"Resume" across a time period of multiple human lifetimes doesn't really convey the correct implications. If I happen to share the same business as my great-great-great-grandfather nobody is going to call that "resuming the family business".
When the law is dumb the law is what needs to change.
You either have a controlled burn that burns up trees and brush.
Or you have an uncontrolled burn that burns up trees and brush and cars and homes and cities and people and every other harmful thing that you really shouldn't burn.
This feels reductive and unlikely to help. Would you allow your neighbor to do a controlled burn of leaves in their yard against your fence? It is easy to see a straight line from that concept to this. Turns out, rule making is hard.
Uh... no? Letting them do it in their yard, fine. You do it against my fence, and you will get yelled at. It gets out of control and hits my property, you will be paying to fix it. That is, ultimately, the crux of the problem here.
Literally, the point is they are building a fund so that prescribed burning can be insured.
Edit: I should say that I'm playing loose here, as this is a conversation, not a debate. That said, I did include the "against your fence" on purpose. I'm well aware of rules on how you can burn, for example: https://www.cobbcounty.org/fire/fire-marshal/outdoor-burning.
Saying that air pollution shouldn't be one of the deciding factors when considering whether to do a controlled burn is very different from saying it should be a free for all.
You're completely missing the point. It's not burn vs. no burn, it's controlled burn vs. uncontrolled burn. The fire is going to happen one way or another, so why is pollution a bigger concern than saving lives and property?
Sadly, that is you missing my point. I am not claiming that pollution alone should preclude the idea of doing burns. I am claiming that to reduce pollution concerns to being "dumb" is wrong.
This is a hard area to regulate. Any attempt to minimize that is reductive and unlikely to be helpful. Is why I picked something i know is allowed, burning in your yard, but with a condition I know is basically never allowed, against my fence.
The pollution is going to happen one way or another. That's why the idea of pollution concerns preventing controlled burns is dumb. The pollution cannot be prevented. Do you understand that?
But nobody is claiming that pollution alone will prevent controlled burn? That is the reductive part that is problematic.
They are a factor, in that you have to do it in a way that addresses pollution concerns. At large, that is probably going to include what accelerants and controls are allowed, as they will have a unique impact on the pollution generated.
Or are you suggesting that the pollution can, in fact, not be controlled and impacted in ways that may need special mitigations?
Under current regulations, people are often prevented from controlled burns due to air quality concerns under CEQA. This leads to fuel buildup.
When the eventual real wildfire happens, the risk to property and lives is much worse, and so is the pollution; places experiencing wildfire experience AQIs of 300,400+ when the WHO considers 150+ to be unhealthy. Mother Nature doesn’t have much concern for laws and regulations, and we have trouble controlling these large fires.
There is no way to control and thin fuel that does not result in pollution. Manual excavation is impractical and arguably worse since we’d be certainly trampling ecosystems in the process; these ecosystems are often expecting some baseline level of fire.
That... is mostly not how this has gone down. It is easy to contrive that current pollution regulations prevent controlled burns, but at large that is not accurate. See the rules I posted about how you can do controlled burns in your yard. Look up similar rules in other states, and you'll often find carve outs specifically for "forest health" reasons. (Edit: forgot to say that you will still almost always have rules about the accelerants and extinguishing methods you are allowed to use. Largely for ecological pollution concerns.)
Those regulations are different on a state by state basis.
The entire discussion thread is about California, the CEQA in my parent comment is the California Environmental Quality Act, and here is an article describing the differences between the South and the West on burning policy: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1029821831/to-stop-extreme-wi...
> Florida has done prescribed burns on more than 1.6 million acres so far this year. California has only burned around 35,000 acres. The state is 2.5 times larger than Florida.
> About half of California is privately owned, and landowners have had little support from public agencies to conduct burns on their property. Permits from firefighting agencies and air quality regulators can be cumbersome to secure.
> In May [2021], Quinn-Davidson helped lead the first burn manager certification course in California. Fourteen local groups, known as prescribed burn associations, recently formed to help private landowners with burns across the state.
That article is frustrating. It seems to completely ignore the drought conditions in the western states as a big reason why they can't burn as often in the year as FL can...
More, none of this actually shows that it is "air quality regulators" that is specifically preventing prescribed burns. That actually reads more as a dog whistle to get people riled up over the idea.
And indeed, the linked article presents a better explanation. Liability concerns on decontainment and other impacts goes a long way to stopping people from doing anything. Straight forwardly, if they do a controlled burn and it impacts others, they are liable to make the others whole. If a wildfire happens, they are both victims.
That is, this article is a direct downstream event from the "prescribed burn associates" effort of the NPR story. If you have a certified associate, you can get insurance to limit your liability. And this is largely because the certified associate will be following necessary rules and regulations to limit the impact. Any reason to think the associates will not be looking to pollution and safety concerns.
With garbage, the alternative is to haul it off to a dump. Fine. With a forest, what is the alternative? Are you going to call in landscapers to clear out a forest and set up a giant composting facility?
I'm not entirely clear what you are asking, all told? Alternative to what?
If you are strawmanning that I'm somehow saying you can't cause any pollution, I can only say that is not what I said. I said pollution should be a factor, but that is not the same as "you cannot cause pollution." And to insist that that is all it can be is again reductive and not helpful.
The world burning down in a roaring conflagration, or have you missed the entire chain of this conversation?
The pollution is going to happen. You get to chose what the scope of it is with controlled burns. Or you can give up that choice and enjoy the smoke of burning homes and cars.
No, not exactly. There is a trade off between both sides, and the fact that the pollution factor is far too strong to the "no pollution side at all" currently, which leads to "violent uncontrolled deadly pollution".
There are some places where it will be unlikely that we can do controlled burns, pollution only being one of the factors. We should try to burn as much around those areas to reduce the likelihood a fire spreads to that area. But note, those controlled burns will create their own pollution.
We (humans) moved in to fire country, now we need to learn how to live with those poor choices.
Right, I never claimed there are not tradeoffs.... I said it is a factor. As such, if you assert that my post said you can't do burns because of pollution, than you have strawmanned it to the weakest possible stance it could be, in spite of my clearly stating that is not my stance. I have literally said the opposite of that, in this very thread.
More, it has not been established that it is too far into the "no pollution side at all." Do you have evidence that it is pollution regulation that has caused no controlled burns? Noting that I can bring up plenty of easy evidence of folks literally doing small scale controlled burns.
I don't think you all are doing it on purpose, but this is a dog whistle tactic to pull in a lot of anti regulation folks to yell about things.
Yes. This happens regularly in wooded areas, I did it growing up, as did my neighbors, and I do now (New Hampshire.) In fact, when there's no home depot, dump, or town pickup, what do you do?
I'm joyed when my neighbor does it, because we do it to keep dried leaves off each other's property precisely to prevent fires in summer and make the same job easier next year. I'd rather burn my leaves to save my house.
Be sure to pay attention to "against your fence." Most every place has very clear rules on how you can do this.
That is, i picked that example not because you can't burn in your yard, but because there are rules you have to follow. Doing it "at large" in a full state will clearly have more difficulties than doing it in your small yard.
There are laws in almost ALL states that say you can not have a fire close to a structure. Here in Texas, it's 100 yards from any structure. A fence counts as a structure.
They've intended to do this consistently, but confounding factors like air quality guidelines have prevented them from keeping up with the required rate of controlled burns.
I can't recall exactly how far behind they are, but if they're permitted to put aside those constraints (unlikely) it'll still take decades at this point.
Air quality issues are two-fold: the (legal) mandated limits and the popular concerns. The latter are often the blocker on small/regional burn seasons. It's late winter/early spring, land manager is ready to go, and the nearby town doesn't love the smoke.
Yep, I find most of the discussion around it profoundly uninformed. California averages (corrected 127 thousand) --1.8Million-- acres of prescribed burns a year. They were happening in the 1980s and 90s (when there were mistakes that cost lives), and have been since the 1870s. Unfortunately, the list of prescribed burns is now only available from ARCGIS and the simple list appears gone: https://data.ca.gov/dataset/prescribed-burns
It's a complex issue so there's lots of reasons why prescribed burns aren't done more, but they have been done for years, and there are new laws to make it easier. The challenges include: Air Quality Laws, Insurance Liability, Federal control of National Forest, and the high population in the Wildland Urban Interface and large number of houses near areas that need fire control. People do build houses in areas called Devil's Canyon and Black Hill, but at the same time large areas of grass and scrub have burned annually each year in Lake County so burns there obviously don't help.
Every article seems like a chance to spread misinformation with lazy analysis and conspiracy theories about Jewish Space Lasers, Climate Change Denial, or that controlled burns haven't been part of California fire control for all of living memory.
I'm shocked this isn't being done already. But what on earth is the reasoning in this article? There are plenty of great reasons to do controlled burns, but for some reason the article says controlled burns are good because:
> purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
When talking about the reason for overgrowth, the article talks about how it's the fault of Europeans who said controlled burns are primitive. The person they reference is not someone in the forest service, or someone who is an expert in this. They reference the "UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning".
Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
> The person they talk to is not someone in the forest service, or someone who is an expert in this. They talk to "UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning".
They didn't talk to anyone, they just used an article with more depth to support their little, less deep article.
>Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
What does this mean? You can't talk about wildfires in the west without talking about how westward expansion brought terrible forest management practices and suppressed traditional management practices that kept forests healthy. How are you involving racism in this topic?
It's not that I don't think that discussion has a place. It's that I don't think saying "natives did it" is a justification for bringing it back. There are plenty of great justifications for bringing it back, and I'm glad they are, but "native americans used to do this" is not a reason.
That sort of reasoning is how you get people claiming that "alternative medicine" is better than the medical miracles we produce today. You need actual data and reasons to support things, not just "native americans did it and racist europeans rejected it".
>I don't think saying "natives did it" is a justification for bringing it back
That's not the justification. The author is bringing up traditional burning practices because suppression of those practices is a cause of our current mega fires.
"Thanks to centuries of overzealous fire protection and the suppression of Indigenous cultural burns — which Europeans found “primitive” — forests have become overgrown, accumulating piles of underbrush and fallen trees. In trying to prevent wildfires altogether, we’ve been essentially storing up bigger and bigger piles of fuel. And with that extra fuel comes fires that burn more ferociously, exacerbated by drought and drier conditions from climate change.
