I just moved to the Bay Area and visited Big Basin for the first time two weekends ago. I had never seen trees that large in my life.
I'm grateful that I took the opportunity to go and see it when I did. It's crazy to think that less than two weeks later there is so much destruction there.
We know that many man-made structures did burn down but the real treasure is redwood trees. And redwood trees can survive fires as part of their natural life. So let’s hope for the best and better protect this magnificent place in the future.
There is a big difference between 'burning off' a couple of hundred acres and 'landscape scale fuel reduction', many reports conflate the two. Burning off 800 acres makes no difference when the surrounding 100,000 acres has high unmanaged forest fuel loads.
Is there any reason to believe this will inspire change? My significant other is devastated as much of her childhood was spent in big basin.
> In rebuilding Big Basin, we hope it is a catalyst for a new movement, one in which we learn to coexist with wildfire and deal directly with the impacts of climate change.
The only way I can see us changing the severity of damage is by incorporating fire breaks regularly - but those seem radically unpopular (as evidence by the lack of them in all of California). Maybe more funding for firefighting but I guess that's probably unpopular too... I guess you would have to raise your property taxes.
where do our current taxes go? CA as a state has one of the highest (or the highest?) tax burden in US. The schools are still awful and we have to rely on prison populations for fire fighting? WTF?
you still are paying ungodly income and sale taxes.
If you own property and don’t pay (or pay very few) income taxes that means you probably wouldn’t be able to keep your house if your property tax base is reset.
Sales tax (VAT) in most European countries is around 20%. The top rate of income tax is typically 50% or more. That's just what it costs to have decent public services.
No argument there! But 50% + 8.6% sales tax vs 50% + 20% VAT is definitely a difference.
Of course, the area under the curve matters, too. I have no insight into what effective tax rates people are paying in 50% top-bracket tax countries in Europe.
As a double-income no kids couple in Silicon Valley, I think we're still paying something like 18% effective tax rate federally.
If your property is worth that much more, you can sell it and get a smaller place in the same area and pocket a nice profit. Prop 13 discourages new development in much the same way that rent control does.
Our sales taxes are 8th in the nation, and, importantly very few states are much lower at all. Almost no states are 6% or below, to our 8.68% combined average.[1]
We've already discussed income tax in this thread, but the parent to your post was talking about "if you were rich > 25 years ago" .. implying the person is probably retired, and isn't paying the highest income tax rates. House paid off, don't need to draw a lot from your retirement, low property taxes.
The roads are absolute shit and the electrical grid is falling apart. It was tempting to settle down and buy a house amidst the years crises, but I'm not signing up to be responsible for the problems in this state.
Education, prisons, health and human services [0]. They actually cut schools by about 7 billion in the last budget. I’m also pretty impressed how we spend over 130B a year (And that’s just the state budget).
CA has a higher tax burden than average, but nowhere near the highest in the US. Illinois, Iowa, and Ohio all have a higher per capita tax burden than California - among others.
California per capita budget is around the middle of all states in the USA - somewhere around 20th highest. The state has high income and sales tax to compensate for reduced property taxes due to prop 13.
This is why many people think California has high taxes. Because they move here, get hit with a high income tax rate, then get hit with a standard property tax rate if they buy a home.
Meanwhile, my parents pay around 1k/year in property taxes on their million dollar home.
Landowners have held disproportionate political power for the entire history of American democracy, but if enough renters show up to the polls and vote their whole ballots, ridiculous policies like this can begin to slowly change.
Would more fire breaks even help with fires like this one? Here in Southern California, fires fairly regularly jump freeways, which are quite a bit wider than typical firebreaks, and our fires are usually just relatively low brush, not entire forests.
With a strong wildfire, you would need massive firebreaks to completely prevent them being crossed, but the point of most of them is to slow things down to the point of being controllable. To cross a firebreak, the fire has to throw lit embers far enough to ignite on the other side. If the firebreak is large enough, the amount of embers that make it is lower, and it becomes more possible to control them.
We have no way to extinguish the heart of a wildfire. For example, notice that the airplanes and helicopters that are used for firefighting rarely dump their load over the heart of a wildfire -- they usually target the edges. So all our efforts are targeted towards controlling the edges of the fire, slowing it down and making it manageable, because that is all we can really control. Firebreaks are a layer of the defense, not the whole thing.
People who know a lot more about forest management than I do seem to believe that the solution is more hands-on management and controlled burns (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/08/26/a-trailblazing...). Unfortunately, the biggest barrier to this right now is the California Air Resources Board, which idiotically allows for so few burn days that the agencies involved can't get the controlled burns done. The net result of this is an entire month or more each year where major portions of the state have some of the worst air in the world.
I generally think California manages things pretty well, all things considered, but if there's a sensible explanation for this policy I haven't seen it.
Homes can potentially still be built in these areas, but they need to use fire resistant construction, maintain defensible space, and accept the risk that it might still burn.
Some locales have adopted a (reasonable) policy of abandoning your house to the wildfire if you have not done your due diligence of defensible space.
The structures are gone, but some of the trees are 1800 years old. They didn't get that old by not being able to survive a fire. It's important to accept that fire is a natural part of the ecological cycle in much of California, in fact, aggressive suppression has disrupted the natural cycle and led to more extreme fires.
