilience and aloha."

A video posted on Twitter showed the devastation in Lahaina, on the island's western shore. The town, which dates to the 1700s, was home to historic buildings and was a favorite of tourists.

A well-known ocean-front street is now lined with burned and crumbled buildings, burned cars and rubble.

"It's horrifying. I've flown here 52 years and I've never seen anything come close to that," Richard Olsten, a helicopter pilot for a tour company, told the Associated Press after flying over the island on Wednesday. "We had tears in our eyes."

Although parts of the Hawaiian islands are tropical, dry grasslands also cover parts of the islands. As a result, wildfires are not uncommon.

A combination of factors, which are exacerbated by climate change, made the fires worse in Maui, scientists aid. Abundant, dry vegetation was especially flammable. High winds from Hurricane Dora, which passed 500 miles south of the islands, fanned the fires.

While no one event can be directly linked to climate change, warming temperatures globally are contributing to an increase in extreme weather events.

"It's leading to these unpredictable or unforeseen combinations that we're seeing right now and that are fueling this extreme fire weather," Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz, a postdoctoral forestry researcher at the University of British Columbia, told the AP. "What these ... catastrophic wildfire disasters are revealing is that nowhere is immune to the issue."

That is a sobering reminder of our vulnerability, and our connectedness. As we mourn for Maui, we are sadly cognizant that these tragedies are likely to become more frequent as our planet warms and our climate changes.

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The Free Press on how college sports' short term profits will be long term losses:

Money changes everything. That is certainly true of college sports, now going through yet another set of convulsions as schools trample each other in pursuit of a bigger pile of media rights dollars.

The Pac-12, for more than a century the preeminent college conference west of the Mississippi, is suddenly defunct. The Big Ten, once based around the Great Lakes, is about to become an unwieldy coast-to-coast agglomeration of 18 schools. The Atlantic Coast Conference will make a mockery of its name as it vultures the leftovers from the Pac-12 even as one of its more prominent members contemplates its own departure.

It's all about money. More specifically, it's all about football money — nobody, including the advocates for realignment, pretends to see any benefits for other sports in this chaos. It's all about appeasing the television imperative to attract the most eyeballs to the screen.

For generations, college football thrived in a decentralized environment of regional rivalries and trophy games spiced with occasional intersectional matchups. "National championships" were a matter of debate.

That ecosystem started to fail with the coming of the College Football Playoffs — a TV-driven system to crown an official champion — and, the true motivator, draw a really big audience for the title game.

The Big Ten — of which the University of Minnesota is a charter member — almost exactly one year ago struck a seven-year deal with Fox, CBS and NBC that will bring its members more than a billion dollars a year. For that money, each of the three networks expects a game each week of national interest.

Even with a roster dotted with such perennial powers as Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan and (starting in 2024) Southern California, that's a big demand.

One can argue that this is what the American sports fan wants. The networks are merely meeting the demand of the viewers they covet, and the money is difficult to turn down.

But the damage being done to the spirit and tradition of college football is genuine. The coast-to-coast conferences of this new football world may provide a steady steam of marquee matchups for the national broadcasts, but at the price of the treasured interstate rivalries and border battles that lie at the heart of the game.

The immediate financial gain is all too likely to give way to a wider deterioration of interest.