“When you talk to different native people from the Yosemite area, they talk about how it used to look when fire was used as a management tool,” UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning said in a University of California article. Areas that were once open valleys are now choked with conifers and other fuel sources that were not there when cultural burns helped groom the land."
The justification for controlled burns is written here
"Setting fires intentionally may sound like a paradoxical approach to fire control, but if they are done correctly, controlled burns reduce the fuel available for wildfires, helping to prevent the catastrophically large, hot fires that overwhelm firefighting resources. They also are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem."
It sounds like you'd like to know more about wildfire and how indigenous burning practices suppress mega fires. I encourage you to read the linked materials, as this little article isn't going to go deep enough to answer your questions.
> The author is bringing up traditional burning practices because suppression of those practices is a cause of our current mega fires.
tl;dr Yes, we should do more controlled burns. No, our current situation has very little to do with "traditional burning practices".
Racism against First Peoples isn't the biggest or near one of the biggest reason we haven't been doing controlled burns in California -- leftwing greenies have opposed burns because they oppose man's intervention with nature.
_Was_ racism a reason? Sure, but the past is not the present. The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics.
The greenies didn't just oppose "traditional burning practices" but also _modern_ burning practices that are used in other US states, and they have much more control over California's policy (and even Fed Interior policy) than racist bogeymen.
Even this correction is being driven by those politics, as a return to "traditional burning practices" after (real and imagined) historical injustice.
> The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics.
so still the people who colonized north america? you've turned this entire thing into a left wing vs right wing culture war issue when the article is just providing historical context. nobody is attacking the right wing in this article - not sure why you're perceiving it as one.
>Racism against First Peoples isn't the biggest or near one of the biggest reason we haven't been doing controlled burns in California -- leftwing greenies have opposed burns because they oppose man's intervention with nature.
I'm sorry, this is just incredibly incorrect. Forest management on the federal level is owned by logging companies. The drive to put out fires, even in remote areas, is driven by a desire to not lose acres that could be logged. It's taken activist decades to convince the Forest Service and the BLM to do controlled burns and we *still* put out naturally-ignited fires in remote areas.
>We’re talking about California. Are you saying California is owned by the logging companies? That seems rather dubious.
Most of the forested land in California is owned by the federal government, who has historically managed the land based on the priorities of natural resource extractors like logging companies.
This article is about the PNW, but it functioned the same way in California
"Europeans" thought it was "primitive", universally? Or some white person somewhere in the annals of time wrote down that opinion once?
What's bizarre is that in spite of that non-sequitur, fire suppression was mandated by the very first session of the California Legislature in 1850. This isn't some ancient technique we're only just now rediscovering. It's been well-established practice for over a century, only recently eschewed in favor of assuaging irrational environmentalists.
no, early europeans who first settled in California believed the practice was primitive. later generations would continue:
> In a 1918 letter, a district ranger at Klamath National Forest wrote to his supervisor that the US Forest Service’s most important duty was to keep fires to a minimum, but “renegade whites and Indians” were setting fires “for pure cussedness”, not caring whether the fires harmed others.
> He suggested that the solution was “to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him”. He also suggested hiring a female missionary who had “gained the confidence” of Indigenous people to convince them to adopt settler theories about fire.
Again, pointing out to an opinion by one group or individual among white people is not a universal thing. It might shock you to hear this, but white people commonly disagree about various approaches to problem solving and politics.
Controlled burning has been used in the South by white people since the early 1800s: https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/19091, where "it was quickly adopted from the Indians by early European settlers".
One ranger in California in 1918 does not speak for an entire race for God's sake. That should be obvious.
Arson wasn’t invented until Ronald Reagan was elected so surely setting “fire for pure cussedness” couldn’t have been a reference to arson in your n=1 anecdote which nicely proved to parent point you seem to take issue with.
Honestly thank you! Further it's been hypothesized that they didn't do controlled burns in the sense we do it now it's literally just letting nature take it's course. Leaving it alone.
>purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
Is there any evidence of this? I mean, I know that the indigenous people did so to try to contain fires, because wildfires have been an issue for millions of years. But is there any evidence it was "more successful" historically? I'm not a huge believer that ancient cultures had these things figured out.
No native writing system was known among North American Indians at the time of first European contact.
Please explain the type of evidence you could gather that would tell you American Indians thought intentional burning was a good idea and part of their planned forest management.
From what I'm reading on your link the evidence is evidence of fires burning things down, thus the Indians had an advanced forest management system in place.
Instead of being argumentative about this, look where we actually have documentation, which is aboriginal burns in the AU.
It turns out that people that lived in fire country for hundreds/thousands of years built up practices of burning when fires would remain calm rather than explode into conflagrations. "Advanced" is relative in this sense.
Between this and natural fires the landscape had a patchwork quality that acted as natural fire breaks.
The article talks about the historical reasons that controlled burns weren't used in California by the settlers. They're talking to Native American historians because they're leveraging Native American preservation techniques. Addressing the root cause of the problem is important. Here's a good video on the subject:
I feel like other states could equally inform California of techniques for controlled burns because the techniques weren’t lost?
UC Davis didn’t empower ancient indigenous community practices uncovering mystical oral history, they went to people that just googled it like everyone else because there has been perpetual cross drift in how to do controlled burns in even more optimal ways. Gullible af wow. This is like the Blazing Saddles of fire control.
The only reason California wasn't doing controlled burns, according to the article, is because they didnt have hush money for when they inevitably burn your house down and lose the lawsuit, and now they topped it up with a paltry $20 million.
The rest of this article is quite a bit of deflection.
But if there are specific techniques the indigenous nations within California's borders used, those are likely to be more relevant, because California's forests are not New York's forests are not Georgia's forests etc.
Not to discount the indigenous techniques, but the forests in California are effectively new:
* There used to be a number of old growth trees spread out intermittently which don’t exist anymore.
* Decades of mismanagement and clear cutting have resulted in forests being a lot denser today then they were a couple of centuries ago, a monolithic area where all the trees are close together, similar in age, and of the same species, is a new environment, in California (the Redwood forest in the North Coast has tightly compacted trees of the same species, but of varying age; also note that Redwood has evolved to withstand fires, probably because of this growing pattern).
* There are number of invasive species, including Eucalyptus and the California Silver, which disrupt native species access and compete with access to water and sunlight
* And worst of all there are a number of pathogens including the invasive bark beetle which is killing old growth giant sequoias in and around Yosamite.
* And to top it all off, California is getting hotter and dryer with the climate catastrophe, which amplifies all these problems.
Controlled fires and better forest management in general is definitely a good thing, and California is doing the right thing by re-establishing it, and including indigenous communities is for sure for the better. However, what worked in the past is only gonna have limited (though positive) effects. Expect California to keep burning at accelerated rate. Even if these efforts work perfectly—which they will—the state will still keep burning. The damage is simply too great.
This bad take comes up all the time and I try to educate people every time it pops up:
> California is getting hotter and dryer with the climate catastrophe
California in the 20th century was very abnormally wet and mild. Using scientific data and looking back 2000+ years one gets a picture of centuries long droughts, and of extreme weather as very normal. This is the status quo and the past 100 years of mild and wet climate is the weird abnormality(which people think it always should be like).
What does it matter? California is getting hotter and dryer regardless, and this still amplifies all the previous mentioned problems of invasive species, and decades of forest mismanagement.
Also California does not exist in a vacuum. The earth is getting significantly warmer. West Coast USA will become dryer as a result, if this is the “natural state” of California (whatever that means for a dynamic climate system) than California will become hotter and dryer still.
Honestly, at this point I've given up on worrying about humans surviving. Our "leaders" have made it pretty clear that "long-term survival" is just not on their agenda, and we've allowed them to amass enough "wealth", "power", and weapons to make changing their minds pretty much impossible. What I worry about now, more than anything else, is that humanity has reached a level of destructiveness that we may trigger something literally catastrophic to this planet's ability to support life at all. What an incredible loss that would be.
but read the article again. there is no procedural mystery on how to do a controlled burn. California expects to burn your house down and didn't allocate money for it and now they allocated a little bit.
"the fear of liability for unintentionally starting a wildfire is one key reason holding back more prescribed burns."
the rest of the article, read it again, the rest of the article is a grift specifically done by CAL FIRE to convince allocating money to the fund at all.
they wrapped it in an indigenous veneer to make it sound like they know what they're doing.
"so private insurance companies will enter the market."
it has kind of nothing to do with the arguments happening in this comment section. the approach is amusing. the problem is hilarious. California wasn't doing controlled "or cultural" burns because they're going to lose all the lawsuits when they burn your house down, and now they're still going to lose all lawsuits but they allocated money to that, but only $20 million and they're hoping the private insurers are like "ooooo" "aaaah" "cultural fire practitioner fire bends for special California flora" and insures with waaaaay more money than $20 million, because so far its a pathetic amount.
Ditto. Every wildfire season we hear about how controlled burns would help mitigate the risks and...they haven't been doing that?
At what point does the Fed Gov say, "wait a minute, if you want disaster funding you've got to clean up your act." And certainly the insurance industry has lobbying power, and nothing from them either?
This has a foul smell. I'm rarely pro-litigation but CA residents should start a class action suit again the state for what looks like negligence.
Their bigoted mindset dismissed how the indigenous people did things because they saw themselves as better than them. It absolutely was racist. And stupid.
History is more nuanced than people want it to be. If you think that white skinned people specifically are or were all racists in a unique way that sets them apart from other nations, creeds, tribes, then yes that is both stupid (demonstrably ahistorical) and itself racist. If you want to compare the relative intellectual achievements of different races, it sounds like you do, that to me is inherently racist. Grouping people of a different historical epoch based on the color of their skin and assigning some judgement to that group, beyond obvious historical fallacy, is literally racism. But I don’t see that sort of racism as being unique or even uncommon. It’s just the racist thinking that’s fashionable today. Don’t follow fashion, that’s the lesson history should teach us. Natives respect their ancestors you should too, but all of them not just the dark skinned.
It isn't a stretch, by any means, to point out the racism of colonizers that viewed and treated the indigenous people of the Americas as savages.