This is likely true but modern fires are burning much hotter than historical ones due to the accumulation of brush... it's entirely possible some of them that survived 1000+ years were killed by this latest one.
Very possibly not. Brush builds up because we suppress fires, the ecosystem is in a fundamentally different state than it has been for most of the last millennium.
Generally the idea is that historically there were frequent fires which kept the available fuel to a lower level.
Humans started fighting wildfires, and for decades we were pretty successful. That resulted in more fuel buildup then happened historically.
When those fire finally burn, they often burn hot enough to destroy trees that used to survive the fires.
I don’t know what the fuel levels were in this area specifically, but yes, it seems plausible that the brush might not have built up to today’s levels before.
All that is true, but we humans also tend to cause fires more frequently too? I live in a fire zone (I'm writing this from a hotel room that I've been forcibly evacuated to) and while Lightning gets the blame this time (I'm sure PG&E execs are quietly sighing relief), it doesn't seem to be the cause most times.
I think it is qualifiable if not quantifiable in that brush is building up. Perhaps more fires are starting, but the net effect would have to be less frequent burns of a given area for brush to build up there.
Yes. Efforts to prevent and extinguish wildfires create the conditions for exceptionally severe wildfires. Invasive species, monoculture and climate change have all increased the potential severity of fires.
To expand on this from the recent Australian fires[1] causing massive damage to traditionally fire resistant environments:
> We’re seeing recurrent fires in tall, wet eucalypt forests, which normally only burn very rarely. A swamp dried out near Port Macquarie, and organic sediments in the ground caught on fire. When you drop the water table, the soil is so rich in organic matter it will burn. We’ve seen swamps burning all around.
> Even Australia’s fire-adapted forest ecosystems are struggling because they are facing increasingly frequent events. In Tasmania, over the past few years we have seen environments burning that historically see fires very rarely, perhaps every 1000 years. __The increasing tempo, spatial scale, and frequency of fires could see ecosystems extinguished.__
Worsened {frequency, intensity, drought conditions, ...} in fire seasons can be catastrophic even to those environments traditionally considered stable under such pressure.
Another part of the problem is many people buying second homes in wooded areas that now prevent controlled burns to clear the extra brush. This has become a big issue in Colorado.
Fires are an important part of seed germination for some varieties of red woods. With semi rural developments, there has been a huge decline in naturally occurring wild fires and controlled burns. This article mentions nothing on forestry management.
>Big Basin, in particular, has benefited from the longest, continuous program of prescribed burning anywhere in the state since the purposeful burning done by indigenous people who tended this landscape for thousands of years.
That's the main thing that's missing from modern forest management by most accounts. Reading that gave me a hell of a lot more confidence that the trees are probably mostly safe, even if pretty much everything else has been wiped out.
"Still, Ms. Barth said there was reason to be optimistic about the fate of the trees.
'They’re meant to resist and even thrive in response to wildfires,' she said. 'If any place is going to be able to withstand this conflagration it’s Big Basin.'"
I think it's not just a matter of man-made structures being gone. Look at 0:31 of this video[1], the giant bright ember on the left is the iconic tree[2] by the visitor center. Having seen what burning firewood looks like, I would be extremely surprised if that tree managed to survive that. And judging from the extent of the damage, most of the most memorable trails in that park are probably also completely destroyed.
I'm glad I had the chance to visit this park last year, but also sad to see its apocalyptic state on top of everything else that already happened this year.
As he says in one of the tweets, "More redwoods near Big Basin park, appear to have made it but as Mercury News environment reporter @PaulRogersSJMN points out, fire prevention for years means lots of fuel that could threaten even fire-resistant redwoods including ancient ones in park interior" [1].
Clearly a number of the larger trees aren't going to survive this [2][3][4][5].
I see statements about "wildfire being a part of the natural cycle" pretty often but it seems to stem from a misunderstanding about the different scales of wildfire. Smaller, cooler, more frequent brush fires were a part of California ecology in some areas; modern wildfires are far hotter and more destructive and are killing vast swaths of forests that have previously survived for hundreds or thousands of years.
There's an arboretum just outside Eugene, Oregon that does a nice job of talking about fire's historical role in the local ecology, and the Oregon Garden just outside Silverton also has a section dedicated to walking through different kinds of forest ecologies and explaining which plant species flourish as a result of different management strategies. The unmanaged, fire-suppressed forests are terribly vulnerable to wildfire as well as stress from pests and competition.
I also took a few photos just a couple of weeks ago of a once-forested area that had burned over 20 years ago. It's still dead.
My first visits to Big Basin were at least 35 years ago and I don't know how to express how saddened I am by this news.
Thank you for sharing Ethan’s Twitter. Those are some devastating and truly moving images. Big Basin is one of my favorite places, and it will always be special to me as one of the first parks I spent significant time in after moving to the Bay Area. The silver lining is that Ethan said the majority of the large redwoods are scorched but still standing. Hopefully the ecosystem is able to recover.
Yeah, maybe the main evolutionary advantage Redwoods have is their ability to survive fires.
When other trees are burned away is when the Redwoods multiply and take over abandoned land.
"One very important adaptation for the coast redwood is its thick bark with deep grooves running vertically along the tree. It is this bark that gives the redwoods their fire-resistant characteristic. Older trees are able to survive fires because their bark is so thick and acts as a fireproof shell."
