Climate change definitely contributes to the crisis, but ignoring other factors does not help us improve the situation. For example, Spanish settlers in California planted invasive trees not adapted to the climate and specifically the wildfires. When the fire seasons came, the invasive trees burned hotter than native trees, causing the death of more of the flora than was typical.
These issues were known to the US Forest Service at least 20 years ago, and broadly speaking nothing was done about it.
Climate change is helping forest fires to ignite and burn hotter due to reduced moisture in both trees and the soil. To the extent that it may also increase the incidence of lightning, and thus the probability of naturally started fires, it can also influence the numbers of fires.
But gross mismanagement of forests for most of the 20th century caused by misguided ideas about what keeps forests healthy is what has led to an almost unimaginable pile of fuel sitting on forest floors that would never have existed in the past.
Water has a high specific heat capacity. If you have a given amount of energy (stored in chemical bonds) and some of it goes to heating water, temperatures will be lower.
It appears you have a very basic understanding of physics.
It mentions in multiple places that climate change is increasing the duration of the forest fire season and worsening conditions that promote wildfire.
The point of the article is that outcomes of poor forestry management practices (a build up of fuel that lead to truly enormous wildfires when they finally burn) were bad enough, and now climate change is dramatically exacerbating those effects.
As a result, changing our forestry management practices to adopt controlled burns, thinning, and other techniques, will be a critical element of climate change adaptation.
That's not to say we shouldn't stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible to avoid even worse future effects. But we've already warmed the globe enough that adaptation is already necessary, and this is just one example.
The thing that's boggling my mind is, we've been hearing about this since the Yellowstone fire in 1988 — the forest immediately bounced back greener and healthier than before. That was over thirty years ago! It’s incredible that controlled burns are even controversial today.
Yeah, I find it deeply frustrating. We've known about the dangers of wildfire suppression for literally decades, and yet it's taken a very long time for forestry management practices to change. There's likely many reasons for that, from institutional momentum to a lack of funding, but something has to change or forests will simply burn uncontrolled and the problem will solve itself...
at least those megafires will decrease the likelihood of fires in the comming years. Lets just hope that people learn from this... Its even worth it setting smaller, local and controlled fires in less severe weather settings to prevent things like this.
I think the issue is that when you're looking for "less severe weather settings" you have limited options - California is in a megadrought. Meanwhile, China has invested heavily in weather modification and is reportedly conjuring up rain storms all while weather modification science here in the US is treated like alchemy.
To be fair, we had big, honkin', town-killin' fires back when it rained and snowed more than average for decades.
It's hard to tell how much is due to drought, how much to a shift from snow to rain, how much is home development, how much is homeless people torching off areas (more than you'd like to think).
The drought began in about 1999. The wet years in the two decades since then have not changed the drought. Soil moisture levels across the SW of the US are at their lowest levels in 1200 years.
So, maybe you're referring to an earlier period, in which case, cool.
> all while weather modification science here in the US is treated like alchemy
I don't fully agree with this statement, it's more that you're not just affecting your rainfall, but neighbors as well. As we speak, 8 of the Western states in the US are performing scientific trials together.
There's no hard data that shows exactly how much weather modification actually works. Some data shows 5 to 15% increased snowfall, but that's just statistical analysis. Once we get hard data that shows the cost/benefit, you're likely to see more weather modification efforts (e.g. how many dollars per acre-foot of water? Is this cheaper or more expensive than pipelines, or drinking water reservoirs? What would a budget look like for bolstering our agriculture? Can a state government budget a few million for the next year due to an anticipated reduction in rainfall? How many million would we need? What's the human and ecological (particularly beneficial bacteria and algae) impacts of being exposed to AgI?)
We also don't know how wide-scale it works. Yes, China can seed clouds to reduce smog to have blue skies for PRC meetings in Beijing, but can it work on the scale of say, an entire mountain range? Or the agricultural area of an entire state? Can't say. It's only been in the last few years that we've gotten RADAR and compute that's capable of analyzing our experiments.
Also another thing, you can generate precipitation, but even weather modification technology can't overcome a drought. If you have a high pressure system (like the one currently sitting over most of the West US at the moment) you're stuck with dry skies.
* Since 1987, the United States has been the largest producer of almonds worldwide. The success of the California crop in seizing the No. 1 rank in world almond production is due in large part to the use of irrigation and mechanization, resulting in higher yields and cost effectiveness.
The US produces 10x more almonds than number two on the global biggest exporters list: over 2m tons/year, #2 on the list is Spain with 200k tons. California is the #1 producer of almonds in the world. It takes 1.1 gallon of water to grow one(!!!) almond.
>at least those megafires will decrease the likelihood of fires in the comming years.
I wouldn't be so sure. It looks like a lot of the fires don't wipe out the fuel load, a lot of burnable stuff grows back quickly, it doesn't take all that many years for everything to grow back.
Living in one of the uber-flammable areas, it's funny how fast all of the plants grow. This entire locality is (2nd (or 3rd (or 4th))) generation trees.
yes, they will. There is a comparison of west-side fires in mexico compared to california (close by areas) where in california every fire is immediately fought, where as in mexico there are more frequent fires, and in general they are less destructive. Sorry but no time to search for the sources now, had it back in school... Thats what I was refering to, a fire all 5 years still has less material than one every 10, no matter the growth rate
socal and NorCal have vastly flora, and the mega fires are all in the North. I wouldn't expect Mexico to have fires like NorCal no matter what the government did.
Controlled burns were the de facto method of land management in that portion of the world for millennia. I'd be curious what a modern incarnation of that would look like.
It'd be a much more organized and planned version of what firefighters do already, including dumping retardants from the air and preparing infrastructure ahead of the fire. Mostly they set up firebreaks [1] and distribute fire fighters around the perimeter to clean up any embers that cross them. The whole process is much easier when there isn't a fire bearing down on them. In California they'd also use the DOT goat squadron [2] which is very effective at stripping any vegetation in an area. If done on a regular basis, semi-permanent firebreaks will form (like a well trodden trail) making it a really efficient process.
The early-20th-century sci-fi novel Earth Abides is about the lives of some of the remnants of humanity after a virus wipes out most of the population. Even then, California had a reputation for wildfires, and in the story large parts of the state burn after there are no people to fight the fires.
In addition to excessive fire suppression causing fires to become ever more extreme, I suspect that the fact that people move around so much caused there to be no "living memory" of the natural conditions of an area, and thus people collectively "forgot" that their areas burn, and need fuel removal and careful management, not just fire suppression.
In my opinion, there's also the fact that very few people know what an old growth forest looks like compared to 2nd growth in the PNW. There's a profound difference in ecosystems with new growth having tremendously more undergrowth. If you spend enough time in the forests, you'll start to see it too. The 2nd growth stuff looks and feels imbalanced.
Forests take thousands upon thousands of years to mature. It can take centuries for the mix of tree species to develop to the point where the "apex" species of tree appears and then dominates the ecosystem. Ecosystems are extraordinarily complex.
In my head, I see reforested areas like the Potato Jesus painting with a bonus "Mission Accomplished" banner.
I'm rather confident very few in California "forgot" that their areas burn. Large parts of California burn down every year and have done so through the height of "excessive fire suppression". Also fire insurance premiums help jog the memory.
The core of the issue has little to do with the fire suppression policy and more to do with the interface between humans and wildlands. There just aren't many areas that are even safe to do proscribe burns en masse that won't threaten some property or structures even if prescribed burns were emphasized.
And I just don't understand how ever single one of these "The REAL problem is California doesn't let wildfires burn" threads is they always start with, "yeah climate change could possibly maybe be one cause but the REAL cause is..." No, really, climate change is not some incidental factor here, the climate conditions in CA are a huge contributor to these fires and possibly dominating factor in these fires.
No, really, climate change is not some incidental factor here, the climate conditions in CA are a huge contributor to these fires and possibly dominating factor in these fires.
All the more reason to focus on managing them, and remember the state's history of fires when deciding where and how to build structures and manage urban/wild interfaces in the future.
This really needs to be emphasized more. Just because a problem is caused by climate change doesn't mean that waiting for climate change to be stopped is the right solution. There is local action that can and should be taken.
And that action is? Government seizes control of any property that is on these interfaces and kicks the people out of their homes? Or maybe the less harsh: government buys all these properties with eminent domain, kicks people off and lets the lands go fallow?
What reality are you guys living in that you think any of this will happen and why do I feel that that same type of people placing forth such armchair planning and development mandates will be part of the crowd up in arms when people are being told they can no longer live where they do because we need to give the land back to the earth to burn in a peace.
The reality of the situation is far more complex as is the solution.
There's no need to jump to kicking people out of their homes. There are plenty of options:
Special taxing districts and/or community volunteer programs in high fire risk areas to fund fuel removal initiatives -- think a crowd of people with power tools clearing dry grass and underbrush.
Incentives and/or code changes for fire-resistant building. I know of someone in a fire-prone area who had to replace their cedar shake roof with a metal roof because the fire department told them they won't bother trying to save houses with wooden roofs.
Changing expectations and funding for controlled burns, and helping/expecting property owners to assist with clearing debris so that controlled burns remain controlled.
Ecosystem engineering beyond controlled burns -- it's a wicked hard problem, but it might be possible to breed, engineer, or import cultivars and species that are less prone to out-of-control fires.
So instead of kicking them out of your homes, you price them out with taxes? Mind you, I'm more mirroring the sentiment of the people who would be affected by your policy rather than simply dismissing it.
There are policies, lots of policies. State, county, local. All up and down CA, but none of them are moving at the speed of climate change. Controlled burning is there, fire resistant buildings are there (although if you ez-bake a house it's gone regardless), building defensible areas (green belts) around cities that fuel control is economically feasible, all on the table. You can look at cities like Paradise, which was basically destroyed, for what these policies look like.
The thing is, these policies take money, and time. Lots of both, and they already largely exist.
If someone builds a home in a flood plane... Oh wait they do.
Something has to give, subsidizing those who live in harm's way; to continue living in harms way; isn't the answer.
Mistakes were made with zoning and building code. The proper fix seems situation dependent, but probably includes some combination of local engineering changes to safety (materials, what's allowed how close to what, evac routes, etc) and abandoning indefensible positions as unsafe for habitation. It generally makes sense for society as a whole to make a one time payment to reclaim areas for nature.
Why do you think those proposals you suggest are ones I would support?
I actually know people who help fight these fires every year, and they seem to have some rather concrete ideas in mind of what should be done and I don't think it involves kicking people out of their homes.