The fact that you're trying so hard to explain that away says a tonne about you. I recommend that you take a long, hard look at yourself and try figure out why you feel the need to justify bigotry.
Hubris. It’s not a fault exclusive to whites. We favor the latest greatest “trust the science” of the moment over traditional but non-scientific (in our estimation) public policies. Expand your mind. There’s much more to learn from history than white peoples were racist. Of course they were. Hubris still exists and it’s better for you if you aren’t blind to it.
It doesn't call Europeans stupid, talks about westward expansion, or racism. I think you are so on edge looking for anti western bias that you extrapolate what the article said so that it fits your narrative.
I don't have a narritive here. I don't even think they are wrong it what they say - europeans WERE being racist idiots by completely disregarding what natives did because they thought they were better. What I'm saying is, that in and of itself is not a reason to bring back controlled burns. The reason you bring back controlled burns is not because Europeans rejected it due to racism. The reason you bring back controlled burns is because they work.
but the article doesn't say any of that at all... so where are you getting this? can you actually quote a portion of the article that calls europeans "racist idiots" (a term which you've used multiple times throughout this thread), or provide a quote that states that we should bring back controlled burns because it's anti-racist? the entire article is literally saying that we should bring back the burns because they work, not for the reasons you're listing.
You’re shocked it’s not being done already, and uninterested in why that might be?
I’m of European descent, too. It’s ok. Our ancestors were imperfect. It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge that and to learn from this example where the so-called primitives had better practices than the self-described civilized people.
It’s not a personal attack if you don’t take it personally.
There is a trend that glorifies native populations over colonizers and it has been going on for years now, said trend is pretty often just thinly veiled racism. I don't think it's insecurity as much as awareness.
But, I cannot find any trend nor glorification in this article? Even not that there is a tone of "we don't do it because it's the opposite of what racists did" thinking (as a sibling poster states).. if someone gets that impression out of this article here, imo they have a problem - or I am too ignorant?
Considering that indigenous populations at large have been oppressed since Europeans made landfall to the Americas, a trend that interrogates their history and struggle, and celebrates their culture is a welcome change in the status quo.
After all, European history, culture, and heritage is still being celebrated even as its foibles criticized, so I fail to see how one culture's sharing of the limelight with another's constitutes racism.
Interestingly, race relations were at their peak in 2008. The trends of seeing racism everywhere and reading it into everything, people's personal views (notably, those of minority respondents, many of whom viewed race relations in far more positive terms than they do today), and more importantly the pervasive, institutionalized victim pimping that has spawned a billion dollar industry in recent years—these are all artificial, forced, and came about in the last 15 years.
Yes, race matters a lot to many people. It certainly matters a lot more than it did until 2008—to all "racial" groups, that is—and I can't help but notice that a lot of freshly minted "experts" are, fifteen years later, profiting very, very handsomely from providing "solutions" to a problem that has perversely only grown in proportion with the size of the industry itself.
> Interestingly, race relations were at their peak in 2008
You mean when a significant minority of the population was saying that Obama was a secret Muslim trying to impose Sharia law on the United States and McCain (whatever happen to people like him?) had to constantly squash it in his own party?
I think he might also mean the claims that Obama was born in Kenya and even releasing his birth certificate, the original, wasn't enough even though this wasn't an issue for other presidents
I'm not taking it as an attack at all. The people who hated controlled burns for racist reasons (such as calling people "primitives") were being incredibly stupid. I am not denying that at all, that should be obvious. The point is, that in and of itself is not a reason to do controlled burns. The reason we do controlled burns is that they control wildfires, help make more of the state inhabitable, etc - we don't do it because it's the opposite of what racists did.
moreover people have been calling for controlled burns for decades (if anything, typically republicans). It's hard to believe at this point what's holding it back is racism.
Yes, selective logging and controlled burns have to be paired if the forest has ever been clear cut.
Where I live (Santa Cruz Mountains) the vast old growth redwood trees were extensively logged (via clear cutting) into the early-to-mid 20th Century.
Then widespread logging just stopped. And for at least the past 50-60 years there has been intense hostility to logging. Everywhere, doesn't matter if public or private land.
The redwood groves that have grown back are all extremely densely packed, relatively small diameter trees mixed in with tan and coast live oaks and lots of smaller shrubbery. Lots of low branches on all trees. Lots of redwood needles and dead tan oak and coast live oak leaves laying thick on the forest floor.
Perfect tinder.
About 3 years ago a lightening storm sparked a fire that burned hundreds of thousands of acres.
Controlled burns would have helped remove the forest duff. But the trees themselves are perfectly set up to respond to fire, unlike in an old growth forest.
The point of bringing it up is because one of the natural questions is "why did we stop doing controlled burns?". If you don't address this, people will think there was a good reason when, in this case, it doesn't seem like there was.
This article is not written as a way to explain to the world the fact that California will begin backing intentional burns, it's written to explain why that wasn't already the case from a historical perspective.
That seems uncharitable to the OP. Context is important. I think that in the present cultural climate, the OP's interpretation is entirely reasonable. He isn't saying European settlers or colonizers didn't make bad decisions (though often we are fed tendentious caricatures here), or denying that there might be something that can be learned from a native population. It's the forced emphasis.
Writing is not just producing a bag of atomic propositions. What is written must be justified and relevant. When something forced occurs within some piece of writing, it betrays a bias, or even an ulterior motive. In this case, controlled burns (or letting natural wildfires play out) aren't a new thing. They're older than agriculture, and they are and have been used across the world in modern times for some time. Look at a live map of forest fires and you'll notice how many are controlled burns. It's not as if we're considering the use of controlled burns for the first time and discovering some long-forgotten wisdom of the natives here. Frankly, what's weird is that California is just now doing this.
But I also wouldn't make a big deal out of this article either. I think learning about precolonial practices like this is interesting, regardless of the bias or motives of the article's author.
there's "forced emphasis" because controlled burns which had been occurring for 1000s of years were outlawed by european settlers, leading to the current catastrophic wildfires that we experience every year in california. historical context isn't some kind of "woke" gotcha - it's literally the history of controlled burns and why banning them has caused our current problems.
As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, most of the forests in California were clearcut and the large, spread out, old growth forests that the Indians (native americans, indigenous people, etc.) used controlled burns on don't exist any more. In 1000 years we could possible get back to that but until then we will have to discover how to do these burns in the forest as it exists and decide if they are a good idea.
One of my favorite hikes in Oregon is a cermonial white oak grove that was crafted by generations of controlled burns. It's starting to fade, but walking the paths it's humbling to imagine what it was like at its full glory. I was also taught to think of the American genocide as a fait-accompli but of course the reality is more complex and the history has not been erased.
Funny, because back in Europe (or just the UK really), controlled burns would be more strongly associated with the "landed gentry" and their grouse shooting.
I definitely don't believe that climate change is the main reason for the proliferation of large fires over the past 5-6 years. I believe that California naturally has a lot of fires and humans have made it worse by putting out the small ones. I also think that Newsom likes to invoke climate change to cover for poor decisions humans have made in California because it displaces the blame to other humans outside of California and furthers his political agenda. It's a convenient bogeyman.
This is a rather jaded take. The article covers the overlap of two newsworthy things:
#1 - To the best of our knowledge, the forests of the region were actively managed via fire for thousands of years. This changed a few hundred years ago, and the result is the unprecedented fires we have been experiencing. The government is reacting by greatly increasing funding for prescribed burns which, to the best of our knowledge, is the best solution at this time.
#2 - The state is bound by federal treaties with the sovereign nations that reside within its borders. The bounds of these treaties are hotly contested. The sovereign nations believe that the treaties grant them the right to the lifestyle they historically had. The federal government wants to curtail activities they believe, if unchecked, might cause lasting negative effects. One of the rights these sovereign nations had restricted were controlled burns, which they call cultural burns. These rights are being slowly returned now that the state and feds view controlled burns in a more positive light.
There is a 3rd indirect element to this article, which is that it is trying to address an audience that has been affected by years of the Smokey the Bear 'all fire is bad' mentality.
You should reread the article. I'm pretty sure you brought along the baggage you are complaining about.
The messaging around managed fires by indigenous peoples is a smart narrative for California.
You will not persuade hardcore preservationists in California by listing out the economic/quality of life benefits of controlled burns. They (and I am generalizing) have a deep passion for returning nature to its natural state.
The key to changing preservationists minds is not to say "there are many benefits to controlled burns (for humans)" but rather, "the state we are creating in forests without burns is not natural."
This is exactly what is happening. People have been arguing for controlled burns for decades, and they're finally making headway now that that they have a relatively bulletproof argument: these fires are a newer development since humans settled this land, the original settlers had a tested and proven method for dealing with them, so let's go back to doing that.
Oh it gets worse than that: we're in an interglacial period right now, coming out of an ice age.
When the Bering Strait ice bridge formed and the descendants of native peoples migrated down through the American continent, California was not a dry desert. It was probably covered by lush forests and wetlands with a much lower sea level than today so there's literally no way to return it to that "natural state"
With the Kelp highway hypothesis [1], humans were here for most of that transition so really there's a whole list of "natural states" to pick from (that we largely can't return to)
You're looking for rationality in an irrational position. These "preservationists" are really just environmental Catholics. Underneath the environmental rhetoric, they've internalized a version of original sin and desire to submit themselves to punishment for said sin. To suggest modern solutions and forward progress would be to suggest that the sinners could erase the original sin by sinning more.
To convince them to take action you have to validate their self-imposed guilt with images of reverting to noble savages clapping hands and playing pan-flutes around a fire while the animals sway in time to the music.
There was a time I would have said these people need education, now I'll settle for using their guilt to herd them in the correct direction.
Right, but people were engaged in burning since the glaciers retreated. So there's no possible pre-burning ecology to return to since the glaciers are LONG gone and the mega-fauna all died. So we can have either unpredictable, large-scale burns or we can have predictable controlled burns that the ecosystem had adapted to for the better part of 15k years.
People have been pointing out the folly of not allowing regular burns for decades, no idea why it is only now getting traction with this weird take. It's not like the divide between those who wanted controlled burns and those who didn't was racial.
The cynical take usually wins. The public as a whole is ignorant of history, couldn’t care less about indigenous people, and is keenly worried about any sort of threat.