While fire is a natural part of the lifecycle of these forests, it’s important to note that the specific forest management practices that have been implemented over the last century have drastically changed the character of the fire regime in western forests.
Most of our pine species have evolved to burn every few decades. During these burns, a fire sweeps through the forest floor, killing most of the trees which have cropped up since the previous fire but haven’t had time to mature. The older, taller trees survive because their characteristic thick, flaky bark protects their trunks from the heat of the burn (interestingly, the smoke from the burn causes the cones in the taller trees to open up and fall into the freshly carbonized soil, creating the next batch of seedlings). The younger trees don’t have this yet, and anyway they usually aren’t tall enough to keep their branches out of the fire, which leads to the major issue here.
Fire prevention over the last hundred years has resulted in forests with a wide mix of trees at various canopy heights, which fire ecologists have taken to calling ladder fuels, because the trees are taller than the saplings which would usually be cleared out and shorter than old growth trees, providing a “ladder” for fire to jump into the canopies of older forests. These forests are not in any way whatsoever equipped to deal with canopy burns. All of their fire defenses are near the ground, in the bark, and there’s a high likelihood that once the fire reaches the canopy it will at least kill the tree, if not spread through the canopy and destroy the forest.
It goes without saying that the physics involved here, when the fire is burning from the ground up to hundreds of feet in the air and consuming all of the available fuel, are magnitudes different than a typical brush fire on the forest floor. While these fires weren’t impossible in prior to the emergence of forest management practices, those practices have unambiguously resulted in more and more severe fires by increasing the volume and density of fuels in these forests.
To that end, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the fire really has consumed all of Big Basin.
> Wildfires are often the tragic manifestation of our global climate crisis.
This was a naturally caused fire in an area where fire is an accepted part of the ecosystem. The buildings were not natural and were removed just like non-native grasses and other species which interfere with the California native species. It sucks, I get it. Many places I've known and loved have been changed by fire, but they come back stronger when the burns are not too frequent which they often are when caused by man.
Anthropogenic global warming is settled science, but at the same time so is the history of climatic variation in California. CA has long periods of dryness, which is why the native plants are so specialized in dealing with it.
I feel for the people affected by the fires and hope they and their belongings remain safe, but let us not forget the long history of fires in CA and the destruction they cause when not planned for. CA is a state of change, and the storms, earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters have and will continue to cause problems. Plans can not save everyone, but plans should be made. Events like this should be kept in the proper perspective so as to educate the public and build awareness which can lead to preservation of lives down the road.
Because calling it a "naturally caused" wildfire is technically true, but only really if you don't believe global climate change causes extreme weather events.
Two sentences past what OP quoted:
> This past weekend’s extraordinary weather event, with thousands of lightning strikes, wreaked havoc and destruction on California’s forests and communities and choked our air.
Lightning storms on the magnitude seen in the Bay Area this past weekend are unheard of--which caused the many fires you may be hearing about.
One storm does not make a trend. Tropical moisture often makes its way to the California coast in late summer. AGW may increase these events, but it is irresponsible journalism to try to pin this atmospheric event, and the resulting storms, on AGW.
"Gone" is a clear and strong word, and it is misapplied here, unless the author is omniscient. Fires hot enough to burn these buildings down may still be a cool enough fire to be natural and healthy in this case. Or maybe not. As the article states, no one has even checked the trees yet, and they are what matter here. If it is an average wildfire, of average hotness, then the trees (and forest generally) are fine.
"As we know it" is just as important as "gone" in the title. Even if every single tree survived (almost certainly not the case), the park will not be the same for many years to come, and the loss of the historic CCC buildings would be devastating all on its own.
I don't know the specifics of this fire, but I think the sequoias themselves are pretty resistant to fire, and even require fire to germinate their seeds.
So sequoia sempervirens aka coast redwood/california redwood is the tallest tree on earth. And the sequioadendron giganteum aka giant sequoias are not that tall, but are lots fatter.
I used to live just down the road in Boulder Creek and hiked in Big Basin routinely for years, including hundreds of hours training for the PCT. I really love that place, and hope the damage isn't as apocalyptic as the headline suggests. There have always been big burn areas at least since I started visiting in the nineties. It's an ecosystem built to survive and thrive with fire, if it's not too much of a good thing. I still have family there, I'll be calling for an update soon.
My last visit was a few thanksgivings ago. I took an early morning hike before the feast, and on my way out passed a flock of wild turkeys. They were lucky I didn't have a flintlock blunderbuss with me. I hope they made it through the fire ok.
Another somber event for Bay Area residents. For trail runners and hikers, the Skyline to Sea trail is an absolute gem. Hoping that some of the old-growth trees make it through.
Did Skyline to the Sea with my daughter a few years back. Split across two days, it was our first overnight hike where we carried tent, bags, cookware....
I suspect it will be back by the time she has kids of her own.
This passage from Against the Grain makes for interesting reading right now:
The case for the use of fire being the decisive transformation in the fortunes of hominids is convincing. It has been mankind’s oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural world. “Tool,” however, is not quite the right word; unlike an inanimate knife, fire has a life of its own. It is, at best, a “semidomesticate,” appearing unbidden and, if not guarded carefully, escaping its shackles to become dangerously feral.
Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous.