A big one would be opening up more forest for logging.
Edit: but the main point here is listening more to the people who risk their lives to fight these fires, and the impression I get is that state politicians aren't doing that enough
> And that action is? Government seizes control of any property that is on these interfaces and kicks the people out of their homes? Or maybe the less harsh: government buys all these properties with eminent domain, kicks people off and lets the lands go fallow?
It may help your understanding a whole lot to realize that, in fact, the REAL problem REALLY IS the buildup of burnable stuff because of past wildfire policy.
Climate change explains why it is all catching on fire now. But if we had the forests that we had a century ago, and current climate conditions, we would have far smaller fires than we would if we had current forests and climate conditions from a century ago.
Did you know that in a healthy forest, most of the mature trees do not get killed by the fire when a fire comes through? It is easy to see that it has to be true - trees survive centuries and fires come through much more often than that. And the reason why it is true is that when you have minimal underbrush, it burns past quickly and doesn't catch the trunk on fire. But we have enough fuel that it burns, and stays burning long enough to catch the whole tree. Which generates such intense heat that you get local weather conditions that dry out the next area so that when it burns, its trees will catch fire more easily.
Guess what? Climate change may start the fire and make it hard to fight. But fuel load is the biggest factor in how intense it is. And that is the result of past forest policy.
Perhaps you missed the part where it's infeasible to do controlled burns on the scale that people around here are armchairing around because there are many of human structures within these wildlands. That is the reason why these fires are suppressed, because if they aren't they will kill humans or destroy structures.
Put another way, if you want to pull your car out of your drive way, but you can't because there is a child standing behind you. The problem is not that you didn't pull you car out, it's the child standing behind you.
Moving onto the "Ok then, just change policy and fix that then". Ok, yeah, kick millions of people off their properties, abandon who knows how many structures, easy, simple.
Why did you just change the subject? And attack me for something that I didn't say rather than what I did say?
The topic was to what extent the current problem is the result of past forestry policy. It wasn't how to get out of the current problem. It *certainly* wasn't about the wisdom of large scale controlled burns in populated areas.
Can we go back to the actual topic? And have you answer whether or not you now understand why people say that past forestry policy is the fundamental reason why this problem exists in the first place?
> And have you answer whether or not you now understand why people say that past forestry policy is the fundamental reason why this problem exists in the first place?
Did you miss the part where I asked if you missed the part where it's infeasible to do controlled burns on the scale that people around here are armchairing around because of the human presence within these wildlands?
It's not forestry policy that prevented controlled burns, it's urban sprawl. And there then is climate change that is moving faster than many policies already put into place.
I did not miss it. But it was responsive to nothing that I said.
As you should be aware, forestry approaches to fuel load include controlled burns, brush clearing, and selective logging. Both brush clearing and selective logging could have been done all along without destroying the homes of people who live in wilderness areas.
With proper preparation and regulations, controlled burns can be safely done in lightly populated areas. As an example I point to Australia. Sadly this approach cannot be taken in California, both due to the fact that our houses are not built to appropriate standards, and the fact that fuel loads are dangerously high. However the fact that this is not, today, a feasible approach doesn't alter the fact that it could have been viable with different past policies. Which also means that different future policies could also make it feasible at some point in the future.
Your comment is at best a retractive justification for the past forestry policy which left us with our current long-term problems. But in no way does it suggest that past policy did not create the basis for our current problems.
> It may help your understanding a whole lot to realize that, in fact, the REAL problem REALLY IS the buildup of burnable stuff because of past wildfire policy.
My direct response:
> Perhaps you missed the part where it's infeasible to do controlled burns on the scale that people around here are armchairing around because there are many of human structures within these wildlands. That is the reason why these fires are suppressed, because if they aren't they will kill humans or destroy structures.
I even gave you a helpful analogy:
> Put another way, if you want to pull your car out of your drive way, but you can't because there is a child standing behind you. The problem is not that you didn't pull you car out, it's the child standing behind you.
If you can't see how this isn't responsive to your comment, then we really don't have anything else to dicuss.
Also,
> With proper preparation and regulations, controlled burns can be safely done in lightly populated areas.
You actually aren't a genius with an idea that the fire fighting agencies of California couldn't think of. California does many controlled burns but there is a limit to their effectiveness, safety and scale, and they absolutely will not solve the wildfire crisis in California. It's a bit odd that use Australia as an example (of effectively managing wildfires I presume, your example was not really fleshed out), in that they have had some of the worse wildfires in their country's history in the last few years, and again, California does do prescribed burns as well when/where in it safe.
I'm not going to bother continuing when you respond to what I wish I said rather than what I actually said.
For the last time, the whole controlled burns is your obsession, and was not something that I said. And your continuing to go back to it marks you as out of touch with reality or logic.
Any reliable source on this? I for one doubt that the population density could allow an exhaustive conversion of all wilderness into “a garden” with a complete absence of megafires. Sounds a bit like a “noble savage” romanticism.
Thanks for the share. I’m aware of these articles and aware of the age-old practices, which are not even exclusive to Americas or ancient times. But I don’t see any data on the whole wilderness being turned into a garden by these tribes and mega fires not being there thanks to it.
You're probably just expecting stricter definitions of the word "garden" (and "wilderness" for that matter). At one extreme there's a botanical garden, where every single leaf of every plant is carefully inspected and maintained, but at the other end, but still a "garden", is a euphemism for "not as it would be with zero humans around."
"Wilderness" is probably also more wild than would be intuitive, iff our sense of "wild" is based on a landscape that was actually actively managed to be an ideal habitat for hunting and gathering.
> You're probably just expecting stricter definitions of the word "garden" (and "wilderness" for that matter). At one extreme there's a botanical garden, where every single leaf of every plant is carefully inspected and maintained, but at the other end, but still a "garden", is a euphemism for "not as it would be with zero humans around."
Not really. The most common image of a garden is a controlled nature space tended for human enjoyment.
“As it would be with zero humans around” is the definition of a wilderness.
Even if you pushed the definitions to extremes they don’t overlap (a wildlife garden is still a garden).
Either way natives didn’t have that degree of control. Even today, in places where forests are assigned to villages for such caretaking, they don’t have that degree of control, even with all the modern aerial firefighting power it is a struggle, as evidenced by current wildfires in the Mediterranean.
The message, I'm pretty sure, wasn't that it was that kind of garden. Just that the landscape was already heavily transformed by the time Europeans arrived, but the Europeans didn't know that and assumed what they saw was its wild state.
It's not limited to California, either, as it's now suspected that North America's vast inland prairies were largely created by people setting fires and that we'd see something closer to forests if it were truly untouched.
It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.
> The message, I'm pretty sure, wasn't that it was that kind of garden
> It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.
It doesn't matter what kind it was, garden metaphor implies human control over a certain boundary.
And in this context (both from OP and the linked article) the control is specifically about preventing mega-fires through controlled fires. Prairies and uncontrolled fires are irrelevant.
There is little reason to question this technique was being applied locally with some success, but there is no evidence that this could be to an extent that made California their garden, in any meaning of the word you want to imagine.
If anything, I don't think the historical population vs landmass numbers can match up, hence my original objection. Disappointingly, only counter-arguments so far has been finessing over the definition of "garden" instead of working on the manpower and efficacy questions.
Well, sure when you exaggerate what I'm saying into 'exhaustive' conversion and a 'complete absence' of megafires it sounds like romanticism. I guess.
The population density was considerably higher before the arrival of in particular smallpox, for one thing. Other posters were kind enough to link you to some references, so I won't bother.
But yes, West Coast natives in fire country absolutely set fires and managed the forests to make it easier to hunt and prevent as much conflagration as they could. They had 12,000 years to get good at it, that's a long time.
The romanticism was thinking of North America as a "wilderness" when it had been inhabited for, again, 12,000 years. Humans shape their environments, the indigenous people of this continent were not an exception to this.
This looks quite different when hunting is the main source of protein, rather than animal husbandry.
> Well, sure when you exaggerate what I'm saying into 'exhaustive' conversion and a 'complete absence' of megafires it sounds like romanticism.
I merely made what was implicit into explicit; using the term "garden" implies a total control.
> The population density was considerably higher before the arrival of in particular smallpox, for one thing.
I'm not interested in the density over time. Do we know the acres of forest-land per capita and the total area a certain manpower can manage this way? Especially since you scale back to 12k years, I wouldn't be surprised if there are orders of magnitude mismatch between the work-load and the population's capacity.
> West Coast natives in fire country absolutely set fires and managed the forests to make it easier to hunt and prevent as much conflagration as they could
No question they did. Local village populations do this around the world today. "As much as they could" doesn't make it their garden though, nor guarantees that the methodology scales to today's land use practices. As a proof you can look at this month's Mediterranean wildfires in Italy, Greece, Spain and Turkey.
> The romanticism was thinking of North America as a "wilderness" when it had been inhabited for, again, 12,000 years. Humans shape their environments, the indigenous people of this continent were not an exception to this.
Roughly 25% to 45% of the world today is still wilderness depending how it is measured. It was probably 99% 12k years ago (I don't have data on this one).
People shape environments but not uniformly, nor necessarily forever. People being evil destroyers of nature is a last century outlook (and maybe rightly so) but in the times of those indigenous tribes, nature used to be the main adversary of humans, destroyer of populations. The idea of "wild man in harmony with nature" is a new age anachronism by people who probably haven't even camped in the wilderness, at least without a full-spectrum REI gadgetry of 21st century.
Ancient forests are fireproof. They take care for themselves. Sequoia forests were humid places.
The indigenous people lived in a different world than today. Not extensive agriculture sucking the earth dry. Not sparks from buildings or cars. Not gasoline spills. Not glass bottles around. Less people doing barbeques or smoking.
We forget so quickly. We used to burn the forests out of indifference and perceived abundance.
> By the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run into the woods.
We also forget that pre-european cultures in the Americas seem to have regularly practiced deliberate forest burning, for several reasons. They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s, but American human-driven forest management didn't started with Europeans.
They also had a few thousand years of practice figuring out what works in the local environment.
Human nature is one of the few things that seems to be consistent throughout all of history across all civilizations. The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.
> The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.
If one person can cause a tragedy by mistake, you have a systematic failure, not a failure of the individual. A sign of a good system is that the occasional fool doesn't end up with the horizon burning.
WA state HB 1168, which passed last year, provides $125m to the DNR for wildfire management and prevention. I know some people involved and the money should help buy them some breathing room to be able to actually be proactive with prescribed burns, thinning, and the like.