The first time the controlled burn goes out of control the initiative will be back to square one.
> To the best of our knowledge, the forests of the region were actively managed via fire for thousands of years.
"Native Americans" arrived here about 30,000 years ago. For all the time prior to that forests were actively managed by controlled burns conducted by nature.
The idea that they somehow had some advanced knowledge that Europeans lacked has no scientific basis, they simply didn't have the modern technology to stop a fire started by lightning.
> they simply didn't have the modern technology to stop a fire started by lightning.
Or as much fixed and immobile infrastructure that would be endangered by fire-- if there is nothing you care about nearby, why not set a fire to aid in hunting or to clear out plants you can't eat in favor of ones you can?
Just because they intentionally set fires that doesn't itself make it environmentally good-- it's an extraordinarily racist view that the indigenous people weren't capable of environmental destruction just because they were less effective at it than industrial civilizations. The noble savage protector of the land is a racist fantasy of people raised on a diet of Disney movies, not reality.
Right. For some reason people have figured out that “noble savage” is racism, but there’s a bit of latency when it comes to “ignoble white man” flavor of racism.
What they knew was that it was easier to hunt and forage in forests after fire had removed the underbrush. They knew that they would be back next year chasing dear, so they decided to light a fire on the way out to make it easier. No advanced knowledge needed. As time went on, the practice became a ritual.
Please make your substantive points without swipes, such as you crossed into at the end. Your comment would be fine without that bit (and maybe the beginning bit as well, though that wasn't so bad).
The TL;DR of why is that without ground clearing fires there is a build up of trees and debris, resulting in what would have previously been a patchwork of groves of trees turning into thick continuous forest coverage with no breaks. In addition to this the ground gets cluttered with fuel like dead trees, needles and the like, and there is a build up of intermediate trees that help carry any fire on the ground into the canopy of the larger trees.
Controlled burns are being done already by the government. The government owns most of the forested land.
This is about a major expansion of the concept, and includes (1) an insurance scheme so that private landowners can do a burn without fear of bankruptcy and (2) restoring cultural burns that Indians performed to manage land before they were banned by people who didn't understand them.
In my opinion, you seem to think there’s some sort of left-leaning political agenda in this post.
Interestingly, a right-leaning college “friend” on Facebook uses (and links to articles that use) the same “Indians have been doing it for thousands of years” argument to complain about Democrats, California, and conservationists.
Okay? I don't care what "side" someone is on when they use this argument. I still think that's not a valid argument. Just because I agree with the conclusion he reaches (controlled burns are good) doesn't mean the logic was sound.
Ok. It was hard to tell based on the language you used.
> Why burn on purpose? It admittedly seems counterintuitive — or even dangerous — but purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
This is what you’re getting hung up on when you should really be focusing on the highlighted (and enlarged) quote:
“Setting fires intentionally may sound unusual, but if done correctly they reduce the fuel available for wildfires and are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem.”
The logic is sound in my opinion. Group X of people were doing things a “better” way, have continued to want to do things the “better” way but were prevented by Group Y, and it’s been _proven_ that their “way” was and is indeed “better”.
I will acknowledge that the article is lacking in the _proven_ sense. But it’s still there.
The reason why this article even mentions Native Americans though is because the new program that is being sponsored specifically targets cultural (i.e. Native American) burns.
My understanding is that it was being done until relatively recently when CA politicians leaned so heavily left that burning small fires to prevent bigger ones was somehow a threat to the environment and global warming. I haven't confirmed this personally, but if lawmakers are passing laws to ban gas powered leaf blowers and kitchen stoves, it's not hard to believe.
At the end of the day politicians weigh the opinions of their constituents who vote them in more than experts. Given two politicians in an area, one who listens to expert advice about controlled burns, and one who buckles to public pressure surrounding local air quality or forest closures, the latter is always going to be more likely to remain in office.
You should read the article. It is about how they are limiting liability and encouraging more burning.
Burning is allowed, has been allowed, and has been an active part of California forest management for decades.
Bans on small off-road engines and new indoor gas burning appliances are generally driven by health concerns (smog, indoor air quality, and noise pollution), and backed by pretty solid science. Not that global warming isn't also a damn good reason to ban these things.
I'm perfectly fine with politicians who ban convenience devices that cause extreme externalities to other people like smog, excess noise, and childhood asthma. That doesn't seem like a radical left position.
The article doesn't explain why this wasn't a problem before, I mean at least I don't remember having "fire season" a decade ago. Maybe it's some other cause but I'm still doubting the reasons behind what I would call "society engineering" in politics instead of incentivizing alternative technologies so that they are better and cheaper.
What is particularly harmful about the take you cite is that its not even relevant. What is relevant is the opposition to controlled burns today are more or less the exact same as they've always been I'd guess: local people who have no interest in breathing shit air for two or three weeks. By focusing on this other narrative we misunderstand today's stances on the issue, and how they might be rectified. For example, I'm sure local residents in impoverished rural areas wouldn't mind a stipend for the poor air quality during the burn period, for instance, which might make these burns more politically palatable.
This is the Successor Ideology that's infecting everything. The managerial class views the world through this fashionable secular religion that's based on original sin, self-flagellation, and believes in the noble savage myth.
> Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
We are talking concrete reasons. We have to first understand the concrete reasons why it wasn't being done already first. You yourself said it is shocking. Don't you want to know why? What were the reasons against controlled burn? Then we can figure out if we should do it. Just because the concrete reasons upset you doesn't mean they aren't worthy of being discussed.
There are many things to be upset about. I don't think controlled burns are it.
But why burn something - trees that can be used for useful purposes, ie. house building and paper products? For a sensible approach it would be - do select logging and then let small controlled fires happen in the area that has been logged. That way you get into situations where you don't have these tinderbox situations and are extracting 100% renewable resources.
The dead trees left behind are a huge boon for insects and the animals that feed on them. Focusing on extracting resources are missing the point of managing a healthy forest. As many leftovers of burns and logging as possible should stay in the ecosystem.
The article may be needlessly framing forest fire management as a racial issue. But it shouldn’t surprise or offend anyone that the people who are from here and have a deep respect for nature as part of their culture would have a better understanding of how to maintain the forest. That professor has valuable knowledge to share and for a long time, people weren’t willing to listen.
Unfortunately, we didn't just stop prescribed burns, we stopped natural burns as well.
> In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Other federal land management agencies quickly followed suit and joined the campaign to eliminate fire from the landscape.
> I'm shocked this isn't being done already. But what on earth is the reasoning in this article? There are plenty of great reasons to do controlled burns, but for some reason the article says controlled burns are good because:
>> purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
Don't be shocked. Part of the reason they're couching it this way is to avoid acknowldeging yet another Sacramento Policy Failure
"In California, two different approvals are needed for a burn — an air permit and a smoke management plan from the California Air Resources Board or a regional air-pollution district. In some cases, Cal Fire has to sign off, too."
"Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists? "
This article is weird because forest management became an extremely partisan issue recently. Do you remember the whole "rake the forests" thing?
Specifically, no of course we don't rake the forests. But generally, yes, accumulated fuel and forest management is at fault. Great pains are taken to redefine policies in progressive terms to avoid the appearance of agreeing with one's political opponents.
“They’re starting again in California. I said, you gotta clean your floors, you gotta clean your forests — there are many, many years of leaves and broken trees and they’re like, like, so flammable, you touch them and it goes up. I've been telling them this for 3 years now, but they don't want to listen.”
> In Finland, after clear-cutting a forest area, crews use heavy machinery (similar to what is used in this video) to “rake” or gather tree harvesting residues, tree roots and other material into huge piles. The biomass is then chipped onsite after it has dried up sufficiently, and chips are hauled to local heat-producing plants to generate warmth for local residents.
Climate change and poor forest management can both contribute to wildfires, but our current mechanisms for political discourse have extremely low bitrates and can't handle discussion of problems with multivariate inputs.
Unless something's changed recently, California doesn't control such things within its own borders for a huge swath of its forests. The federal government does, and that's been the crux of the matter for as long as I've paid any attention to it.
The headline would make more sense if it highlighted that they are looking to help insure prescribed burns. The point being that they have wanted this for a long time, but the risks associated with doing a burn effectively make it so that nobody will do it.
All of the talk about whether or not successful controlled burns should be done are somewhat moot. Nobody is arguing against that. Pretty much they never have. The barriers seem to have always been in costs associated with containment and what happens when that goes wrong.
Edit: I should add that I stated the "never have" too strongly. It was never unanimous that it was a bad idea. I would be a wrong if I said absolutely nobody ever said it was a bad idea.
They've always allowed controlled burns. I've personally seen them happen in California in regional parks. The problem seems to be that not many authorities want to do them because of liability concerns.
In any case, I meant that the budget should be aligned with the normal amount of damage from uncontrolled wildfires.
>Prescribed burns are generally focused mainly on acreage and reducing the amount of fuel available for wildfires; cultural burns are focused on what needs burned to revitalize woodlands and promote biodiversity.
I wish they'd elaborate on how this is done. Focuses on what needs to be burned? Meaning a type of tree? Just the undergrowth? Curious how fire can be controlled to just specific elements in the landscape.
From my layman understanding: usually it's just dry undergrowth and dead stuff that burns. Getting a healthy tree to burn needs a lot of heat or time, so if you burn frequently enough the undergrowth burns away long before the trees have a chance to catch fire. If too much flammable material has built up, remove undergrowth from around the tree trunks (or inversely, stack dead branches under trees you want to burn, though not sure if anyone does that).
I think it's really hard to burn a healthy tree. Water is good at controlling temperature. Even you use a blowtorch on a healthy tree. You will just make a black taint on it. And a big healthy have tons of water in it. Make it even more durable to fire.
To make a healthy tree burnable. You first need tons of heat source to prepare the wood itself so it is dry enough that actually burnable. But a healthy forest shouldn't have that level of heat source to make it doable (otherwise it will burn itself away someday, just like current situation of CA)
Prescribed burn here exists to remove the fuel, so it never pile up to the level that "Once it ignited, everything burns regardless of it is a healthy tree or what. And it burns forever because everything is burnable at this level of temperature".