Our ancestors could not have failed to notice how natural wildfires transformed the landscape: how they cleared old vegetation and encouraged a host of quick-colonizing grasses and shrubs, many bearing desired seeds, berries, fruits, and nuts. They could also not have failed to notice that a fire drove fleeing game from its path, exposed hidden burrows and nests of small game, and, most important, later stimulated the browse and mushrooms that attracted grazing prey. Native North Americans deployed fire to sculpt landscapes favored by elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, ruffed grouse, turkey, and quail, all of which they hunted. The game they subsequently bagged represented a kind of harvesting of prey animals they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a habitat they would find enticing. Quite apart from being the designers of hunting grounds—veritable game parks—early humans used fire to hunt large game. The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed.
Fire was the key to humankind’s growing sway over the natural world— a species monopoly and trump card, worldwide. The Amazonian rain forest bears indelible traces of the use of fire to clear land and open the canopy; Australia’s eucalyptus landscape is, to a considerable degree, the effect of human fire. The volume of such landscaping in North America was such that when it stopped abruptly, due to the devastating epidemics that came with the European, the newly unchecked growth of forest cover created the illusion among white settlers that North America was a virtually untouched, primeval forest. According to some climatologists, the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850, may well have been due to the reduction of CO2—a greenhouse gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s indigenous fire farmers.
Scott, James C.. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (p. 37-39). Yale University Press.
So Mr Scott is communicating the idea that the global accumulation of CO2 prior to the 1500s was not only caused by indigenous people but it was so great that their mass "die-off" created a cooler climate for 300 years. Incredible.
I wonder to what Mr Scott attributes the current existential climate crisis. I can only guess.
It's a terrible tragedy, but forests recover very quickly after forest fires. Although we as humans hate seeing such beautiful places get destroyed, it's a perfectly natural part of history and without these types of fires, we don't get a proper cycle of nature.
This is simply not true anymore. Modern fires are far hotter thanks to the accumulation of decades of brush as we've refused to do prescribed burns. Modern fires destroy forests. There's nothing natural about them.
No, this is simply not true. There's nothing special about these "modern" fires. Some people like to think that it's different because we're around to see things, but we're not. 1000 year old trees are nothing compared to geological age. Most importantly, you have no idea how hot "ancient" fires burned so how could you possibly compare them to today?
If you're expecting that within a couple of years there's no new growth in Big Basin, and that it will remain some sort of dead desert, then you're sorely mistaken.
I took this photo not long ago (in Oregon, not California). The burn scars in the background were burned in 2002 and 2003 (https://imgur.com/wBQhXn3). The tree canopies that were there, that now remain only as burnt, denuded toothpicks in the landscape, have been replaced by chapparal, which will burn again just as hotly. In the intervening almost 20 years, there's nothing growing more than a few feet above the ground and there's still a lot of barren earth.
Many species do benefit from wildfires of a particular intensity. The megafires that we are seeing today are so hot, so big, and so intense, that no species are benefiting from them. These fires are simply destructive. There is no magical renewal afterward. For these burn areas -- and there are more and more appearing around the western states now -- life creeps back in, slowly, from the edges, and when you're talking about 50,000 acres of destruction, that takes a very long time.
I don't want to be frustrated at you specifically, but comments like this one keep getting repeated by people that heard it somewhere once. Our forest management practices must change immediately, and the common belief that all wildfire is totally natural and totally good for the ecology is preventing the critical mass of public support required to make that change happen.
I'm not sure how long you think it takes to repopulate a forest, but 20 years isn't a very long time. As a human, with a lifespan of 80 years, it might seem long but to nature it's just a drop in a bucket. I'm pretty confident that the forest will regrow, just not in a time frame convenient for you. And from your picture you can clearly see that the forest is regrowing.
> I'm not sure how long you think it takes to repopulate a forest, but 20 years isn't a very long time.
I really dislike this sneering tone that's so common on HN. Just come out and say "I think you're a moron". I have some notion of geological time scales, thank you.
Doug fir grows at approximately two feet per year. Do you see a lot of 40 foot tall trees in those burn scars? It's the tree that most commonly repopulates a burned area in this region of Oregon. This article has further reading on fire ecology in Douglas Fir forests: https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/management/firemanagement_fir...
Note that the article makes several distinctions between varying fire severities.
As it turns out, you were wrong, and all the ancient redwoods survived. I suggest being a bit more introspective and open to the idea that you could be wrong.
I think you're probably just a troll, you sure sound like one. But just in case you're not, and on the tiniest, merest chance that there's any point at all to this: (a) I made no statement about all the redwoods, only "a number of the larger trees", a statement for which I provided ample photographic evidence and by which I still stand; (b) the only reports so far are from an AP photographer, who is not an arborist; (c) it will be difficult to assess the full extent of the damage until at least next Spring, so I'll be waiting until then before being convinced of anything either way; (d) you do not have the grace and skill to make suggestions that anybody would follow.
>Wildfires are often the tragic manifestation of our global climate crisis. While we cannot be certain that is the case here, it seems likely that this global crisis has struck close to home.
Leading with political outrage and then immediately admitting there’s no basis to think so. Forest fires came long before people and will continue long after we are gone.
It’s bad writing and basically propaganda to lead every article about natural events with some bit about climate change. You can’t link individual events to climate change. You might as well lead every article about a fire, flood, or hurricane with some pearl clutching about climate change.