Strange, for the last few yeas NH pretty much sold the idea that its climate change and thous evil politicians that aren't 100% in on the the green movement who cased the wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves.
We're no more "guests" than anything else on this planet. I'm all for keeping the planet nice for future humans but there's no need for some weird pseudo religious element about being caretakers.
It would be nice if we could take the resources used to fight fires, and instead put it into making homes more fire-resistant. Let the forests be (burned or not) and learn to live with them.
It doesn't matter if your house is made out of asbestos and concrete if the AQI is off the charts and ambient temperature is over 600 degrees due to fires surrounding it.
> In the United States the pine tree, Pinus palustris, known as the longleaf pine, once covered as much as 90,000,000 acres (360,000 km2) but due to clear cutting was reduced by between 95% and 97%. The trees grow very large (up to 150 feet), taking 100 to 150 years to mature and can live up to 500 years. The wood was prized and cutting resulted in many hundreds of thousands of stumps that are very resinous, do not rot, and eventually become fatwood. This ushered in a new industry for many years.
Some of these trees burn like firebombs, they probably find it useful too. As a species. The individual tree, maybe, but if so far more briefly.
This highlights one of the problems with pop culture and science. Pop culture has a tendency to fixate on a small number of big problems or sexy technologies to the exclusion of all others.
e.g. If you bring up forestry management's role in setting the stage for megafires, you will typically be labelled a climate change denier unless you go out of your way to address climate change first, as this article does. Even then, you'll likely be seen by many as "minimizing the real problem".
Yes, climate change is a bigger problem, overall, than megafires, but past (and continuing) forestry practices are the larger part of the megafire problem. Should we ignore small problems until the big ones are all solved?
Of course not.
The problem with pop culture is that it influences everything. If you want to have any success with grant applications, finding ways to work in current pop-culture buzzwords in is essential. Anyone trying to do research on forestry would be well advised to have "climate change" somewhere in their proposal even if it's not important to their work at all.
If you want to get politicians to devote public funding to improving forestry practices, good luck! There's money for exploring the impact of climate change on forests, but not for improving forestry practices themselves. At least, not until enough megafires make people look more carefully at the problem.
The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades. It just wasn't something that fit into pop culture narratives, so we've let things get worse and worse.
The next time you hear someone saying that X is an important part of a problem that climate change also affects, pay closer attention. Don't just dismiss that person as a climate change denier. Make room for small problems as well as the big ones, because ignoring many small problems soon leads to big ones.
This is exactly right. Especially the part about how this phenomenon is not new. I seem to remember an article for grade school kids in a scholastic magazine from the late 90s that mentioned this.
Documentaries about Yellowstone at the time mentioned the importance of fired in the germination of new trees.
Of course, policy has not effectively reacted to well known science. Sigh.
The previous poster was comparing building California homes near trees to the folks who build on flood plains.
A natural expansion of that tells you that you can't build in Santa Rosa (Tubbs Fire), Oakland hills (more fires), the Bay Area (earthquakes, someday the Hayward Fault will let loose), or really much of anywhere near the coast (rising sea levels, California Coastal Commission has decided that protecting your property with water barriers is no bueno).
The unfortunate reality is that some of this may be true. Building in danger zones where the home will need to be replaced in 10-20 years is an awful investment on a 30 year mortgage. If the property is untenable after 20 years then the owner is out a good chunk of money.
This isn’t a big deal when property is cheap and can be paid off within 5-10 years, and rebuilt. But housing has become dramatically more expensive relative to cash flow than it has been historically.
> Building in danger zones where the home will need to be replaced in 10-20 years is an awful investment on a 30 year mortgage.
With a cheap enough house, it's just the thing. Spend all of your money on land.
Maybe the future is in RVs. If they let me get away with it, I can see scraping a parking pad in Big Sur and sticking a motorhome on it. Relatively earthquake-proof. Fire? Simply drive away. Vacations to the desert can be slept in your own bed. Want to live the classic life? Buy a GMC Motorhome.
Maybe those behemoths make sense. Live the Jim Rockford lifestyle.
Near me is a very picturesque mountain town, I would love to live there. However the houses are just woven into the forest, its only a matter of time until the entire place goes up in flame.
Yes, it is a beautiful way to build. It's also completely indefensible in event of a wildfire.
This is also climate dependent, though. Most of CT, VT, MA, NY, PA, NH, ME are essentially tactless forests separated by small meadows. Where I grew up in CT, if we did not prune the forest, it would encroach about 5-10ft/year into our lawns. if you truly didn't mow, it might have been twice or three times that.
Also when I grew up we'd make burn piles once a year to burn all the deadwood that came down around the property. It was often impossible to light those piles of wood without kerosene since everything was so wet.
I think a lot of the forest living is inspired by places like VT and CT where building in a forest is fine and safe. In the middle of a pine forest in northern CA is a totally different ecosystem and can't be treated the same.
Make sure there are no dries leaves or pine needles gathered in places, ensure that your attic vent is properly screened from embers, that flammable furniture (e.g., cushions) is not laying about too close to the house.
Lots of simple, preventative measures that people can do to increase their odds.
That’s really not enough, forest fires are basically distributed denial of service attack. A tiny spark which wouldn’t be a significant issue on it’s own can destroy a house when nobody is there actively protecting it.
Clearing vegetation and material selection can make a huge difference, just don’t expect a normal house to be ok anywhere near a fire.
A big enough fire, which is what you get with tall, overcrowded trees, will set many houses on fire from hundreds of yards away - even if no embers or anything else land on the house.
It is really amazing the amount of heat released, and how quickly, in one of these fires.
The three main sources of ignition during a wildfire are embers, direct flame contact, and radiant heat. This is why the FPA and others have the three different zones, of particular distances, where they recommend doing particular things. House can survive large quantities of radiant heat:
Quite often what happens with radiant heat is that it breaks a window, which then allows embers to go into the house and set it alight. Embers are actually the things that cause the most damage:
It’s also pretty wasteful when you think about it. How much energy could we harness if we simply allowed logging and used the wood for heating, construction, or electricity.
Past forestry management is why we have the the problem in the first place.
Climate change is why the problem just got so much worse, so quickly. And is why we can't attempt to fix it as gradually as we created it in the first place.
Both are actually important for understanding this subject. And climate change doesn't just come up because it is demanded by pop culture.
How does that data support the case that climate change is the main culprit? It shows no record fires from ‘77-‘03, and a lot of record fires since ‘03. Why wasn’t there a steady progression, if the cause is slow-and-steady climate change?
It is because natural variation (including a variety of multi-year cycles) far exceeds the long-term warming trend. So global warming shows up as an increased frequency of extreme events when natural variation and warming coincide. But variation is still dominant.
However extreme events become more extreme. We are now seeing extreme events that simply would not have been possible without global warming. For example the 2011–2017 California drought was the most extreme drought in at least 1200 years. And yet, here we are again in what's shaping to be an even more extreme one. And going forward, droughts like this one are going to become common.
This is the beef* I had with Cliff Mass when he said the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest had nothing to do with climate change, it wasn't an extreme event, it was just natural variation. The temperatures may not have been more extreme than known outliers, but what he didn't say is much more important: How often would natural variations lead us to expect events like it and how long would they last?
You can't just say "oh, this is just a typical thing that happens once in a hundred years" when it's happening every year.
* I have lots of other beefs with Cliff, but they aren't relevant to this discussion.
Those numbers are extreme enough to make me question whether the model's tails are heavy enough, but yeah. It basically wouldn't have been possible without global warming.
> How does that data support the case that climate change is the main culprit?
Most likely because people don't know what they're talking about. There are a lot of potential causes, probably some more that never come up, but an awful lot of absolutely certain theories.
I can’t really take this seriously when it starts in 1932. Natural disasters didn’t just start happening because humans showed up. Show some data from 200-400 years ago and I’d be more inclined to believe we are living in an outlier.
… create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades. It just wasn't something that fit into pop culture narratives, so we've let things get worse and worse.
I’ve concluded it’s actually more like NIMBY ism and willful ignorance. Nobody wants controlled burns in their backyard, and many don’t want to maintain defensible space. So everyone joins together to create this shared illusion that they can manage the land and their property however they want AND never suffer the consequences.
This is exactly it. Pop culture does not set policy.
The current forestry management regieme around preventing forest fires was put in place to protect forests as an agricultural asset and resource for the timber industry.
That practice has morphed into a protection of real estate as people have built their homes in the wildfire zone over the past 40 years.
Prior to colonozation by Europeans in the Pacific Northwest, native americans regularly burned forests regularly. That practice stopped once their populations were decimated by disease and subjugation.
It did not require native Americans, lighting could do it just fine.
What was the thinking of these native Americans you speak of? Were they thinking "we should start wildfires because it will be better for the forest over a period of centuries"? Because...?
I agree that the practice of trying to stop these fires results in larger fires later. What I'd like is more information on why native Americans were able to realize and act on this. I'm willing to believe it, but not without some explanation.
Remember when the previous administration was ridiculed for suggesting the massive forest fires were largely caused by forest mismanagement and that artificially preventing burns would only make it worse? [0]
Oddly enough, everyone laughed too when the same administration suggested the lab leak hypothesis...
Credibility matters. Denying the big problem exists in spite of an overwhelming consensus results in being distrusted and ridiculed when (perhaps rightly) playing up a small problem over the big problem in a particular space.
Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population.
People attack credibility when they can't refute the facts!
> Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population.
Of course, remember it was forbidden to mention the lab leak hypothesis on mainstream social media. They banned people for that.
That's a disingenuous way to interpret this. nothing in that article is denying that forrest management is a problem. There's even a quote in there where Newsome acknowledged that is part of the problem. That admin wanted to do everything they could to down play climate change anyway they can. People were talking abuut forrest management before Trump said we need to rake our forrests in 2020 this was a big thing after the fires in 2017
> "Please respect, and I know you do, the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue ... of climate change,” Newsom said.
I don't see this as a disingenuis way to interpret it. Summarizing - OP's point is that we ridiculed previous administration for suggesting that forest mismanagement played a larger role in California fires. Newsom, as quoted above, was suggesting that Climate Change is the primary reason.
No where in the article does it say that previous administration only blamed forest mismanagement. They said that likely the larger role is played by forest mismanagement.
Furthermore, Newsom claims "Fundamental" issue. Meaning, it is the (sole?) basis for forest fires.
During a briefing with Trump, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, told him forest management is an issue, but "climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this."
And it's true, Winters are drier summer is hotter. Trump is ridiculed because he talks like an idiot and denies climate change.