A strange article considering that California has been doing prescribed burns for years[1]. You could read it and easily believe that this is some new and novel approach. Many groups agree that California needs to do more but describing it as "California will begin backing intentional burns" seems intentionally misleading.
The author's digression into European's attitudes toward Native Americans doesn't seem to add much to the discussing except give them some cultural warrior brownie points.
> In May 2018, then-governor Jerry Brown set a goal of burning 500,000 acres of wildlands each year by 2023—a start at treating the 20 million acres that California’s Forest Carbon Plan estimates would benefit from prescribed fire or manual thinning.
no, the controlled burns so far have been miniscule and error-laden. There was a control fight between CalFire and other agencies over every detail. Multiple, massive fires occurred in the intervals when they were arguing about it behind closed doors. The past-Chief of CalFIRE was terminated over this and other issues; his immediate successor was given more than 10x the budget that CalFIRE ever had. Money is a problem in the woods. Firefighting is genuinely harsh and dangerous, the people they have to run it are largely military culture.
None of that justifies a headline of "California will _begin_ backing intentional burns". Already this thread is full of comments condemning California for its wooly-headiness.
California still lags far behind Florida, a much smaller state, in the acreage of prescribed burns per year. SW Florida is a tropical savanna climate, having a winter fire season. Around 2 million acres per year are burned, and have been since I was a child.
California is more than twice the size of Florida. Ignoring a third which is "desert" — much of this is actually steppe — doesn't tip the scales. I'm not sure what the arbitrary human-imposed classification of "controlled by the federal government" has to do with anything.
> I'm not sure what the arbitrary human-imposed classification of "controlled by the federal government" has to do with anything
I would assume that forests on federal land are managed by the federal government, and forests owned by the state are managed by the state. California might not have a lot of say whether prescribed burns happen on federal land.
> I'm not sure what the arbitrary human-imposed classification of "controlled by the federal government" has to do with anything
It has a lot do when you discuss California’s land use policy, which does not apply to nearly half of California, including an even larger share of the land to which controlled burns might sensibly apply, which are largely national parks or national forests.
>It has a lot do when you discuss California’s land use policy, which does not apply to nearly half of California, including an even larger share of the land to which controlled burns might sensibly apply, which are largely national parks or national forests.
Many of the controlled burns in Florida take place in Everglades National Park, which includes the largest federally protected wilderness in the Eastern US. I don't see how this objection changes anything. Is the federal government preventing controlled burns? Since when has that ever been a policy?
I think this is a very interesting question, and I'd love to see a concise explanation.
To directly answer "is the federal government preventing controlled burns?" They will definitely prevent controlled burns during the dry season. More, they have to fund doing the burns. Story I saw linked earlier was https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026137249/with-extreme-fires.... https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire is about as far as I got on my quick dive looking for details on how to run a controlled burn. I don't see an obvious link for seasons that they run these burns.
This story, ultimately, is about finding a way to insure private run large scale burns. The state built up an accredited set of associates, now they are leveraging them to try and make an insurance market for limiting liability.
(At least, that is my read of the situation. There is definitely a ton of talking past each other in this topic.)
Definitely a misleading headline - Watch Duty shows 14 prescribed burns in the state right now. I live in the WUI and they've been doing burns around here for the past ~3 months.
other states have had far larger programs for much longer. The main issue is that California for many years chose to blame climate change alone for all their fires and now they have years of fuel built up that they have to get rid of. The article you posted even says California has already reduced the goal to only 400K and the deadline is 2025 and so far they are at less than a quarter of their goal
Did you not notice that all of the pacific north west and the Rockies have been burning? All these other states that had prescribed burning also had massive wild fires.
The PNW hasn't done much cultural and prescribed burning, either. Most of the west coast -- and most of the USFS-managed land in the country -- was operated under the 10am policy for most of the 20th century, leading to massive fuel buildups.
I want to be clear, I'm not a climate change denialist -- climate change is real, and it's an imminent threat -- but forest fires are not exploding simply due to climate change. The reality is, once you've built up enough fuel, the only way out is by burning it. We no longer suppress wildfires to the same extent, and so they grow much larger.
Also, for what it's worth, the PNW had wildfire season prior to the implementation of the 10am policy. In 1895, in Tacoma, WA, Mark Twain joked about the wildfire smoke: "Really, your scenery is wonderful. It is quite out of sight."[0]
The reality is, our forests grew up alongside not only natural wildfires, but human-instigated wildfires for the purposes of ecosystem management by native tribes. We spent a couple hundred years trying to implement a "better" system, by ignoring the natural processes of the past 10,000 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that we're in a bad place now.
There is a popular conservative narrative that the record number of forest fires we've had in the last 5 years have nothing to do with climate change, and everything to do with "policy" - specifically the lack of controlled burns.
Corner someone at a trump rally, and they may never have set foot in California or a forest, but they'll be familiar with the concept of "intentional burns" because the daily wire or fox news or newsmax would have said it as they dismissed "liberal alarmism" over climate change.
It fits a convenient narrative which is that all of society's problems are just because of big government interceding in their lives.
Telling these people that "Actually California, BC, and North America, do intentional burns all the time" does nothing because it contradicts the propaganda they've heard. And they'll assume it's a lie.
Saying "Fine, we'll START doing intentional burns" may have a chance.
Because the amount of acreage that California burns is minuscule. It becomes especially obvious when you compare it to a swamp that probably doesn’t even need it, such as Florida.
> Florida has done prescribed burns on more than 1.6 million acres so far this year. California has only burned around 35,000 acres. The state is 2.5 times larger than Florida.
~2021, NPR.
Doesn’t seem like they did much between 2018 and 2021
the backlog for implementing this is decades old; there is no unified voice, and ad-hoc opinionated materials can attract readers quickly, for the wrong reasons perhaps.
There is no joy on this topic - its a brutal mess, with more to come. Popular media is going to produce contents like this, again.. and yes there is collective anger under the surface. Somehow, rational thinking must stay alive, while the venting and posturing continues in the open.. It is worth considering Australia, Greece, the far-North scrub forests.. are all facing this, without the budgets and science of California.
went on a short hike around Mammoth Lakes in California with a retired US Forest Service guy, and he told us a story about how they manually surveyed an area that had been fire suppressed for many years. They counted the number of trees per acre, and compared that to the number of trees per acre to an area near Mammoth (Bishop maybe) that hadn't been fire suppressed.
I don't remember the specifics anymore, but basically there were far fewer trees per acre in the area that did not have fire suppression, but the trees were far healthier / bigger as they did not have to compete for resources. While the trees in the fire suppressed area were smaller and made for a less healthy ecosystem.
I'm not sure how it's done in California, but in a lot of places, they do something kind of similar to this. In areas with a very large buildup of fuel that puts trees at risk of burning, they will cleacut a ring around the planned burn to keep the fire contained.
However, they would not normally log all the trees within the burn area. The goal is to preserve the trees and clear out the fuel that has built up at the underbrush level. After the burn, mature trees help suppress further underbrush development.
When trees are removed, it leads to a lot of secondary growth, which both promotes fire and is heavily susceptible to being killed by fire. This is fine if the goal is to maintain the area as a more open field-like space via frequent controlled burns (which we honestly should be doing more of; meadows are highly ecologically valuable), but if the goal is to maintain it as forest, then you don't want to remove mature trees.
how about allowing loggers to cut down some trees instead of just burning it or capturing that energy released. Allows people to take that home for firewood. Personally, I burn wood for the winter and cooking.
I'm not personally opposed (though most of that kind of harvesting might disturb a lot of habitat, potentially introducing non-native invasives. But, it is also a fact that a lot of plant life is dependent on fire.
You don't burn to kill the trees. You burn to clear up the dry, flammable plant material on the ground. If controlled burns are conducted regularly, this fuel does not build up enough to create large fires that kill trees.
> Under the Clean Air Act, wildfires are considered “exceptional events,” and the pollutants they emit are typically exempt from regulatory scrutiny. Prescribed burns generally receive no such exemption when the Environmental Protection Agency measures a state’s compliance with air quality standards. States may face penalties including loss of federal highway money if they exceed pollution standards while mitigating against more harmful smoke from wildfires.
...
> Obtaining an exemption for a prescribed fire under the Clean Air Act is already so arduous that states are reluctant to implement or expand burn programs. The Government Accountability Office recently reported that the approval process is so burdensome that only one state has submitted and been granted an exemption from the EPA, a project in Kansas in 2012.
Just one more obstacle to having a sensible fire regime. Sheesh.
If you do prescribed burns early in the season, the fires will be small, and not out of control (generally). That prevents worse air pollution later.
In general this differentiation between "acts of God" and "acts of Man" is a real problem. You neglect a forest until it burns down a community, and you're innocent. It was an act of God. You try to prevent that from happening by doing controlled burns, something goes wrong, and it burns down some houses; busted.
The EPA is not as powerful as they should be. We should prioritize clean air over property damage from fires. Sadly the voters and both parties will get that wrong, albeit for different reasons.
A valid question if you can first prove that wildfires are “caused” by too much underbrush in a way that could not be otherwise mitigated. Many of the recent fires have been caused by arson or pg&e and merely facilitated by poor forest management practices caused by real estate values being absurd in California.
One of the caveats not really talked about here is that national parks are actually the responsibility of the federal government to take care of not the state of california. So, only so much california can do if white house ignores responsibility to do controlled burns on the 6.3 million acres of national parks here where wildfires have often started.
In recent years historic mega fires have raged across the globe in Siberia, Australia, the Amazon, Canada, and throughout the American northwest. Not sure how you can blame all that on American forest management practices.
> fund’s purpose is ... demonstrating that prescribed and cultural burns are low risk, so private insurance companies will enter the market.
How does a fund demonstrate that? The linked legislation (https://wildfiretaskforce.org/prescribed-fire-liability-clai...) claims "rates of escape and loss are very low" already. Insurance companies' actuaries are experts at quantifying loss, so if it is low already...?
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 152 ms ] threadI recommend the Good Fire podcast for anyone confused by this headline.[0]
[0] https://yourforestpodcast.com/good-fire-podcast
Headline seems like it was written badly on purpose just to clickbait people unfamiliar with the subject.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/03/wildfires-dr...
No idea what you're on about.
You either have a controlled burn that burns up trees and brush.