And anyway, the evidence is that well-meaning human attempts to control wildfires are driving the growth in severe wildfire, due to the accumulation of brush that naturally would burn off in small fires without human intervention. This is discussed extensively elsewhere in this thread.
That really bums me out. I found out while living in the Bay Area that 5 days of smoky skies a year really bother me despite the outdoors being so enjoyable the other 360 days of the year and that's part of why I moved from SF to Miami in 2018. Part of it is that when I reflected on it I just felt worse about it because I thought about the cumulative effect of all the fires. I miss the Bay Area and might move back but I'm glad to not have to deal with smoke in the meantime.
A fire there was inevitable. Anyone who’s visited would’ve noticed that many of the trees were charred from previous fires.
For people who have never lived in or visited Silicon Valley, you should know that the parks in the area are one of the best parts around here (probably tied for first with the great weather). Big Basin has the biggest trees in the area, but other than that, it can be a little underwhelming. There are a lot of other really awesome parks and preserves (Castle Rock, Portola, Russian Ridge, Skyline Ridge, Monte Bello, Wunderlich, just to name a few) within a 30 minute drive of Palo Alto. I had been trying to go to as many as I could the last few months, but barely scratched the surface. Any of the ones I visited were better than and park I had gone to before moving out here.
It definitely sucks that so many of the great parks have been affected. September and October are pretty great for hiking in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and this will certainly put a damper on it.
I'm a little worried about what's going to happen come winter rains. With so many hillsides laid bare, there are going to be way more landslides whenever heavy rains hit, so a lot more areas than usual are probably going to get washed out.
German Public Broadcasting (Deutsche Welle) just published this timely and well rounded two-part overview and analysis of wildfire causes and mitigation.
Hope the trees or at least most of them survive. Its a special place in the South Bay. Bldgs can be rebuilt. I guess trees will grow back too, but there is a sadness in loosing these ancient trees :( They were witness to the rise of our recent society ... Had a chance to bike to the park in May. It was shut due to Covid .. already eerie and quiet and amazing. Just one Ranger and a Sherrif watching the place. They were kind enough to let me get a pic in front of the huge Redwood cross section hanging there at park HQ ... Have to go back again when things clear ...
These trees have made it through fires before and many of them will make it through again. The forest is a living thing, and this destruction is part of it.
I haven't been to Big Basin since the winter because of COVID -- it was closed for a while, then limited parking, and I just stayed closer to home. I hope I didn't miss a last chance at seeing some of my favorite nooks intact.
We need some goats to eat all the fuel while it's still growing. Herbivores will also trample dead plants to the ground so grass can grow. Apparently there's too much work for the herders, based on articles published after the last round of fires.
I love Big Basin. It is one of my favorite places in the world. The meteor trail is the prettiest trail I've found of the hundreds or thousands I've hiked in the Bay outside of the South Bay / Peninsula. The Berry Falls loops is magnificent - I love the sudden, dramatic change of ecosystem even more than the awesome falls.
People have been reaching out to me about the fires.
I understand why we mourn, but why do we think this is a bad thing?
Fires are part of the forest.
Humans have done harm here, both from preventing past fires (which make the smaller number of fires worse) and potentially from climate change (I don't know enough to know how strong the connection of global climate change to this sort of event is), but the basics of it seem clear: forests catch fire sometimes. Such natural phenomena are what gave us the forests we have today.
This one hurts. I've put in a lot of hours up there camping and hiking. I was just talking with someone about how you used to be able to go up there on a whim and snag a last minute campsite. Even if it was next to some jackass running his TV and microwave it was still fun.
Any area you go into up there shows the fire damage those trees have survived over the years.
I'll miss the old-timey HQ cabin and cafe but I'm counting on a good recovery here.
I live on the mountain above Los Gatos on the border with Santa Cruz. Yesterday everything smelled of smoke, and the outside was covered in white ash. Today no smoke smell and blue sky as the wind is blowing away from me towards the fire. Better right, but...the area next to me just went red with evacuation orders, and we are next.
We just packed up the important stuff and have it waiting in piles near the door. It is interesting what you think about taking. Clothing for everyone, meds, etc. The FreeNAS box with all the photos and like. The wedding album. The flag from my grandfathers coffin. Books and photos from family that are now 100+ years old. A painting that hung over my grandparents sofa, and then my parents and now mine. My daughter packed a stuffed animal I gave her when she was 6.
There are a ton of very expenses items that do not make the cut. It’s the things that drive happy memories but are of little monetary value that do.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 169 ms ] threadI'm grateful that I took the opportunity to go and see it when I did. It's crazy to think that less than two weeks later there is so much destruction there.
Oops, the first line is some unsupported statement.
> While we cannot be certain that is the case here, it seems likely that this global crisis has struck close to home.
http://joannenova.com.au/2019/10/california-maybe-prescribed...
There is a big difference between 'burning off' a couple of hundred acres and 'landscape scale fuel reduction', many reports conflate the two. Burning off 800 acres makes no difference when the surrounding 100,000 acres has high unmanaged forest fuel loads.
> In rebuilding Big Basin, we hope it is a catalyst for a new movement, one in which we learn to coexist with wildfire and deal directly with the impacts of climate change.
The only way I can see us changing the severity of damage is by incorporating fire breaks regularly - but those seem radically unpopular (as evidence by the lack of them in all of California). Maybe more funding for firefighting but I guess that's probably unpopular too... I guess you would have to raise your property taxes.