No one denies that forrest management is a problem. it was a huge blaming thing for a couple years because the federal government actually maintains most of it. Remeber all of this?
I am not defending Trump which you appear to be arguing for. I agree that Trump says the most ridiculous things.
All I am trying to do is to stay somewhat objective. I clearly recall how the entire media instantly discredited him for mentioning forest mismanagement.
I've seen time and again as a liberal how we get into mob thinking and seldom criticize ourselves or look at things objectively.
I think they were ridiculed for the later parts of that article.
> When Wade Crowfoot, California secretary for natural resources – identified climate change as the primary cause of the wildfires, Trump interrupted: "It'll start getting cooler – you just watch."
> "I wish science agreed with you," Crowfoot told the president.
> Trump responded, "I don't think science knows, actually."
I ridiculed him because the state of California owns less than 10% of their forests, whereas the federal government owns over 50% of California's forests.
He was in control of the land he claims California is mismanaging. The guy is a fucking idiot.
The problem was not that the previous occupant of the Oval Office mentioned forest mismanagement, the problem was that his idea of proper management was to rake the leaves.
> The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades.
This is 100% true.
Unfortunately, better forestry practices require a LOT more money to be pumped into the departments which manage those forests for manpower. Go take a look at how much manpower and resource it took to clean up even a tiny area around the Grand Canyon.
In addition, climate change is making things like "controlled burns" increasingly dangerous. The number of days you have the conditions to do a controlled burn are getting fewer and fewer.
"Better" forestry practices are not cheap, and nobody wants to spend the money until after their house burns down.
agree and also over time, like lots of farming, ultimately control was more important that technique, so you get people who win at control, deciding the technique.
I think it's also just modern internet reactive culture. I see it in other areas too. If I watch a video game review, sometimes the reviewer will spend a minute or more (in a <10 minute review) telling people this is just an opinion, reviews are subjective, this is just for me, maybe you will like it, it's OK to like things if I don't like them. It's really obnoxious, distracting, and even feels pandering sometimes. All these statements should be implicit, but here we are.
This sort of thing has been going on since well before the internet. J. K. Galbraith wrote about how, during McCarthy's red scare, one had to put all sorts of caveats in parenthetical phrases to break up anything that might be quoted out of context (it still would be, but one could at least point out the elided text.) This was hardly new then - see Cardinal Richelieu's well-known epigram "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." It is probably as old as language.
If there is anything new here, the internet and talk radio has shown a lot of people how to do this. Some of them mistake it for wisdom, and others just like to annoy people who hold nuanced views. Don't blame the victims for the fact that it is no longer possible to assume anything reasonable is implicit.
It is old but I think the modern aspect is that is it much more of a 2-way communication medium. Yes, in previous eras you could get angry letters or phone calls. But today you can have hundreds of thousands of people respond directly on the channel that you are using to communicate. It makes it a lot harder to fire and forget with an opinion, so I don't blame them for including caveats, but it makes the content annoying. I am not annoyed at them personally for including these CYA spiels, I am annoyed that it has to be included.
One could also argue that the problem is people wanting to live in forests and not properly maintain treeline from recommended distances (~100ft) leads to so much residential damage.
Stop living where there are forest fires and there won't be such an urgency to put them out.
Also, I think there's a kneejerk reaction to blaming forest services for not taking care of the forests. When in reality (a) they do: brush clearing and controlled burns happen all the time in california & oregon, (b) forests are far too huge for even 10x the puny forestry service of today, and (c) budget is constantly being cut.
Also x 2: the west coast US is experience drought unlike any since humans settled the west coast. Letting forest fires burn in California, Oregon and Washington now wound remove the forests entirely. EDIT: Regardless it is gonna happen, there are completely brown/orange forests in central oregon just waiting to burn.
> Letting forest fires burn in California, Oregon and Washington now wound remove the forests entirely.
That's not how it works. Most larger trees survive fires just fine, they just don't look very pretty for a while afterwards.
In Australia, there are trees like the aptly named stringybark that exude flammable oils and peel off thin strips of their own bark to form highly flammable piles of tinder under themselves, which appears to ensure that any forest fire is powerful but passes through quickly (not killing the tree), and conveniently eliminates any nearby competition in the process.
I just backpacked through major burn zones from 2003 and 2020, and that is exactly how it worked. Mt Washington was burned to the ground in 2003 (B and B Complex fires), every single tree was burned down, even the big ones. The current new growth is about 5-10ft. In between Bend and Crescent there is a strip of forest that is completely orange because of the drought: top to bottom, every tree; it looks painted. The burn from last year near Lake Detroit has regions where no tree survived due to drought + fire. I recommend you backpack/drive/hike parts of Central Oregon to see the damage, and impending risk, for yourself.
> That's not how it works. Most larger trees survive fires just fine, they just don't look very pretty for a while afterwards.
In theory that's how it should work. The problem is when you have heat plus drought conditions... the wildfires consume everything.
For example, the Castle fire in California consumed over a tenth of the entire population of giant sequoias. Giant sequoias are pretty fire resistant due to their size and height, but this fire devastated them.
Mega fires are not the healthier small fires that do what you describe. The energy release from the built up, continuous mass of old fuel is literally in the scale of thermal flash from a nuclear weapon. It is unreal, and kills everything - sometimes even sterilizing soil 10+ Ft underground.
Lots of small fires means it never gets that bad. We’re well past that point now.
Australia is very different/unique. There are trees and plants in Australia that require fire for the seeds to sprout. Fires have been part of the ecosystem for so long over there that it has adapted. What you're describing sounds more like temperate rain forests of the west coast where pockets of wetness and some trees (like the Douglas Fir) make a fire less all consuming. But given that these forests have become drier and given things like pine beetle which is doing well because the winters aren't cold enough to control it the nature of the fires is changing. The fires are bigger, hotter, and destroy larger swaths of the forest.
AFAIK over the last few decades it is well understood that fires should be left to burn and generally this happens unless they threaten population areas. In theory this should mean that the next fire season has less fuel to burn but it's not working.
I'm not sure what the author is talking about is really current practices since I've heard the opposite so many times. What he describes seem to be mostly past practices.
Driving around the mountains in Marin county CA people live in these incredibly picturesque and beautiful spaces on forested mountain tops. I had never really seen anything like it other than possibly villas on the Italian coast, or parts of Japan but I believe the whole country is a lot wetter. My understanding is this kind of architecture and landscaping really only took off around the 1970s, but I can't blame those who are able to afford it for wanting to live essentially IN nature.
On the other hand city blocks, suburbs and good size lawns are boring in comparison but at least they are harder to burn down in dry weather.
Pop culture spreads using the instruments of media (social or conventional). Presence of ubiquitious media in the age of the Internet and snatching everyone's attention - now we have a recipe for a total mob thinking. A giant hive of people (often passionate and angry) moving in unison for a singular ideology. We've created many of these mobs. Intellectual people are also losing their grip on truth.
Before the internet, there was some damping factor in how information was distributed. This allowed for time and place for debate. How do we balance this? We desperately need instruments of truth without care for what the majority/minority believes, thinks, accepts, rejects or promotes.
100 years from now we're going to look back at this chaotic time in human history when we didn't know what to do with the Internet.
For nature doesn't care about anything but the truth.
climate change is a get out of jail free card for politicians, not sure why people are surprised.
Same thing happens with houses that flood because they were allowed to be built where they never should have been. Just blame climate change instead of government stupidity/corruption
People want to, but are very bad at caring about quality.
For whatever subject, there will be a sort of platonic ideal -- and this ideal won't be the same for everyone as there is room for taste and priorities. BUT what that ideal actually is depends on a whole lot of subtlety and understanding... especially accounting for the marginally different outcomes for a different set of priorities which you get in diversity of cultures.
Instead, you get extremism. There are a few people talking about real quality who are completely drowned out by people who generally know quite a bit less who want quality but don't understand it and opt instead for maximizing or minimizing some value. (i.e. the practice of preventing all forest fires, defund/abolish the police, prohibition, etc.)
People can't handle subtlety or disagreeing with someone to a small degree.
This is the trend, absolutism, not understanding details, and yelling loudly about everything.
Try to get into a conversation about COVID-19 about actual risks and thresholds for certain actions and you'll either get complete deniers or advocates for every precaution (preferably forced on everyone at every level of possible control).
How do you silence the loudest people on the extremes without simply being authoritarian?
>The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news.
Seriously, you should check out just how much of California used to burn in prehistory. I ran into a few papers on Sci-Hub about it. It's pretty crazy.
It looks like a large part of California would be uninhabitable given natural practices.
In addition to the pop culture issue here, I think the other side of the issue is bike-shedding. In general I don't think people are all that knowledgeable in a very broad sense, so whenever they're approached by a topic they know one thing about, they'll talk about it as if it were the most important aspect; bike shedding.
The swipe about denial accusations was wholly unnecessary. Multiple factors are at play. They're feeding on each other.
It's clear that there's a catastrophic problem that's developed, and continues to accellerate, with wildfire incidence and severity in North America. And that past forestry practices have all but certainly contributed.
Starting over 20 years ago, the number and scale of fire scars I'd see whilst travelling through the Western US began impressing itself on me sharply. On one trip I'd headed out of Boise on state routes 21 and 75, through the Sawtooth Wilderness, and hit a fire scar that was over 20 miles long. I continued through to Yellowstone where the decade-plus scars of the 1988 conflagration there, one of the most severe in the US at the time, were still sharply visible, along with stands of unburnt, but clearly dead trees, on the mountainsides (beetle infestation I believe). There was still plenty of fuel.
Other portions of that trip brought me through other fire scars, as well as terrain that would burn over the next several years (some of these immediately adjacent or twice-burned ground). One of my road stops ended up being a command-centre for firefighting efforts. That made news of the subsequent burns far more visceral.
Some years later, I had a long road-trip talk with a retired US Forestry worker who gave the story of how mismanagement was fueling current burns --- this now nearly a decade and a half ago itself. I think about that conversation often.
But wildfire is an increasing problem around the world, including in locations which have not to the best of my knowledge been subject to total fire suppression, including large regions of Siberia, ablaze now, burning for months, and quite possibly the continuation of what have become annual fires errupting for much of the past decade. The regions are simply too remote for the type of suppression the US and Canada have practiced.
And much of the terrain I've seen burned isn't exactly "forest". It might have some trees, but is more scrubland. Whether or not that is also subject to overaccumulation of fuel load I'm not certain, but it's the type of terrain that would burn regardless ... and yet, still seems to be burning more frequently and more intensely than before.