Or you have an uncontrolled burn that burns up trees and brush and cars and homes and cities and people and every other harmful thing that you really shouldn't burn.
Yes, this is extremely common in the south east.
Literally, the point is they are building a fund so that prescribed burning can be insured.
Edit: I should say that I'm playing loose here, as this is a conversation, not a debate. That said, I did include the "against your fence" on purpose. I'm well aware of rules on how you can burn, for example: https://www.cobbcounty.org/fire/fire-marshal/outdoor-burning.
This is a hard area to regulate. Any attempt to minimize that is reductive and unlikely to be helpful. Is why I picked something i know is allowed, burning in your yard, but with a condition I know is basically never allowed, against my fence.
They are a factor, in that you have to do it in a way that addresses pollution concerns. At large, that is probably going to include what accelerants and controls are allowed, as they will have a unique impact on the pollution generated.
Or are you suggesting that the pollution can, in fact, not be controlled and impacted in ways that may need special mitigations?
Under current regulations, people are often prevented from controlled burns due to air quality concerns under CEQA. This leads to fuel buildup.
When the eventual real wildfire happens, the risk to property and lives is much worse, and so is the pollution; places experiencing wildfire experience AQIs of 300,400+ when the WHO considers 150+ to be unhealthy. Mother Nature doesn’t have much concern for laws and regulations, and we have trouble controlling these large fires.
There is no way to control and thin fuel that does not result in pollution. Manual excavation is impractical and arguably worse since we’d be certainly trampling ecosystems in the process; these ecosystems are often expecting some baseline level of fire.
The entire discussion thread is about California, the CEQA in my parent comment is the California Environmental Quality Act, and here is an article describing the differences between the South and the West on burning policy: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1029821831/to-stop-extreme-wi...
> Florida has done prescribed burns on more than 1.6 million acres so far this year. California has only burned around 35,000 acres. The state is 2.5 times larger than Florida.
> About half of California is privately owned, and landowners have had little support from public agencies to conduct burns on their property. Permits from firefighting agencies and air quality regulators can be cumbersome to secure.
> In May [2021], Quinn-Davidson helped lead the first burn manager certification course in California. Fourteen local groups, known as prescribed burn associations, recently formed to help private landowners with burns across the state.
More, none of this actually shows that it is "air quality regulators" that is specifically preventing prescribed burns. That actually reads more as a dog whistle to get people riled up over the idea.
And indeed, the linked article presents a better explanation. Liability concerns on decontainment and other impacts goes a long way to stopping people from doing anything. Straight forwardly, if they do a controlled burn and it impacts others, they are liable to make the others whole. If a wildfire happens, they are both victims.
That is, this article is a direct downstream event from the "prescribed burn associates" effort of the NPR story. If you have a certified associate, you can get insurance to limit your liability. And this is largely because the certified associate will be following necessary rules and regulations to limit the impact. Any reason to think the associates will not be looking to pollution and safety concerns.
If you are strawmanning that I'm somehow saying you can't cause any pollution, I can only say that is not what I said. I said pollution should be a factor, but that is not the same as "you cannot cause pollution." And to insist that that is all it can be is again reductive and not helpful.
The world burning down in a roaring conflagration, or have you missed the entire chain of this conversation?
The pollution is going to happen. You get to chose what the scope of it is with controlled burns. Or you can give up that choice and enjoy the smoke of burning homes and cars.
There are some places where it will be unlikely that we can do controlled burns, pollution only being one of the factors. We should try to burn as much around those areas to reduce the likelihood a fire spreads to that area. But note, those controlled burns will create their own pollution.
We (humans) moved in to fire country, now we need to learn how to live with those poor choices.
More, it has not been established that it is too far into the "no pollution side at all." Do you have evidence that it is pollution regulation that has caused no controlled burns? Noting that I can bring up plenty of easy evidence of folks literally doing small scale controlled burns.
I don't think you all are doing it on purpose, but this is a dog whistle tactic to pull in a lot of anti regulation folks to yell about things.
I'm joyed when my neighbor does it, because we do it to keep dried leaves off each other's property precisely to prevent fires in summer and make the same job easier next year. I'd rather burn my leaves to save my house.
That is, i picked that example not because you can't burn in your yard, but because there are rules you have to follow. Doing it "at large" in a full state will clearly have more difficulties than doing it in your small yard.
I can't recall exactly how far behind they are, but if they're permitted to put aside those constraints (unlikely) it'll still take decades at this point.
Here's a paper published in 2020.
https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/3/3/44 Prescribed Burns in California: A Historical Case Study of the Integration of Scientific Research and Policy
It's a complex issue so there's lots of reasons why prescribed burns aren't done more, but they have been done for years, and there are new laws to make it easier. The challenges include: Air Quality Laws, Insurance Liability, Federal control of National Forest, and the high population in the Wildland Urban Interface and large number of houses near areas that need fire control. People do build houses in areas called Devil's Canyon and Black Hill, but at the same time large areas of grass and scrub have burned annually each year in Lake County so burns there obviously don't help.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s...
Every article seems like a chance to spread misinformation with lazy analysis and conspiracy theories about Jewish Space Lasers, Climate Change Denial, or that controlled burns haven't been part of California fire control for all of living memory.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/10/28/fac...
That is the total acreage that burned. Mostly wildfires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
Apparently, prescribed burns are about 125,000 acres/year: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/prescribed-burning/....
> purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
When talking about the reason for overgrowth, the article talks about how it's the fault of Europeans who said controlled burns are primitive. The person they reference is not someone in the forest service, or someone who is an expert in this. They reference the "UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning".
Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
They didn't talk to anyone, they just used an article with more depth to support their little, less deep article.
>Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
What does this mean? You can't talk about wildfires in the west without talking about how westward expansion brought terrible forest management practices and suppressed traditional management practices that kept forests healthy. How are you involving racism in this topic?
It's not that I don't think that discussion has a place. It's that I don't think saying "natives did it" is a justification for bringing it back. There are plenty of great justifications for bringing it back, and I'm glad they are, but "native americans used to do this" is not a reason.
That sort of reasoning is how you get people claiming that "alternative medicine" is better than the medical miracles we produce today. You need actual data and reasons to support things, not just "native americans did it and racist europeans rejected it".
That's not the justification. The author is bringing up traditional burning practices because suppression of those practices is a cause of our current mega fires.
"Thanks to centuries of overzealous fire protection and the suppression of Indigenous cultural burns — which Europeans found “primitive” — forests have become overgrown, accumulating piles of underbrush and fallen trees. In trying to prevent wildfires altogether, we’ve been essentially storing up bigger and bigger piles of fuel. And with that extra fuel comes fires that burn more ferociously, exacerbated by drought and drier conditions from climate change.
“When you talk to different native people from the Yosemite area, they talk about how it used to look when fire was used as a management tool,” UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning said in a University of California article. Areas that were once open valleys are now choked with conifers and other fuel sources that were not there when cultural burns helped groom the land."
The justification for controlled burns is written here
"Setting fires intentionally may sound like a paradoxical approach to fire control, but if they are done correctly, controlled burns reduce the fuel available for wildfires, helping to prevent the catastrophically large, hot fires that overwhelm firefighting resources. They also are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem."
It sounds like you'd like to know more about wildfire and how indigenous burning practices suppress mega fires. I encourage you to read the linked materials, as this little article isn't going to go deep enough to answer your questions.
tl;dr Yes, we should do more controlled burns. No, our current situation has very little to do with "traditional burning practices".
Racism against First Peoples isn't the biggest or near one of the biggest reason we haven't been doing controlled burns in California -- leftwing greenies have opposed burns because they oppose man's intervention with nature.
_Was_ racism a reason? Sure, but the past is not the present. The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics.
The greenies didn't just oppose "traditional burning practices" but also _modern_ burning practices that are used in other US states, and they have much more control over California's policy (and even Fed Interior policy) than racist bogeymen.
Even this correction is being driven by those politics, as a return to "traditional burning practices" after (real and imagined) historical injustice.
That's the truth that this article attempts to dodge.
so still the people who colonized north america? you've turned this entire thing into a left wing vs right wing culture war issue when the article is just providing historical context. nobody is attacking the right wing in this article - not sure why you're perceiving it as one.
I'm sorry, this is just incredibly incorrect. Forest management on the federal level is owned by logging companies. The drive to put out fires, even in remote areas, is driven by a desire to not lose acres that could be logged. It's taken activist decades to convince the Forest Service and the BLM to do controlled burns and we *still* put out naturally-ignited fires in remote areas.
I won’t say you’re incredibly incorrect myself, but maybe just simply incorrect?
Most of the forested land in California is owned by the federal government, who has historically managed the land based on the priorities of natural resource extractors like logging companies.
This article is about the PNW, but it functioned the same way in California
https://wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Ron-Vorderstrasse.pdf
>I won’t say you’re incredibly incorrect myself, but maybe just simply incorrect?
You're complete lack of knowledge on this subject doesn't make me incorrect. Please go do some reading and come back with an intelligent argument.
The majority of the articles focus is on insurance liability.
Do any of you people actually read before you comment?
What's bizarre is that in spite of that non-sequitur, fire suppression was mandated by the very first session of the California Legislature in 1850. This isn't some ancient technique we're only just now rediscovering. It's been well-established practice for over a century, only recently eschewed in favor of assuaging irrational environmentalists.
> In a 1918 letter, a district ranger at Klamath National Forest wrote to his supervisor that the US Forest Service’s most important duty was to keep fires to a minimum, but “renegade whites and Indians” were setting fires “for pure cussedness”, not caring whether the fires harmed others.
> He suggested that the solution was “to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him”. He also suggested hiring a female missionary who had “gained the confidence” of Indigenous people to convince them to adopt settler theories about fire.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...
Controlled burning has been used in the South by white people since the early 1800s: https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/19091, where "it was quickly adopted from the Indians by early European settlers".
One ranger in California in 1918 does not speak for an entire race for God's sake. That should be obvious.
/s
Is there any evidence of this? I mean, I know that the indigenous people did so to try to contain fires, because wildfires have been an issue for millions of years. But is there any evidence it was "more successful" historically? I'm not a huge believer that ancient cultures had these things figured out.
I'll let you go into the further reading section for more information.