If you were wealthy in CA > 25 years ago, you're likely not paying much at all in taxes. We instead rely on high sales tax and income tax.
If you own property and don’t pay (or pay very few) income taxes that means you probably wouldn’t be able to keep your house if your property tax base is reset.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_value_added_tax...
Of course, the area under the curve matters, too. I have no insight into what effective tax rates people are paying in 50% top-bracket tax countries in Europe.
As a double-income no kids couple in Silicon Valley, I think we're still paying something like 18% effective tax rate federally.
Those successful property investors never have to lift a finger or pay a dime
We've already discussed income tax in this thread, but the parent to your post was talking about "if you were rich > 25 years ago" .. implying the person is probably retired, and isn't paying the highest income tax rates. House paid off, don't need to draw a lot from your retirement, low property taxes.
1. https://taxfoundation.org/state-and-local-sales-tax-rates-20...
[0] http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/budget/2020-21EN/#/BudgetSummary
But to be honest this is one of those things where ignorance is bliss
CA has a higher tax burden than average, but nowhere near the highest in the US. Illinois, Iowa, and Ohio all have a higher per capita tax burden than California - among others.
This is why many people think California has high taxes. Because they move here, get hit with a high income tax rate, then get hit with a standard property tax rate if they buy a home.
Meanwhile, my parents pay around 1k/year in property taxes on their million dollar home.
We have no way to extinguish the heart of a wildfire. For example, notice that the airplanes and helicopters that are used for firefighting rarely dump their load over the heart of a wildfire -- they usually target the edges. So all our efforts are targeted towards controlling the edges of the fire, slowing it down and making it manageable, because that is all we can really control. Firebreaks are a layer of the defense, not the whole thing.
I generally think California manages things pretty well, all things considered, but if there's a sensible explanation for this policy I haven't seen it.
Some locales have adopted a (reasonable) policy of abandoning your house to the wildfire if you have not done your due diligence of defensible space.
Humans started fighting wildfires, and for decades we were pretty successful. That resulted in more fuel buildup then happened historically.
When those fire finally burn, they often burn hot enough to destroy trees that used to survive the fires.
I don’t know what the fuel levels were in this area specifically, but yes, it seems plausible that the brush might not have built up to today’s levels before.
I wonder what the quantifiable overall effect is.
> We’re seeing recurrent fires in tall, wet eucalypt forests, which normally only burn very rarely. A swamp dried out near Port Macquarie, and organic sediments in the ground caught on fire. When you drop the water table, the soil is so rich in organic matter it will burn. We’ve seen swamps burning all around.
> Even Australia’s fire-adapted forest ecosystems are struggling because they are facing increasingly frequent events. In Tasmania, over the past few years we have seen environments burning that historically see fires very rarely, perhaps every 1000 years. __The increasing tempo, spatial scale, and frequency of fires could see ecosystems extinguished.__
Worsened {frequency, intensity, drought conditions, ...} in fire seasons can be catastrophic even to those environments traditionally considered stable under such pressure.
[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/massive-australian-b...
>Big Basin, in particular, has benefited from the longest, continuous program of prescribed burning anywhere in the state since the purposeful burning done by indigenous people who tended this landscape for thousands of years.
That's the main thing that's missing from modern forest management by most accounts. Reading that gave me a hell of a lot more confidence that the trees are probably mostly safe, even if pretty much everything else has been wiped out.
"Still, Ms. Barth said there was reason to be optimistic about the fate of the trees.
'They’re meant to resist and even thrive in response to wildfires,' she said. 'If any place is going to be able to withstand this conflagration it’s Big Basin.'"
I'm glad I had the chance to visit this park last year, but also sad to see its apocalyptic state on top of everything else that already happened this year.
[1] https://www.ktvu.com/news/californias-oldest-state-park-big-...
[2] https://s3-media0.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/_aLLH1G53QxyzKCleBGw...
As he says in one of the tweets, "More redwoods near Big Basin park, appear to have made it but as Mercury News environment reporter @PaulRogersSJMN points out, fire prevention for years means lots of fuel that could threaten even fire-resistant redwoods including ancient ones in park interior" [1].
Clearly a number of the larger trees aren't going to survive this [2][3][4][5].
I see statements about "wildfire being a part of the natural cycle" pretty often but it seems to stem from a misunderstanding about the different scales of wildfire. Smaller, cooler, more frequent brush fires were a part of California ecology in some areas; modern wildfires are far hotter and more destructive and are killing vast swaths of forests that have previously survived for hundreds or thousands of years.
There's an arboretum just outside Eugene, Oregon that does a nice job of talking about fire's historical role in the local ecology, and the Oregon Garden just outside Silverton also has a section dedicated to walking through different kinds of forest ecologies and explaining which plant species flourish as a result of different management strategies. The unmanaged, fire-suppressed forests are terribly vulnerable to wildfire as well as stress from pests and competition.
I also took a few photos just a couple of weeks ago of a once-forested area that had burned over 20 years ago. It's still dead.
My first visits to Big Basin were at least 35 years ago and I don't know how to express how saddened I am by this news.
[1]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296547748259360768
[2]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640252279312384/ph...
[3]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296640967299063809/ph...
[4]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296641416802656256/ph...