I've also driven through forests (part of the region now on fire in California, in 2015), and despite years of backpacking and rural trips, feeling very uncomfortable over just how painfully dry and primed for ignition that portion of the trip, made late in the year with hot dry weather and months of no precipitation, felt. The Camp Fire followed within a couple of years, and the Dixie fire is literally burning up the path I'd blazed. Forestry management is part of that, but bone-dry dust, pine needles, shrubs, and trees take more than just misguided foresters.
I'm interested in exploring alternative forms of forest management that can unwind the years of fire suppression and get to a new equilibrium that does not involve every forest being burned down along the way. Can anyone point to sources/research in this direction?
It seems past time to look into more radical alternatives than just doing a few prescribed burns.
I don't locate the problem with "pop culture," but with a certain kind of activist culture that's currently popular. Activism isn't a truth-seeking operation. Activists already know the truth; their job as they see it is to educate or cudgel everyone else. Activism isn't responsive to new information, for this very reason. It isn't interested in hearing new truths. It already knows all the truths that matter and, further, perceives itself to be engaged in a battle to convert these truths into policy.
I don't mean this to sound trite. I think it's a fundamentally mistaken way to operate in the world and it makes it a lot harder to have honest conversations about complex issues like this one.
(disclaimer, I work in a Climate&Energy group and have been studying wildfires, though by no means a deep expert in forestry)
The implication of this article is that we should have let the forests burn, and as a corollary we should go back to doing that.
The former seems like a reasonable argument. This article misses a couple of important details, though, notably the effects of invasive species and how climate change affects the regrowth of forests post fire. As a result, the latter is by no means obvious. At this point, it's unlikely that forests will go back to how things were, even if we stop suppression.
I'm not sure what's being suggested here. That we continue the current practices of preventing smaller fires? If the eventually of preventing smaller fires is creating a later megafire, aren't were merely delaying the inevitable--and doing more damage in the long term?
I don't think there is a great prescriptive process here to follow, and we've kind of backed ourselves into a corner (but again I am not a forestry expert).
The current practice is not a good equilibrium, but neither is going back to allowing most fires to burn out naturally. Going back to what worked before sounds appealing (minus the smoke), but really it's not likely to work again the second time around because of everything else that has changed. So an ideal solution is probably going to need to be more complicated.
You know, it's worth considering that 'California' isn't some big monolithic landscape.
The dangerous fires mostly seem to erupt from hard-to-access river canyons. Do you just let those burn? Light 'em up on purpose?
As a side note, these areas are filled with highly flammable buildings. 100 year old wood construction, shared attics in the small towns, nowhere near modern code.
Here's a great talk from a Forest Service expert on why wildfires have become worse. The TLDR is that forests have become much denser, particularly after old trees were logged, and this creates large areas of fuel. Additionally, forests need active management - prescribed burns, dry fuel cleanup, pest management, etc. Climate change may be aggravating or amplifying the intensity of wildfires but there are other causes that are potentially more important, and they present opportunities for wildfire prevention that are currently ignored by governments/news media/social media.
This was one of the major findings after the major Yellowstone fire of 1988. Decades of stopping any fires led to a massive fuel buildup that caused a huge firestorm.
In OZ, within the emergency volunteer firefighting community, there's dissent about "what to do" with people who have a strongly pragmatic view that there is no more wild landscape, and we need to actively manage it all, even national parks, and people who want nature to run its course and only manage around the fringes.
NSW vs Vic vs Qld. City vs Country. Farmer vs Townie. Farmer and Townie vs Traditional landowners
They get pretty heated, but I stress this is within a community of people who don fire-gear, get in trucks and actually have to deal with the damn things.
There's a generation gap, a gender gap, a culture gap, a politics gap, a you're-not-from-round-here gap...
I walked into the edge of the online flamefest. Wish I hadn't joined in. (yea. flamefest amongst fireies...)
I was under the impression that prescribed burning (including the return of indigenous burn practices) enjoyed majority support in Australia? (Save the few NIMBYs complaining about the smoke)
It's more popular than elsewhere. In Italy where I grew up, it gets very little support. I now live in Sydney and in the past 10 years I became used to periodically having smoke from planned burning. I can't imagine something like that would go down well back in Italy.
I was wondering if there are climatic/ecological differences that make controlled burning more effective / less disruptive for the ecosystem in some places compared to others.
Yes that's true about Italian farmers! I grew up on a farm and we had controlled burnings every now and then. But when speaking of forests/unmanaged land/natural parks, there seems to be a much different sensitivity.
At least among people that I know[0], there is a widespread belief that when a forest burns it will never recover to its original state, or it will do it only after an exceedingly long time[1]. The same belief doesn't apply to agricultural land[2].
[0] Obviously this is just based on my direct experience, maybe in different parts of Italy or in different social circles it would be different.
[1] Again, I think this is more true in some environments than others - for example I seem to remember reading that, for tropical rainforests, the recovery time is very long. I don't know much about this topic though.
[2] Even though it's probably the case that agricultural controlled burning affects aspects such as soil biology, beneficial species, pests, etc.
I've heard of issues with smoke tainting grapes (prescribed burns to prevent major fires in a wine region) but I got the impression that each side negotiated timing rather than it being serious opposition. The alternative being full-scale fire causes a lot more damage.
I only have tangential knowledge of it, but there's a lot of controversy around how planned burns are implemented. Do you do it later in the year closer to summer when the risk is higher, or do you do it early and let fuel build up plus cover less ground? Should you be bulldozing the trees off the side of the road and completely clearing it instead of doing controlled burns along the edge? Does it do anything to drive along a road setting the brush on fire because it's easy to get to, if you don't burn the massive forest that's going to send embers straight into your town? What do you do when there's a rare orchid patch or a tiny endangered marsupial right in the area you want to set on fire? What if there's a commercial pine or bluegum plantation that you aren't allowed to set on fire? Which models do you use for choosing where to burn? Do you listen to the researchers from the university three hours' drive away, the indigenous elders who live an hour away but have traditional knowledge, or the old farmer who lives right next door who tells you where the fire went on Black Saturday but probably has a bit of tunnel vision from his experience? When so many fires are deliberately lit, should you put more effort into finding the arsonists instead of controlled burns? Is the RFS stealing funding from the CFA somehow? Should you arrange a reciprocal deal where you send water bombers to California during the Australian winter and spring if it means they're not at home to stop "controlled" burns that get away? Why are all these idiots building houses with redgums so close you can reach out the window and touch them, and how do you do a controlled burn in a lightly populated area with risky houses like that?
That's a fascinating insight into the manifold issues confronting fire management. Thank you for that.
> Why are all these idiots building houses with redgums so close you can reach out the window and touch them, and how do you do a controlled burn in a lightly populated area with risky houses like that?
Seems like this should be enforced at a government level.. either the house owner takes responsibility for poor fire preparation (i.e, they might lose their house, have increased insurance premiums), or the government fines people for endangering their neighbours.
Everyone likes the idea of managing this stuff properly until it means their house gets burned by falling embers. There is the problem that firefighers are unable to manage everything in a safe and not disruptive way.
Even when done safe as possible there will still be a wave of complaints when controlled burns cover someones property in ash or burns holes in their garden shade.
It comes down to poor forest management. Don't weed your garden? Don't allow logging to thin out trees? Reap what you sow. Overcrowded disease-prone trees, drought, beetle infestations, piles of deadfall, less wildlife, huge devastating fires with choking smoke, then flash floods, removal of topsoil, silt-filled rivers, lakes, and dams, and landslides. Controlled burns occasionally become uncontrolled burns and just destroy valuable resources. But, no surprise here. You can't expect common sense from academics.
Yeh, however I'm not sure that the only cause. I think that record temperatures, and less moisture, are more important factors here.
For example, I know that in recent years we observe unprecedented fires in Siberia region where, due to wast areas and very low population/infrastructure, smaller natural fires were never artificially suppressed.
Controlled burns don't always stay under control. Lawsuits have effectively shut down controlled burns anywhere near houses.
The trade-off is between the probability that a controlled burn will accidentally spread to houses and the eventual big wildfire that will take out a subdivision or entire town.
Sadly, back during the Yellowstone fires of 1988 the press and uninformed people got the phrase "let it burn" from somewhere and proceeded to wreck all political will for any sort of measured and responsible wildland fire management. Two decades later, if Americans see a wildfire burning and it isn't swarmed with attempts to put it out, they complain.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadThese issues were known to the US Forest Service at least 20 years ago, and broadly speaking nothing was done about it.
Climate change is helping forest fires to ignite and burn hotter due to reduced moisture in both trees and the soil. To the extent that it may also increase the incidence of lightning, and thus the probability of naturally started fires, it can also influence the numbers of fires.
But gross mismanagement of forests for most of the 20th century caused by misguided ideas about what keeps forests healthy is what has led to an almost unimaginable pile of fuel sitting on forest floors that would never have existed in the past.
[citation needed]
Actually no, none needed this is obvious nonsense, everyone with a basic understanding of physics can spot that.
It appears you have a very basic understanding of physics.
It mentions in multiple places that climate change is increasing the duration of the forest fire season and worsening conditions that promote wildfire.
The point of the article is that outcomes of poor forestry management practices (a build up of fuel that lead to truly enormous wildfires when they finally burn) were bad enough, and now climate change is dramatically exacerbating those effects.
As a result, changing our forestry management practices to adopt controlled burns, thinning, and other techniques, will be a critical element of climate change adaptation.
That's not to say we shouldn't stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible to avoid even worse future effects. But we've already warmed the globe enough that adaptation is already necessary, and this is just one example.
Global warming is an accelerant, but not the root cause.
To be fair, we had big, honkin', town-killin' fires back when it rained and snowed more than average for decades.
It's hard to tell how much is due to drought, how much to a shift from snow to rain, how much is home development, how much is homeless people torching off areas (more than you'd like to think).
So, maybe you're referring to an earlier period, in which case, cool.
I don't fully agree with this statement, it's more that you're not just affecting your rainfall, but neighbors as well. As we speak, 8 of the Western states in the US are performing scientific trials together.
There's no hard data that shows exactly how much weather modification actually works. Some data shows 5 to 15% increased snowfall, but that's just statistical analysis. Once we get hard data that shows the cost/benefit, you're likely to see more weather modification efforts (e.g. how many dollars per acre-foot of water? Is this cheaper or more expensive than pipelines, or drinking water reservoirs? What would a budget look like for bolstering our agriculture? Can a state government budget a few million for the next year due to an anticipated reduction in rainfall? How many million would we need? What's the human and ecological (particularly beneficial bacteria and algae) impacts of being exposed to AgI?)