Please explain the type of evidence you could gather that would tell you American Indians thought intentional burning was a good idea and part of their planned forest management.
From what I'm reading on your link the evidence is evidence of fires burning things down, thus the Indians had an advanced forest management system in place.
It turns out that people that lived in fire country for hundreds/thousands of years built up practices of burning when fires would remain calm rather than explode into conflagrations. "Advanced" is relative in this sense.
Between this and natural fires the landscape had a patchwork quality that acted as natural fire breaks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe43QK85448
UC Davis didn’t empower ancient indigenous community practices uncovering mystical oral history, they went to people that just googled it like everyone else because there has been perpetual cross drift in how to do controlled burns in even more optimal ways. Gullible af wow. This is like the Blazing Saddles of fire control.
The only reason California wasn't doing controlled burns, according to the article, is because they didnt have hush money for when they inevitably burn your house down and lose the lawsuit, and now they topped it up with a paltry $20 million.
The rest of this article is quite a bit of deflection.
* There used to be a number of old growth trees spread out intermittently which don’t exist anymore.
* Decades of mismanagement and clear cutting have resulted in forests being a lot denser today then they were a couple of centuries ago, a monolithic area where all the trees are close together, similar in age, and of the same species, is a new environment, in California (the Redwood forest in the North Coast has tightly compacted trees of the same species, but of varying age; also note that Redwood has evolved to withstand fires, probably because of this growing pattern).
* There are number of invasive species, including Eucalyptus and the California Silver, which disrupt native species access and compete with access to water and sunlight
* And worst of all there are a number of pathogens including the invasive bark beetle which is killing old growth giant sequoias in and around Yosamite.
* And to top it all off, California is getting hotter and dryer with the climate catastrophe, which amplifies all these problems.
Controlled fires and better forest management in general is definitely a good thing, and California is doing the right thing by re-establishing it, and including indigenous communities is for sure for the better. However, what worked in the past is only gonna have limited (though positive) effects. Expect California to keep burning at accelerated rate. Even if these efforts work perfectly—which they will—the state will still keep burning. The damage is simply too great.
> California is getting hotter and dryer with the climate catastrophe
California in the 20th century was very abnormally wet and mild. Using scientific data and looking back 2000+ years one gets a picture of centuries long droughts, and of extreme weather as very normal. This is the status quo and the past 100 years of mild and wet climate is the weird abnormality(which people think it always should be like).
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-histo...
Also California does not exist in a vacuum. The earth is getting significantly warmer. West Coast USA will become dryer as a result, if this is the “natural state” of California (whatever that means for a dynamic climate system) than California will become hotter and dryer still.
but read the article again. there is no procedural mystery on how to do a controlled burn. California expects to burn your house down and didn't allocate money for it and now they allocated a little bit.
"the fear of liability for unintentionally starting a wildfire is one key reason holding back more prescribed burns."
the rest of the article, read it again, the rest of the article is a grift specifically done by CAL FIRE to convince allocating money to the fund at all.
they wrapped it in an indigenous veneer to make it sound like they know what they're doing.
"so private insurance companies will enter the market."
it has kind of nothing to do with the arguments happening in this comment section. the approach is amusing. the problem is hilarious. California wasn't doing controlled "or cultural" burns because they're going to lose all the lawsuits when they burn your house down, and now they're still going to lose all lawsuits but they allocated money to that, but only $20 million and they're hoping the private insurers are like "ooooo" "aaaah" "cultural fire practitioner fire bends for special California flora" and insures with waaaaay more money than $20 million, because so far its a pathetic amount.
At what point does the Fed Gov say, "wait a minute, if you want disaster funding you've got to clean up your act." And certainly the insurance industry has lobbying power, and nothing from them either?
This has a foul smell. I'm rarely pro-litigation but CA residents should start a class action suit again the state for what looks like negligence.
the narrative "we bad , they good" always sells
You can see this from ignoring food forests and insisting on farming when the soil was just throwing up rocks year on year in north east U.S.
The fact that you're trying so hard to explain that away says a tonne about you. I recommend that you take a long, hard look at yourself and try figure out why you feel the need to justify bigotry.
It wasn’t out of stupidity, it was out of malice and bigotry.
It’s also a culture of domination that has stuck with us to this day.
I’m of European descent, too. It’s ok. Our ancestors were imperfect. It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge that and to learn from this example where the so-called primitives had better practices than the self-described civilized people.
It’s not a personal attack if you don’t take it personally.
There is a trend that glorifies native populations over colonizers and it has been going on for years now, said trend is pretty often just thinly veiled racism. I don't think it's insecurity as much as awareness.
After all, European history, culture, and heritage is still being celebrated even as its foibles criticized, so I fail to see how one culture's sharing of the limelight with another's constitutes racism.
Yes, race matters a lot to many people. It certainly matters a lot more than it did until 2008—to all "racial" groups, that is—and I can't help but notice that a lot of freshly minted "experts" are, fifteen years later, profiting very, very handsomely from providing "solutions" to a problem that has perversely only grown in proportion with the size of the industry itself.
You mean when a significant minority of the population was saying that Obama was a secret Muslim trying to impose Sharia law on the United States and McCain (whatever happen to people like him?) had to constantly squash it in his own party?
Where I live (Santa Cruz Mountains) the vast old growth redwood trees were extensively logged (via clear cutting) into the early-to-mid 20th Century.
Then widespread logging just stopped. And for at least the past 50-60 years there has been intense hostility to logging. Everywhere, doesn't matter if public or private land.
The redwood groves that have grown back are all extremely densely packed, relatively small diameter trees mixed in with tan and coast live oaks and lots of smaller shrubbery. Lots of low branches on all trees. Lots of redwood needles and dead tan oak and coast live oak leaves laying thick on the forest floor.
Perfect tinder.
About 3 years ago a lightening storm sparked a fire that burned hundreds of thousands of acres.
Controlled burns would have helped remove the forest duff. But the trees themselves are perfectly set up to respond to fire, unlike in an old growth forest.
Writing is not just producing a bag of atomic propositions. What is written must be justified and relevant. When something forced occurs within some piece of writing, it betrays a bias, or even an ulterior motive. In this case, controlled burns (or letting natural wildfires play out) aren't a new thing. They're older than agriculture, and they are and have been used across the world in modern times for some time. Look at a live map of forest fires and you'll notice how many are controlled burns. It's not as if we're considering the use of controlled burns for the first time and discovering some long-forgotten wisdom of the natives here. Frankly, what's weird is that California is just now doing this.
But I also wouldn't make a big deal out of this article either. I think learning about precolonial practices like this is interesting, regardless of the bias or motives of the article's author.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
#1 - To the best of our knowledge, the forests of the region were actively managed via fire for thousands of years. This changed a few hundred years ago, and the result is the unprecedented fires we have been experiencing. The government is reacting by greatly increasing funding for prescribed burns which, to the best of our knowledge, is the best solution at this time.
#2 - The state is bound by federal treaties with the sovereign nations that reside within its borders. The bounds of these treaties are hotly contested. The sovereign nations believe that the treaties grant them the right to the lifestyle they historically had. The federal government wants to curtail activities they believe, if unchecked, might cause lasting negative effects. One of the rights these sovereign nations had restricted were controlled burns, which they call cultural burns. These rights are being slowly returned now that the state and feds view controlled burns in a more positive light.
There is a 3rd indirect element to this article, which is that it is trying to address an audience that has been affected by years of the Smokey the Bear 'all fire is bad' mentality.
You should reread the article. I'm pretty sure you brought along the baggage you are complaining about.
You will not persuade hardcore preservationists in California by listing out the economic/quality of life benefits of controlled burns. They (and I am generalizing) have a deep passion for returning nature to its natural state.
The key to changing preservationists minds is not to say "there are many benefits to controlled burns (for humans)" but rather, "the state we are creating in forests without burns is not natural."
...just because it is interesting.
"Natural state" is a term with a debatable definition. Is it:
* how it was when the Native Americans lived on it and did whatever they did
* how it was when there are no humans around at all
And these aren't even necessarily the only definitions, or a binary choice (it could be a spectrum/tunable).
When the Bering Strait ice bridge formed and the descendants of native peoples migrated down through the American continent, California was not a dry desert. It was probably covered by lush forests and wetlands with a much lower sea level than today so there's literally no way to return it to that "natural state"
With the Kelp highway hypothesis [1], humans were here for most of that transition so really there's a whole list of "natural states" to pick from (that we largely can't return to)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas)#K...
To convince them to take action you have to validate their self-imposed guilt with images of reverting to noble savages clapping hands and playing pan-flutes around a fire while the animals sway in time to the music.
There was a time I would have said these people need education, now I'll settle for using their guilt to herd them in the correct direction.
Which is what's happening.
Its natural state includes devastating wildfires every so often when lightning touches off dry undergrowth that hasn't been cleared away for years.
The first time the controlled burn goes out of control the initiative will be back to square one.
"Native Americans" arrived here about 30,000 years ago. For all the time prior to that forests were actively managed by controlled burns conducted by nature.
The idea that they somehow had some advanced knowledge that Europeans lacked has no scientific basis, they simply didn't have the modern technology to stop a fire started by lightning.
Or as much fixed and immobile infrastructure that would be endangered by fire-- if there is nothing you care about nearby, why not set a fire to aid in hunting or to clear out plants you can't eat in favor of ones you can?
Just because they intentionally set fires that doesn't itself make it environmentally good-- it's an extraordinarily racist view that the indigenous people weren't capable of environmental destruction just because they were less effective at it than industrial civilizations. The noble savage protector of the land is a racist fantasy of people raised on a diet of Disney movies, not reality.
This is, by definition, not a controlled burn.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Paul Hessburg of the Forest Service and University of Washington has a good TEDx talk on this that helps explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas
This is about a major expansion of the concept, and includes (1) an insurance scheme so that private landowners can do a burn without fear of bankruptcy and (2) restoring cultural burns that Indians performed to manage land before they were banned by people who didn't understand them.
Interestingly, a right-leaning college “friend” on Facebook uses (and links to articles that use) the same “Indians have been doing it for thousands of years” argument to complain about Democrats, California, and conservationists.