[5]: https://twitter.com/ethanbaron/status/1296643324275593216/ph...
But, if the surrounding fuels have been exhausted, likely the worst of it is over in that area.
When other trees are burned away is when the Redwoods multiply and take over abandoned land.
"One very important adaptation for the coast redwood is its thick bark with deep grooves running vertically along the tree. It is this bark that gives the redwoods their fire-resistant characteristic. Older trees are able to survive fires because their bark is so thick and acts as a fireproof shell."
From: http://bioweb.uwlax.edu/bio203/s2009/hemmeric_nata/Adaptatio....
Most of our pine species have evolved to burn every few decades. During these burns, a fire sweeps through the forest floor, killing most of the trees which have cropped up since the previous fire but haven’t had time to mature. The older, taller trees survive because their characteristic thick, flaky bark protects their trunks from the heat of the burn (interestingly, the smoke from the burn causes the cones in the taller trees to open up and fall into the freshly carbonized soil, creating the next batch of seedlings). The younger trees don’t have this yet, and anyway they usually aren’t tall enough to keep their branches out of the fire, which leads to the major issue here.
Fire prevention over the last hundred years has resulted in forests with a wide mix of trees at various canopy heights, which fire ecologists have taken to calling ladder fuels, because the trees are taller than the saplings which would usually be cleared out and shorter than old growth trees, providing a “ladder” for fire to jump into the canopies of older forests. These forests are not in any way whatsoever equipped to deal with canopy burns. All of their fire defenses are near the ground, in the bark, and there’s a high likelihood that once the fire reaches the canopy it will at least kill the tree, if not spread through the canopy and destroy the forest.
It goes without saying that the physics involved here, when the fire is burning from the ground up to hundreds of feet in the air and consuming all of the available fuel, are magnitudes different than a typical brush fire on the forest floor. While these fires weren’t impossible in prior to the emergence of forest management practices, those practices have unambiguously resulted in more and more severe fires by increasing the volume and density of fuels in these forests.
To that end, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if the fire really has consumed all of Big Basin.
This was a naturally caused fire in an area where fire is an accepted part of the ecosystem. The buildings were not natural and were removed just like non-native grasses and other species which interfere with the California native species. It sucks, I get it. Many places I've known and loved have been changed by fire, but they come back stronger when the burns are not too frequent which they often are when caused by man.
Anthropogenic global warming is settled science, but at the same time so is the history of climatic variation in California. CA has long periods of dryness, which is why the native plants are so specialized in dealing with it.
I feel for the people affected by the fires and hope they and their belongings remain safe, but let us not forget the long history of fires in CA and the destruction they cause when not planned for. CA is a state of change, and the storms, earthquakes, fires and other natural disasters have and will continue to cause problems. Plans can not save everyone, but plans should be made. Events like this should be kept in the proper perspective so as to educate the public and build awareness which can lead to preservation of lives down the road.
Two sentences past what OP quoted:
> This past weekend’s extraordinary weather event, with thousands of lightning strikes, wreaked havoc and destruction on California’s forests and communities and choked our air.
Lightning storms on the magnitude seen in the Bay Area this past weekend are unheard of--which caused the many fires you may be hearing about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoia_sempervirens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoiadendron_giganteum
So sequoia sempervirens aka coast redwood/california redwood is the tallest tree on earth. And the sequioadendron giganteum aka giant sequoias are not that tall, but are lots fatter.
My last visit was a few thanksgivings ago. I took an early morning hike before the feast, and on my way out passed a flock of wild turkeys. They were lucky I didn't have a flintlock blunderbuss with me. I hope they made it through the fire ok.
I suspect it will be back by the time she has kids of her own.
The case for the use of fire being the decisive transformation in the fortunes of hominids is convincing. It has been mankind’s oldest and greatest tool for reshaping the natural world. “Tool,” however, is not quite the right word; unlike an inanimate knife, fire has a life of its own. It is, at best, a “semidomesticate,” appearing unbidden and, if not guarded carefully, escaping its shackles to become dangerously feral.
Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous.
Our ancestors could not have failed to notice how natural wildfires transformed the landscape: how they cleared old vegetation and encouraged a host of quick-colonizing grasses and shrubs, many bearing desired seeds, berries, fruits, and nuts. They could also not have failed to notice that a fire drove fleeing game from its path, exposed hidden burrows and nests of small game, and, most important, later stimulated the browse and mushrooms that attracted grazing prey. Native North Americans deployed fire to sculpt landscapes favored by elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, ruffed grouse, turkey, and quail, all of which they hunted. The game they subsequently bagged represented a kind of harvesting of prey animals they had deliberately assembled by carefully creating a habitat they would find enticing. Quite apart from being the designers of hunting grounds—veritable game parks—early humans used fire to hunt large game. The evidence suggests that long before the bow and arrow appeared, roughly twenty thousand years ago, hominids were using fire to drive herd animals off precipices and to drive elephants into bogs where, immobilized, they could more easily be killed.
Fire was the key to humankind’s growing sway over the natural world— a species monopoly and trump card, worldwide. The Amazonian rain forest bears indelible traces of the use of fire to clear land and open the canopy; Australia’s eucalyptus landscape is, to a considerable degree, the effect of human fire. The volume of such landscaping in North America was such that when it stopped abruptly, due to the devastating epidemics that came with the European, the newly unchecked growth of forest cover created the illusion among white settlers that North America was a virtually untouched, primeval forest. According to some climatologists, the cold spell known as the Little Ice Age, from roughly 1500 to 1850, may well have been due to the reduction of CO2—a greenhouse gas—brought about by the die-off of North America’s indigenous fire farmers.