We also don't know how wide-scale it works. Yes, China can seed clouds to reduce smog to have blue skies for PRC meetings in Beijing, but can it work on the scale of say, an entire mountain range? Or the agricultural area of an entire state? Can't say. It's only been in the last few years that we've gotten RADAR and compute that's capable of analyzing our experiments.
Also another thing, you can generate precipitation, but even weather modification technology can't overcome a drought. If you have a high pressure system (like the one currently sitting over most of the West US at the moment) you're stuck with dry skies.
California has an agriculture problem.
* Since 1987, the United States has been the largest producer of almonds worldwide. The success of the California crop in seizing the No. 1 rank in world almond production is due in large part to the use of irrigation and mechanization, resulting in higher yields and cost effectiveness.
The US produces 10x more almonds than number two on the global biggest exporters list: over 2m tons/year, #2 on the list is Spain with 200k tons. California is the #1 producer of almonds in the world. It takes 1.1 gallon of water to grow one(!!!) almond.
https://www.atlasbig.com/en-in/countries-by-almond-productio..., https://keepcaliforniafarming.org/produce/california-almonds..., https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it-re...
Look at page 4: https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/PDFs/2017-18AgExports.pdf
Pistachios, walnuts, dairy, wine, beer, kiwis(!), avocados, grapes, rice!
I wouldn't be so sure. It looks like a lot of the fires don't wipe out the fuel load, a lot of burnable stuff grows back quickly, it doesn't take all that many years for everything to grow back.
Living in one of the uber-flammable areas, it's funny how fast all of the plants grow. This entire locality is (2nd (or 3rd (or 4th))) generation trees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak
[2] https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-popular-li...
[0]https://calpba.org/
In addition to excessive fire suppression causing fires to become ever more extreme, I suspect that the fact that people move around so much caused there to be no "living memory" of the natural conditions of an area, and thus people collectively "forgot" that their areas burn, and need fuel removal and careful management, not just fire suppression.
In my head, I see reforested areas like the Potato Jesus painting with a bonus "Mission Accomplished" banner.
I can't be too many thousands of years. It doesn't take too many thousands to completely change the nature of forests (spruce to pine for example).
The core of the issue has little to do with the fire suppression policy and more to do with the interface between humans and wildlands. There just aren't many areas that are even safe to do proscribe burns en masse that won't threaten some property or structures even if prescribed burns were emphasized.
And I just don't understand how ever single one of these "The REAL problem is California doesn't let wildfires burn" threads is they always start with, "yeah climate change could possibly maybe be one cause but the REAL cause is..." No, really, climate change is not some incidental factor here, the climate conditions in CA are a huge contributor to these fires and possibly dominating factor in these fires.
All the more reason to focus on managing them, and remember the state's history of fires when deciding where and how to build structures and manage urban/wild interfaces in the future.
What reality are you guys living in that you think any of this will happen and why do I feel that that same type of people placing forth such armchair planning and development mandates will be part of the crowd up in arms when people are being told they can no longer live where they do because we need to give the land back to the earth to burn in a peace.
The reality of the situation is far more complex as is the solution.
Special taxing districts and/or community volunteer programs in high fire risk areas to fund fuel removal initiatives -- think a crowd of people with power tools clearing dry grass and underbrush.
Incentives and/or code changes for fire-resistant building. I know of someone in a fire-prone area who had to replace their cedar shake roof with a metal roof because the fire department told them they won't bother trying to save houses with wooden roofs.
Changing expectations and funding for controlled burns, and helping/expecting property owners to assist with clearing debris so that controlled burns remain controlled.
Ecosystem engineering beyond controlled burns -- it's a wicked hard problem, but it might be possible to breed, engineer, or import cultivars and species that are less prone to out-of-control fires.
There are policies, lots of policies. State, county, local. All up and down CA, but none of them are moving at the speed of climate change. Controlled burning is there, fire resistant buildings are there (although if you ez-bake a house it's gone regardless), building defensible areas (green belts) around cities that fuel control is economically feasible, all on the table. You can look at cities like Paradise, which was basically destroyed, for what these policies look like.
The thing is, these policies take money, and time. Lots of both, and they already largely exist.
Something has to give, subsidizing those who live in harm's way; to continue living in harms way; isn't the answer.
Mistakes were made with zoning and building code. The proper fix seems situation dependent, but probably includes some combination of local engineering changes to safety (materials, what's allowed how close to what, evac routes, etc) and abandoning indefensible positions as unsafe for habitation. It generally makes sense for society as a whole to make a one time payment to reclaim areas for nature.
I actually know people who help fight these fires every year, and they seem to have some rather concrete ideas in mind of what should be done and I don't think it involves kicking people out of their homes.
Edit: but the main point here is listening more to the people who risk their lives to fight these fires, and the impression I get is that state politicians aren't doing that enough
If a fire comes, just let their houses burn.
"Proscribed" means prohibited. I think you must mean prescribed burns? I assume it's a typo but it conveys the opposite meaning.
Climate change explains why it is all catching on fire now. But if we had the forests that we had a century ago, and current climate conditions, we would have far smaller fires than we would if we had current forests and climate conditions from a century ago.
Did you know that in a healthy forest, most of the mature trees do not get killed by the fire when a fire comes through? It is easy to see that it has to be true - trees survive centuries and fires come through much more often than that. And the reason why it is true is that when you have minimal underbrush, it burns past quickly and doesn't catch the trunk on fire. But we have enough fuel that it burns, and stays burning long enough to catch the whole tree. Which generates such intense heat that you get local weather conditions that dry out the next area so that when it burns, its trees will catch fire more easily.
Guess what? Climate change may start the fire and make it hard to fight. But fuel load is the biggest factor in how intense it is. And that is the result of past forest policy.
Put another way, if you want to pull your car out of your drive way, but you can't because there is a child standing behind you. The problem is not that you didn't pull you car out, it's the child standing behind you.
Moving onto the "Ok then, just change policy and fix that then". Ok, yeah, kick millions of people off their properties, abandon who knows how many structures, easy, simple.
Or maybe, you know, it's complicated.
The topic was to what extent the current problem is the result of past forestry policy. It wasn't how to get out of the current problem. It *certainly* wasn't about the wisdom of large scale controlled burns in populated areas.
Can we go back to the actual topic? And have you answer whether or not you now understand why people say that past forestry policy is the fundamental reason why this problem exists in the first place?
Did you miss the part where I asked if you missed the part where it's infeasible to do controlled burns on the scale that people around here are armchairing around because of the human presence within these wildlands?
It's not forestry policy that prevented controlled burns, it's urban sprawl. And there then is climate change that is moving faster than many policies already put into place.
As you should be aware, forestry approaches to fuel load include controlled burns, brush clearing, and selective logging. Both brush clearing and selective logging could have been done all along without destroying the homes of people who live in wilderness areas.
With proper preparation and regulations, controlled burns can be safely done in lightly populated areas. As an example I point to Australia. Sadly this approach cannot be taken in California, both due to the fact that our houses are not built to appropriate standards, and the fact that fuel loads are dangerously high. However the fact that this is not, today, a feasible approach doesn't alter the fact that it could have been viable with different past policies. Which also means that different future policies could also make it feasible at some point in the future.
Your comment is at best a retractive justification for the past forestry policy which left us with our current long-term problems. But in no way does it suggest that past policy did not create the basis for our current problems.
> It may help your understanding a whole lot to realize that, in fact, the REAL problem REALLY IS the buildup of burnable stuff because of past wildfire policy.
My direct response:
> Perhaps you missed the part where it's infeasible to do controlled burns on the scale that people around here are armchairing around because there are many of human structures within these wildlands. That is the reason why these fires are suppressed, because if they aren't they will kill humans or destroy structures.
I even gave you a helpful analogy:
> Put another way, if you want to pull your car out of your drive way, but you can't because there is a child standing behind you. The problem is not that you didn't pull you car out, it's the child standing behind you.
If you can't see how this isn't responsive to your comment, then we really don't have anything else to dicuss.
Also,
> With proper preparation and regulations, controlled burns can be safely done in lightly populated areas.
You actually aren't a genius with an idea that the fire fighting agencies of California couldn't think of. California does many controlled burns but there is a limit to their effectiveness, safety and scale, and they absolutely will not solve the wildfire crisis in California. It's a bit odd that use Australia as an example (of effectively managing wildfires I presume, your example was not really fleshed out), in that they have had some of the worse wildfires in their country's history in the last few years, and again, California does do prescribed burns as well when/where in it safe.
For the last time, the whole controlled burns is your obsession, and was not something that I said. And your continuing to go back to it marks you as out of touch with reality or logic.
With that, I'm done with your brand of idiocy.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The indigenous people practiced a careful system of controlled burns, to prevent megafires and to keep the land healthy for hunting.
It wasn't a wilderness, it was a garden. Failure to understand this is a big part of what lead us to what we see today.
* Cap radio: The Racist Removal Of Native Americans In California Is Often Missing From Wildfire Discussions, Experts Say https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/09/16/the-racist-remo...
* Nature: Quiet Fire: Indigenous tribes in California and other parts of the U.S. have been rekindling the ancient art of controlled burning https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/indi...
Edit: formatting
"Wilderness" is probably also more wild than would be intuitive, iff our sense of "wild" is based on a landscape that was actually actively managed to be an ideal habitat for hunting and gathering.
Not really. The most common image of a garden is a controlled nature space tended for human enjoyment.
“As it would be with zero humans around” is the definition of a wilderness.
Even if you pushed the definitions to extremes they don’t overlap (a wildlife garden is still a garden).
Either way natives didn’t have that degree of control. Even today, in places where forests are assigned to villages for such caretaking, they don’t have that degree of control, even with all the modern aerial firefighting power it is a struggle, as evidenced by current wildfires in the Mediterranean.
It's not limited to California, either, as it's now suspected that North America's vast inland prairies were largely created by people setting fires and that we'd see something closer to forests if it were truly untouched.
It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.
> It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.
It doesn't matter what kind it was, garden metaphor implies human control over a certain boundary.
And in this context (both from OP and the linked article) the control is specifically about preventing mega-fires through controlled fires. Prairies and uncontrolled fires are irrelevant.
There is little reason to question this technique was being applied locally with some success, but there is no evidence that this could be to an extent that made California their garden, in any meaning of the word you want to imagine.