> Why burn on purpose? It admittedly seems counterintuitive — or even dangerous — but purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
This is what you’re getting hung up on when you should really be focusing on the highlighted (and enlarged) quote:
“Setting fires intentionally may sound unusual, but if done correctly they reduce the fuel available for wildfires and are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem.”
The logic is sound in my opinion. Group X of people were doing things a “better” way, have continued to want to do things the “better” way but were prevented by Group Y, and it’s been _proven_ that their “way” was and is indeed “better”.
I will acknowledge that the article is lacking in the _proven_ sense. But it’s still there.
The reason why this article even mentions Native Americans though is because the new program that is being sponsored specifically targets cultural (i.e. Native American) burns.
It is being done already, and has been for over a century. It's just facebook boomers got it in their heads that it wasn't.
Burning is allowed, has been allowed, and has been an active part of California forest management for decades.
Bans on small off-road engines and new indoor gas burning appliances are generally driven by health concerns (smog, indoor air quality, and noise pollution), and backed by pretty solid science. Not that global warming isn't also a damn good reason to ban these things.
I'm perfectly fine with politicians who ban convenience devices that cause extreme externalities to other people like smog, excess noise, and childhood asthma. That doesn't seem like a radical left position.
What's more shocking is why it wasn't being done.
> Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
We are talking concrete reasons. We have to first understand the concrete reasons why it wasn't being done already first. You yourself said it is shocking. Don't you want to know why? What were the reasons against controlled burn? Then we can figure out if we should do it. Just because the concrete reasons upset you doesn't mean they aren't worthy of being discussed.
There are many things to be upset about. I don't think controlled burns are it.
it's not being upset about controlled burns, but the "you're racist yet again and you didn't even know it!"
If it happens naturally, it's nobody's fault. If it happens because the state is doing a controlled burn, the state foots the bill.
Take a look at how many of the wildfires are due to unmaintained power lines if you REALLY want to blow a gasket.
Unfortunately, we didn't just stop prescribed burns, we stopped natural burns as well.
> In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Other federal land management agencies quickly followed suit and joined the campaign to eliminate fire from the landscape.
https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...
So we have forests laden with nearly a hundred years worth of unburned fuel.
Don't be shocked. Part of the reason they're couching it this way is to avoid acknowldeging yet another Sacramento Policy Failure
"In California, two different approvals are needed for a burn — an air permit and a smoke management plan from the California Air Resources Board or a regional air-pollution district. In some cases, Cal Fire has to sign off, too."
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24934569...
This article is weird because forest management became an extremely partisan issue recently. Do you remember the whole "rake the forests" thing?
Specifically, no of course we don't rake the forests. But generally, yes, accumulated fuel and forest management is at fault. Great pains are taken to redefine policies in progressive terms to avoid the appearance of agreeing with one's political opponents.
Both sides do this btw.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
President Donald Trump Old Forge PA, 2020
https://www.youtube.com/live/nN9mo_Zxdk0?t=2081
> In Finland, after clear-cutting a forest area, crews use heavy machinery (similar to what is used in this video) to “rake” or gather tree harvesting residues, tree roots and other material into huge piles. The biomass is then chipped onsite after it has dried up sufficiently, and chips are hauled to local heat-producing plants to generate warmth for local residents.
What you linked is weird propaganda about Finnish forestry companies trying to utilize clear cut areas more effectively.
Even the method he mentioned is used (as opposed to what the juvenile mockings suggest) but for a slightly different but related purpose.
Enjoy this and the instance where the German was laughing at Trump when he warned against over reliance on Russia.
All of the talk about whether or not successful controlled burns should be done are somewhat moot. Nobody is arguing against that. Pretty much they never have. The barriers seem to have always been in costs associated with containment and what happens when that goes wrong.
Edit: I should add that I stated the "never have" too strongly. It was never unanimous that it was a bad idea. I would be a wrong if I said absolutely nobody ever said it was a bad idea.
Instead of $20M, the budget should be whatever the total damages were on average per year for the past ten years.
You have to make an informed guess the first time.
In any case, I meant that the budget should be aligned with the normal amount of damage from uncontrolled wildfires.
I wish they'd elaborate on how this is done. Focuses on what needs to be burned? Meaning a type of tree? Just the undergrowth? Curious how fire can be controlled to just specific elements in the landscape.
To make a healthy tree burnable. You first need tons of heat source to prepare the wood itself so it is dry enough that actually burnable. But a healthy forest shouldn't have that level of heat source to make it doable (otherwise it will burn itself away someday, just like current situation of CA)
Prescribed burn here exists to remove the fuel, so it never pile up to the level that "Once it ignited, everything burns regardless of it is a healthy tree or what. And it burns forever because everything is burnable at this level of temperature".
The author's digression into European's attitudes toward Native Americans doesn't seem to add much to the discussing except give them some cultural warrior brownie points.
[1]https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/california-needs-more-fire...
> In May 2018, then-governor Jerry Brown set a goal of burning 500,000 acres of wildlands each year by 2023—a start at treating the 20 million acres that California’s Forest Carbon Plan estimates would benefit from prescribed fire or manual thinning.
https://www.fdacs.gov/Forest-Wildfire/Wildland-Fire/Prescrib...
38% of California is desert, and much of the rest (much of that, too; 47% in total) is controlled by the federal government.
California is not like Florida in a lot of ways more significant to this discussion than being larger.
I would assume that forests on federal land are managed by the federal government, and forests owned by the state are managed by the state. California might not have a lot of say whether prescribed burns happen on federal land.
It has a lot do when you discuss California’s land use policy, which does not apply to nearly half of California, including an even larger share of the land to which controlled burns might sensibly apply, which are largely national parks or national forests.
Many of the controlled burns in Florida take place in Everglades National Park, which includes the largest federally protected wilderness in the Eastern US. I don't see how this objection changes anything. Is the federal government preventing controlled burns? Since when has that ever been a policy?
To directly answer "is the federal government preventing controlled burns?" They will definitely prevent controlled burns during the dry season. More, they have to fund doing the burns. Story I saw linked earlier was https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026137249/with-extreme-fires.... https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire is about as far as I got on my quick dive looking for details on how to run a controlled burn. I don't see an obvious link for seasons that they run these burns.
This story, ultimately, is about finding a way to insure private run large scale burns. The state built up an accredited set of associates, now they are leveraging them to try and make an insurance market for limiting liability.
(At least, that is my read of the situation. There is definitely a ton of talking past each other in this topic.)
I want to be clear, I'm not a climate change denialist -- climate change is real, and it's an imminent threat -- but forest fires are not exploding simply due to climate change. The reality is, once you've built up enough fuel, the only way out is by burning it. We no longer suppress wildfires to the same extent, and so they grow much larger.
Also, for what it's worth, the PNW had wildfire season prior to the implementation of the 10am policy. In 1895, in Tacoma, WA, Mark Twain joked about the wildfire smoke: "Really, your scenery is wonderful. It is quite out of sight."[0]
The reality is, our forests grew up alongside not only natural wildfires, but human-instigated wildfires for the purposes of ecosystem management by native tribes. We spent a couple hundred years trying to implement a "better" system, by ignoring the natural processes of the past 10,000 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that we're in a bad place now.
0. https://crosscut.com/2019/09/wildfires-are-burned-washington...
Corner someone at a trump rally, and they may never have set foot in California or a forest, but they'll be familiar with the concept of "intentional burns" because the daily wire or fox news or newsmax would have said it as they dismissed "liberal alarmism" over climate change.
It fits a convenient narrative which is that all of society's problems are just because of big government interceding in their lives.
Telling these people that "Actually California, BC, and North America, do intentional burns all the time" does nothing because it contradicts the propaganda they've heard. And they'll assume it's a lie.
Saying "Fine, we'll START doing intentional burns" may have a chance.
~2021, NPR.
Doesn’t seem like they did much between 2018 and 2021
There is no joy on this topic - its a brutal mess, with more to come. Popular media is going to produce contents like this, again.. and yes there is collective anger under the surface. Somehow, rational thinking must stay alive, while the venting and posturing continues in the open.. It is worth considering Australia, Greece, the far-North scrub forests.. are all facing this, without the budgets and science of California.
Now if the bureaucrats would only allow the power companies to clear underbrush from beneath transmission lines...
I don't remember the specifics anymore, but basically there were far fewer trees per acre in the area that did not have fire suppression, but the trees were far healthier / bigger as they did not have to compete for resources. While the trees in the fire suppressed area were smaller and made for a less healthy ecosystem.
Or do both. Thin out the substantial trees with selective logging, which reduces the fuel load, then burn the undergrowth.
However, they would not normally log all the trees within the burn area. The goal is to preserve the trees and clear out the fuel that has built up at the underbrush level. After the burn, mature trees help suppress further underbrush development.
When trees are removed, it leads to a lot of secondary growth, which both promotes fire and is heavily susceptible to being killed by fire. This is fine if the goal is to maintain the area as a more open field-like space via frequent controlled burns (which we honestly should be doing more of; meadows are highly ecologically valuable), but if the goal is to maintain it as forest, then you don't want to remove mature trees.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fight-fire-with-fire-if-epa-all...
> Under the Clean Air Act, wildfires are considered “exceptional events,” and the pollutants they emit are typically exempt from regulatory scrutiny. Prescribed burns generally receive no such exemption when the Environmental Protection Agency measures a state’s compliance with air quality standards. States may face penalties including loss of federal highway money if they exceed pollution standards while mitigating against more harmful smoke from wildfires.
...
> Obtaining an exemption for a prescribed fire under the Clean Air Act is already so arduous that states are reluctant to implement or expand burn programs. The Government Accountability Office recently reported that the approval process is so burdensome that only one state has submitted and been granted an exemption from the EPA, a project in Kansas in 2012.
If you do prescribed burns early in the season, the fires will be small, and not out of control (generally). That prevents worse air pollution later.
In general this differentiation between "acts of God" and "acts of Man" is a real problem. You neglect a forest until it burns down a community, and you're innocent. It was an act of God. You try to prevent that from happening by doing controlled burns, something goes wrong, and it burns down some houses; busted.
How does a fund demonstrate that? The linked legislation (https://wildfiretaskforce.org/prescribed-fire-liability-clai...) claims "rates of escape and loss are very low" already. Insurance companies' actuaries are experts at quantifying loss, so if it is low already...?