Scott, James C.. Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (p. 37-39). Yale University Press.
If you're expecting that within a couple of years there's no new growth in Big Basin, and that it will remain some sort of dead desert, then you're sorely mistaken.
I took this photo not long ago (in Oregon, not California). The burn scars in the background were burned in 2002 and 2003 (https://imgur.com/wBQhXn3). The tree canopies that were there, that now remain only as burnt, denuded toothpicks in the landscape, have been replaced by chapparal, which will burn again just as hotly. In the intervening almost 20 years, there's nothing growing more than a few feet above the ground and there's still a lot of barren earth.
Many species do benefit from wildfires of a particular intensity. The megafires that we are seeing today are so hot, so big, and so intense, that no species are benefiting from them. These fires are simply destructive. There is no magical renewal afterward. For these burn areas -- and there are more and more appearing around the western states now -- life creeps back in, slowly, from the edges, and when you're talking about 50,000 acres of destruction, that takes a very long time.
I don't want to be frustrated at you specifically, but comments like this one keep getting repeated by people that heard it somewhere once. Our forest management practices must change immediately, and the common belief that all wildfire is totally natural and totally good for the ecology is preventing the critical mass of public support required to make that change happen.
I really dislike this sneering tone that's so common on HN. Just come out and say "I think you're a moron". I have some notion of geological time scales, thank you.
Doug fir grows at approximately two feet per year. Do you see a lot of 40 foot tall trees in those burn scars? It's the tree that most commonly repopulates a burned area in this region of Oregon. This article has further reading on fire ecology in Douglas Fir forests: https://www.nps.gov/pore/learn/management/firemanagement_fir...
Note that the article makes several distinctions between varying fire severities.
Bye now.
Leading with political outrage and then immediately admitting there’s no basis to think so. Forest fires came long before people and will continue long after we are gone.
It’s bad writing and basically propaganda to lead every article about natural events with some bit about climate change. You can’t link individual events to climate change. You might as well lead every article about a fire, flood, or hurricane with some pearl clutching about climate change.
And anyway, the evidence is that well-meaning human attempts to control wildfires are driving the growth in severe wildfire, due to the accumulation of brush that naturally would burn off in small fires without human intervention. This is discussed extensively elsewhere in this thread.
For people who have never lived in or visited Silicon Valley, you should know that the parks in the area are one of the best parts around here (probably tied for first with the great weather). Big Basin has the biggest trees in the area, but other than that, it can be a little underwhelming. There are a lot of other really awesome parks and preserves (Castle Rock, Portola, Russian Ridge, Skyline Ridge, Monte Bello, Wunderlich, just to name a few) within a 30 minute drive of Palo Alto. I had been trying to go to as many as I could the last few months, but barely scratched the surface. Any of the ones I visited were better than and park I had gone to before moving out here.
I'm a little worried about what's going to happen come winter rains. With so many hillsides laid bare, there are going to be way more landslides whenever heavy rains hit, so a lot more areas than usual are probably going to get washed out.
part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUo2Vs6id7w part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5VPWq8LVDtk
Hope the trees or at least most of them survive. Its a special place in the South Bay. Bldgs can be rebuilt. I guess trees will grow back too, but there is a sadness in loosing these ancient trees :( They were witness to the rise of our recent society ... Had a chance to bike to the park in May. It was shut due to Covid .. already eerie and quiet and amazing. Just one Ranger and a Sherrif watching the place. They were kind enough to let me get a pic in front of the huge Redwood cross section hanging there at park HQ ... Have to go back again when things clear ...
I haven't been to Big Basin since the winter because of COVID -- it was closed for a while, then limited parking, and I just stayed closer to home. I hope I didn't miss a last chance at seeing some of my favorite nooks intact.
Further reading:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/03/30/goats-...
https://www.google.com/search?q=california+goat+herders&oq=c...
https://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_gill_it_s_not_the_cow_it_s_t...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9yiclBCxMo
People have been reaching out to me about the fires.
I understand why we mourn, but why do we think this is a bad thing?
Fires are part of the forest.
Humans have done harm here, both from preventing past fires (which make the smaller number of fires worse) and potentially from climate change (I don't know enough to know how strong the connection of global climate change to this sort of event is), but the basics of it seem clear: forests catch fire sometimes. Such natural phenomena are what gave us the forests we have today.
Any area you go into up there shows the fire damage those trees have survived over the years.
I'll miss the old-timey HQ cabin and cafe but I'm counting on a good recovery here.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/f0121f7f2f0941afb3ed705...
We just packed up the important stuff and have it waiting in piles near the door. It is interesting what you think about taking. Clothing for everyone, meds, etc. The FreeNAS box with all the photos and like. The wedding album. The flag from my grandfathers coffin. Books and photos from family that are now 100+ years old. A painting that hung over my grandparents sofa, and then my parents and now mine. My daughter packed a stuffed animal I gave her when she was 6.
There are a ton of very expenses items that do not make the cut. It’s the things that drive happy memories but are of little monetary value that do.
A lesson in perspective I guess.