If anything, I don't think the historical population vs landmass numbers can match up, hence my original objection. Disappointingly, only counter-arguments so far has been finessing over the definition of "garden" instead of working on the manpower and efficacy questions.
The population density was considerably higher before the arrival of in particular smallpox, for one thing. Other posters were kind enough to link you to some references, so I won't bother.
But yes, West Coast natives in fire country absolutely set fires and managed the forests to make it easier to hunt and prevent as much conflagration as they could. They had 12,000 years to get good at it, that's a long time.
The romanticism was thinking of North America as a "wilderness" when it had been inhabited for, again, 12,000 years. Humans shape their environments, the indigenous people of this continent were not an exception to this.
This looks quite different when hunting is the main source of protein, rather than animal husbandry.
I merely made what was implicit into explicit; using the term "garden" implies a total control.
> The population density was considerably higher before the arrival of in particular smallpox, for one thing.
I'm not interested in the density over time. Do we know the acres of forest-land per capita and the total area a certain manpower can manage this way? Especially since you scale back to 12k years, I wouldn't be surprised if there are orders of magnitude mismatch between the work-load and the population's capacity.
> West Coast natives in fire country absolutely set fires and managed the forests to make it easier to hunt and prevent as much conflagration as they could
No question they did. Local village populations do this around the world today. "As much as they could" doesn't make it their garden though, nor guarantees that the methodology scales to today's land use practices. As a proof you can look at this month's Mediterranean wildfires in Italy, Greece, Spain and Turkey.
> The romanticism was thinking of North America as a "wilderness" when it had been inhabited for, again, 12,000 years. Humans shape their environments, the indigenous people of this continent were not an exception to this.
Roughly 25% to 45% of the world today is still wilderness depending how it is measured. It was probably 99% 12k years ago (I don't have data on this one).
People shape environments but not uniformly, nor necessarily forever. People being evil destroyers of nature is a last century outlook (and maybe rightly so) but in the times of those indigenous tribes, nature used to be the main adversary of humans, destroyer of populations. The idea of "wild man in harmony with nature" is a new age anachronism by people who probably haven't even camped in the wilderness, at least without a full-spectrum REI gadgetry of 21st century.
The indigenous people lived in a different world than today. Not extensive agriculture sucking the earth dry. Not sparks from buildings or cars. Not gasoline spills. Not glass bottles around. Less people doing barbeques or smoking.
> By the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run into the woods.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/the-ame...
We also forget that pre-european cultures in the Americas seem to have regularly practiced deliberate forest burning, for several reasons. They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s, but American human-driven forest management didn't started with Europeans.
I doubt it. There just weren't nearly as many of them.
Human nature is one of the few things that seems to be consistent throughout all of history across all civilizations. The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.
If one person can cause a tragedy by mistake, you have a systematic failure, not a failure of the individual. A sign of a good system is that the occasional fool doesn't end up with the horizon burning.
A quick look at some papers indicates that prehistoric California burned much more acreage than the modern variety.
https://www.dnr.wa.gov/publications/em_leg_dnr_wildfire_fore...
Who knew that densely planted tall pine trees burn so much?
Much of north america is naturally "a sea of pine trees". It would have been like this in 1700.
> In the United States the pine tree, Pinus palustris, known as the longleaf pine, once covered as much as 90,000,000 acres (360,000 km2) but due to clear cutting was reduced by between 95% and 97%. The trees grow very large (up to 150 feet), taking 100 to 150 years to mature and can live up to 500 years. The wood was prized and cutting resulted in many hundreds of thousands of stumps that are very resinous, do not rot, and eventually become fatwood. This ushered in a new industry for many years.
Some of these trees burn like firebombs, they probably find it useful too. As a species. The individual tree, maybe, but if so far more briefly.
e.g. If you bring up forestry management's role in setting the stage for megafires, you will typically be labelled a climate change denier unless you go out of your way to address climate change first, as this article does. Even then, you'll likely be seen by many as "minimizing the real problem".
Yes, climate change is a bigger problem, overall, than megafires, but past (and continuing) forestry practices are the larger part of the megafire problem. Should we ignore small problems until the big ones are all solved?
Of course not.
The problem with pop culture is that it influences everything. If you want to have any success with grant applications, finding ways to work in current pop-culture buzzwords in is essential. Anyone trying to do research on forestry would be well advised to have "climate change" somewhere in their proposal even if it's not important to their work at all.
If you want to get politicians to devote public funding to improving forestry practices, good luck! There's money for exploring the impact of climate change on forests, but not for improving forestry practices themselves. At least, not until enough megafires make people look more carefully at the problem.
The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades. It just wasn't something that fit into pop culture narratives, so we've let things get worse and worse.
The next time you hear someone saying that X is an important part of a problem that climate change also affects, pay closer attention. Don't just dismiss that person as a climate change denier. Make room for small problems as well as the big ones, because ignoring many small problems soon leads to big ones.
Documentaries about Yellowstone at the time mentioned the importance of fired in the germination of new trees.
Of course, policy has not effectively reacted to well known science. Sigh.
I think building lots of houses in forests, is a similar problem as when people build lots of houses in flood plains.
In both cases, we sneak in some houses during a "good" year, and then we get to spend all the future years trying to defeat nature.
So is the Bay Area a good place to build houses? Santa Rosa, CA?
The previous poster was comparing building California homes near trees to the folks who build on flood plains.
A natural expansion of that tells you that you can't build in Santa Rosa (Tubbs Fire), Oakland hills (more fires), the Bay Area (earthquakes, someday the Hayward Fault will let loose), or really much of anywhere near the coast (rising sea levels, California Coastal Commission has decided that protecting your property with water barriers is no bueno).
This isn’t a big deal when property is cheap and can be paid off within 5-10 years, and rebuilt. But housing has become dramatically more expensive relative to cash flow than it has been historically.
With a cheap enough house, it's just the thing. Spend all of your money on land.
Maybe the future is in RVs. If they let me get away with it, I can see scraping a parking pad in Big Sur and sticking a motorhome on it. Relatively earthquake-proof. Fire? Simply drive away. Vacations to the desert can be slept in your own bed. Want to live the classic life? Buy a GMC Motorhome.
Maybe those behemoths make sense. Live the Jim Rockford lifestyle.
Yes, it is a beautiful way to build. It's also completely indefensible in event of a wildfire.
Also when I grew up we'd make burn piles once a year to burn all the deadwood that came down around the property. It was often impossible to light those piles of wood without kerosene since everything was so wet.
I think a lot of the forest living is inspired by places like VT and CT where building in a forest is fine and safe. In the middle of a pine forest in northern CA is a totally different ecosystem and can't be treated the same.
Then trim vegetation from your house at least 30'/10m, and keep things tidy out to at least 100'/30m:
* https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/...
Make sure there are no dries leaves or pine needles gathered in places, ensure that your attic vent is properly screened from embers, that flammable furniture (e.g., cushions) is not laying about too close to the house.
Lots of simple, preventative measures that people can do to increase their odds.
Clearing vegetation and material selection can make a huge difference, just don’t expect a normal house to be ok anywhere near a fire.
* https://www.intermap.com/risks-of-hazard-blog/2015/03/does-y...
* https://ibhs.org/ibhs-news-releases/embers-cause-up-to-90-of...
It seems that by dealing with anything on/near your structure that can be ignited by them can reduce risk by quite a lot.
It is really amazing the amount of heat released, and how quickly, in one of these fires.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq6wy_tffpg
Quite often what happens with radiant heat is that it breaks a window, which then allows embers to go into the house and set it alight. Embers are actually the things that cause the most damage:
* https://www.intermap.com/risks-of-hazard-blog/2015/03/does-y...
* https://ibhs.org/ibhs-news-releases/embers-cause-up-to-90-of...
On the other hand radiant heat often kills people the most (e.g., through heat stroke).
Look at https://twitter.com/CAL_FIRE/status/1298383464094265344/phot... and see how big a chunk 2020 is of all megafires in California history. And 2021 is on track to be even worse.
Past forestry management is why we have the the problem in the first place.
Climate change is why the problem just got so much worse, so quickly. And is why we can't attempt to fix it as gradually as we created it in the first place.
Both are actually important for understanding this subject. And climate change doesn't just come up because it is demanded by pop culture.
However extreme events become more extreme. We are now seeing extreme events that simply would not have been possible without global warming. For example the 2011–2017 California drought was the most extreme drought in at least 1200 years. And yet, here we are again in what's shaping to be an even more extreme one. And going forward, droughts like this one are going to become common.
This is the beef* I had with Cliff Mass when he said the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest had nothing to do with climate change, it wasn't an extreme event, it was just natural variation. The temperatures may not have been more extreme than known outliers, but what he didn't say is much more important: How often would natural variations lead us to expect events like it and how long would they last?
You can't just say "oh, this is just a typical thing that happens once in a hundred years" when it's happening every year.
* I have lots of other beefs with Cliff, but they aren't relevant to this discussion.
Those numbers are extreme enough to make me question whether the model's tails are heavy enough, but yeah. It basically wouldn't have been possible without global warming.
Most likely because people don't know what they're talking about. There are a lot of potential causes, probably some more that never come up, but an awful lot of absolutely certain theories.
I’ve concluded it’s actually more like NIMBY ism and willful ignorance. Nobody wants controlled burns in their backyard, and many don’t want to maintain defensible space. So everyone joins together to create this shared illusion that they can manage the land and their property however they want AND never suffer the consequences.
The current forestry management regieme around preventing forest fires was put in place to protect forests as an agricultural asset and resource for the timber industry.
That practice has morphed into a protection of real estate as people have built their homes in the wildfire zone over the past 40 years.
Prior to colonozation by Europeans in the Pacific Northwest, native americans regularly burned forests regularly. That practice stopped once their populations were decimated by disease and subjugation.
What was the thinking of these native Americans you speak of? Were they thinking "we should start wildfires because it will be better for the forest over a period of centuries"? Because...?
I agree that the practice of trying to stop these fires results in larger fires later. What I'd like is more information on why native Americans were able to realize and act on this. I'm willing to believe it, but not without some explanation.
Oddly enough, everyone laughed too when the same administration suggested the lab leak hypothesis...
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/09/14/trum...
Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population.
People attack credibility when they can't refute the facts!
> Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population.
Of course, remember it was forbidden to mention the lab leak hypothesis on mainstream social media. They banned people for that.
> "Please respect, and I know you do, the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue ... of climate change,” Newsom said.
I don't see this as a disingenuis way to interpret it. Summarizing - OP's point is that we ridiculed previous administration for suggesting that forest mismanagement played a larger role in California fires. Newsom, as quoted above, was suggesting that Climate Change is the primary reason.
No where in the article does it say that previous administration only blamed forest mismanagement. They said that likely the larger role is played by forest mismanagement.
Furthermore, Newsom claims "Fundamental" issue. Meaning, it is the (sole?) basis for forest fires.
During a briefing with Trump, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, told him forest management is an issue, but "climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this."
And it's true, Winters are drier summer is hotter. Trump is ridiculed because he talks like an idiot and denies climate change.
No one denies that forrest management is a problem. it was a huge blaming thing for a couple years because the federal government actually maintains most of it. Remeber all of this?
All I am trying to do is to stay somewhat objective. I clearly recall how the entire media instantly discredited him for mentioning forest mismanagement.
I've seen time and again as a liberal how we get into mob thinking and seldom criticize ourselves or look at things objectively.
back in 2016 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-managing-its...
He's criticized for being an asshole https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/11/politics/california-wildfires...
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/trump-again-misunderstands...
> When Wade Crowfoot, California secretary for natural resources – identified climate change as the primary cause of the wildfires, Trump interrupted: "It'll start getting cooler – you just watch."
> "I wish science agreed with you," Crowfoot told the president.
> Trump responded, "I don't think science knows, actually."
He was in control of the land he claims California is mismanaging. The guy is a fucking idiot.
This is 100% true.
Unfortunately, better forestry practices require a LOT more money to be pumped into the departments which manage those forests for manpower. Go take a look at how much manpower and resource it took to clean up even a tiny area around the Grand Canyon.
In addition, climate change is making things like "controlled burns" increasingly dangerous. The number of days you have the conditions to do a controlled burn are getting fewer and fewer.
"Better" forestry practices are not cheap, and nobody wants to spend the money until after their house burns down.
If there is anything new here, the internet and talk radio has shown a lot of people how to do this. Some of them mistake it for wisdom, and others just like to annoy people who hold nuanced views. Don't blame the victims for the fact that it is no longer possible to assume anything reasonable is implicit.
Stop living where there are forest fires and there won't be such an urgency to put them out.
Also, I think there's a kneejerk reaction to blaming forest services for not taking care of the forests. When in reality (a) they do: brush clearing and controlled burns happen all the time in california & oregon, (b) forests are far too huge for even 10x the puny forestry service of today, and (c) budget is constantly being cut.
Also x 2: the west coast US is experience drought unlike any since humans settled the west coast. Letting forest fires burn in California, Oregon and Washington now wound remove the forests entirely. EDIT: Regardless it is gonna happen, there are completely brown/orange forests in central oregon just waiting to burn.
That's not how it works. Most larger trees survive fires just fine, they just don't look very pretty for a while afterwards.
In Australia, there are trees like the aptly named stringybark that exude flammable oils and peel off thin strips of their own bark to form highly flammable piles of tinder under themselves, which appears to ensure that any forest fire is powerful but passes through quickly (not killing the tree), and conveniently eliminates any nearby competition in the process.
In theory that's how it should work. The problem is when you have heat plus drought conditions... the wildfires consume everything.
For example, the Castle fire in California consumed over a tenth of the entire population of giant sequoias. Giant sequoias are pretty fire resistant due to their size and height, but this fire devastated them.
Lots of small fires means it never gets that bad. We’re well past that point now.
AFAIK over the last few decades it is well understood that fires should be left to burn and generally this happens unless they threaten population areas. In theory this should mean that the next fire season has less fuel to burn but it's not working.
I'm not sure what the author is talking about is really current practices since I've heard the opposite so many times. What he describes seem to be mostly past practices.
There are trees in the US that require fire to propagate. The lodgepole pine, for example, is ubiquitous across western North America
On the other hand city blocks, suburbs and good size lawns are boring in comparison but at least they are harder to burn down in dry weather.
Until the government/insurance companies stop paying for it people will keep rebuilding in the exact same spot.
Before the internet, there was some damping factor in how information was distributed. This allowed for time and place for debate. How do we balance this? We desperately need instruments of truth without care for what the majority/minority believes, thinks, accepts, rejects or promotes.
100 years from now we're going to look back at this chaotic time in human history when we didn't know what to do with the Internet.
For nature doesn't care about anything but the truth.
A red pill awakening moment.
Same thing happens with houses that flood because they were allowed to be built where they never should have been. Just blame climate change instead of government stupidity/corruption
People want to, but are very bad at caring about quality.
For whatever subject, there will be a sort of platonic ideal -- and this ideal won't be the same for everyone as there is room for taste and priorities. BUT what that ideal actually is depends on a whole lot of subtlety and understanding... especially accounting for the marginally different outcomes for a different set of priorities which you get in diversity of cultures.
Instead, you get extremism. There are a few people talking about real quality who are completely drowned out by people who generally know quite a bit less who want quality but don't understand it and opt instead for maximizing or minimizing some value. (i.e. the practice of preventing all forest fires, defund/abolish the police, prohibition, etc.)
People can't handle subtlety or disagreeing with someone to a small degree.
This is the trend, absolutism, not understanding details, and yelling loudly about everything.
Try to get into a conversation about COVID-19 about actual risks and thresholds for certain actions and you'll either get complete deniers or advocates for every precaution (preferably forced on everyone at every level of possible control).
How do you silence the loudest people on the extremes without simply being authoritarian?
Seriously, you should check out just how much of California used to burn in prehistory. I ran into a few papers on Sci-Hub about it. It's pretty crazy.
It looks like a large part of California would be uninhabitable given natural practices.
It's clear that there's a catastrophic problem that's developed, and continues to accellerate, with wildfire incidence and severity in North America. And that past forestry practices have all but certainly contributed.
Starting over 20 years ago, the number and scale of fire scars I'd see whilst travelling through the Western US began impressing itself on me sharply. On one trip I'd headed out of Boise on state routes 21 and 75, through the Sawtooth Wilderness, and hit a fire scar that was over 20 miles long. I continued through to Yellowstone where the decade-plus scars of the 1988 conflagration there, one of the most severe in the US at the time, were still sharply visible, along with stands of unburnt, but clearly dead trees, on the mountainsides (beetle infestation I believe). There was still plenty of fuel.
Other portions of that trip brought me through other fire scars, as well as terrain that would burn over the next several years (some of these immediately adjacent or twice-burned ground). One of my road stops ended up being a command-centre for firefighting efforts. That made news of the subsequent burns far more visceral.
Some years later, I had a long road-trip talk with a retired US Forestry worker who gave the story of how mismanagement was fueling current burns --- this now nearly a decade and a half ago itself. I think about that conversation often.
But wildfire is an increasing problem around the world, including in locations which have not to the best of my knowledge been subject to total fire suppression, including large regions of Siberia, ablaze now, burning for months, and quite possibly the continuation of what have become annual fires errupting for much of the past decade. The regions are simply too remote for the type of suppression the US and Canada have practiced.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/08/05/siberia-feels-the-...
And much of the terrain I've seen burned isn't exactly "forest". It might have some trees, but is more scrubland. Whether or not that is also subject to overaccumulation of fuel load I'm not certain, but it's the type of terrain that would burn regardless ... and yet, still seems to be burning more frequently and more intensely than before.
I've also driven through forests (part of the region now on fire in California, in 2015), and despite years of backpacking and rural trips, feeling very uncomfortable over just how painfully dry and primed for ignition that portion of the trip, made late in the year with hot dry weather and months of no precipitation, felt. The Camp Fire followed within a couple of years, and the Dixie fire is literally burning up the path I'd blazed. Forestry management is part of that, but bone-dry dust, pine needles, shrubs, and trees take more than just misguided foresters.
It seems past time to look into more radical alternatives than just doing a few prescribed burns.
I don't mean this to sound trite. I think it's a fundamentally mistaken way to operate in the world and it makes it a lot harder to have honest conversations about complex issues like this one.
The implication of this article is that we should have let the forests burn, and as a corollary we should go back to doing that.
The former seems like a reasonable argument. This article misses a couple of important details, though, notably the effects of invasive species and how climate change affects the regrowth of forests post fire. As a result, the latter is by no means obvious. At this point, it's unlikely that forests will go back to how things were, even if we stop suppression.
The current practice is not a good equilibrium, but neither is going back to allowing most fires to burn out naturally. Going back to what worked before sounds appealing (minus the smoke), but really it's not likely to work again the second time around because of everything else that has changed. So an ideal solution is probably going to need to be more complicated.
The dangerous fires mostly seem to erupt from hard-to-access river canyons. Do you just let those burn? Light 'em up on purpose?
As a side note, these areas are filled with highly flammable buildings. 100 year old wood construction, shared attics in the small towns, nowhere near modern code.
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...
NSW vs Vic vs Qld. City vs Country. Farmer vs Townie. Farmer and Townie vs Traditional landowners
They get pretty heated, but I stress this is within a community of people who don fire-gear, get in trucks and actually have to deal with the damn things.
There's a generation gap, a gender gap, a culture gap, a politics gap, a you're-not-from-round-here gap...
I walked into the edge of the online flamefest. Wish I hadn't joined in. (yea. flamefest amongst fireies...)
I was wondering if there are climatic/ecological differences that make controlled burning more effective / less disruptive for the ecosystem in some places compared to others.
At least among people that I know[0], there is a widespread belief that when a forest burns it will never recover to its original state, or it will do it only after an exceedingly long time[1]. The same belief doesn't apply to agricultural land[2].
[0] Obviously this is just based on my direct experience, maybe in different parts of Italy or in different social circles it would be different.
[1] Again, I think this is more true in some environments than others - for example I seem to remember reading that, for tropical rainforests, the recovery time is very long. I don't know much about this topic though.
[2] Even though it's probably the case that agricultural controlled burning affects aspects such as soil biology, beneficial species, pests, etc.
> Why are all these idiots building houses with redgums so close you can reach out the window and touch them, and how do you do a controlled burn in a lightly populated area with risky houses like that?
Seems like this should be enforced at a government level.. either the house owner takes responsibility for poor fire preparation (i.e, they might lose their house, have increased insurance premiums), or the government fines people for endangering their neighbours.
Even when done safe as possible there will still be a wave of complaints when controlled burns cover someones property in ash or burns holes in their garden shade.
For example, I know that in recent years we observe unprecedented fires in Siberia region where, due to wast areas and very low population/infrastructure, smaller natural fires were never artificially suppressed.
The trade-off is between the probability that a controlled burn will accidentally spread to houses and the eventual big wildfire that will take out a subdivision or entire town.