I'm glad our century+ of gross mismanaging our forests is getting more press. But I think we're still fighting deeply entrenched mindsets that fire is always bad. Across the west, our forests are fire-adapted and need to burn to be healthy, but we're still suppressing most fire and not doing nearly enough prescribed burning.
We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.
Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.
A good read is "The Big Burn" by Timothy Egan. It details how at its founding, the Forest Service knew the fire suppression regime they were creating was unhealthy. But it was the only politically possible path for them at the time.
> We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.
I'm thinking that mother nature generally plants trees at far higher than 2X density.
> For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn whole hillsides at once, or sit smoldering in the underbrush for months.
> The result is approximately 60 square miles of forest that look remarkably different from other parts of the Sierra Nevada: Instead of dense, wall-to-wall tree cover — the outcome of more than a century of fire suppression — the landscape is broken up by patches of grassland, shrubland and wet meadows filled with wildflowers more abundant than in other parts of the forest. These gaps in the canopy are often punctuated by the blackened husks of burned trunks or the fresh green of young pines.
Well, once you've allowed hundreds of thousands of people to build houses there, which ones are you going to burn? Seriously, do something and they won't burn today. Do nothing and they burn. All over the pacific northwest there are millions of people who live in forested areas, which will burn without fire control.
You can do burns when things are wetter, but how many $Bs are you going to be liable for? Or you can just make the insurance unattainable.
>Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.
Forest management has become politicized. Massive blazes, homes destroyed, fire fighters dead are just props for political theater to push a political agenda.
There are a lot of reasons fires are more and more common and more and more devastating, but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.
A lot more effort needs to be undertaken to build fire breaks and conduct controlled burns in the forests of North America to mitigate this problem and provide the fire the ecosystem evolved around and nutrients for new trees. It would also help beat back the various fungal and beetle pandemics in the western forests. We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.
The point is that the focus on global warming means no one will do anything about poor land management because that problem is not made public.
You can see what happens right here in the downvotes I have got. Just because I shift blame for something away from global warming to another cause, people feel they most downvote me.
Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to no other cause can be blamed.
I partly made that comment to see how much a rational and reasonable comment would get downvoted for that reason. I think the experiment proved something.
It's a matter of framing. We just have to move the discussion from "global warming increases wildfires, buy more EVs" to "global warming increases wildfires, let's improve our forest management to manage the impact (while also fighting against climate change)".
> "global warming increases wildfires, buy more EVs"
There is a profit to be made from selling EVs.
> "global warming increases wildfires, let's improve our forest management to manage the impact (while also fighting against climate change)"
Better forest management IS fighting climate change. Well managed land can be a carbon sink whereas fires release huge amounts of CO2 and are damaging in many other says. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27353-x bout just one region of the world
But doing this is costly and there is not much to be sold to do it.
There is always a lobby for doing something that that means someone can sell something. For things that do not increase sales, particularly things that involve not doing things (e.g. no cutting down forests) there is no equivalent lobby.
Fighting wildfires is expensive, which means it's big business. There's absolutely business interests in keeping wildfires raging. Fire suppression means the government gets to purchase planes and helicopters, 3M can supply countless brand new sets of fire resistant gear every year considering how high wildland fire employee turnover is, Perimeter Solutions gets to sell Phos-Chek faster than they can produce it, etc.
Yes. There's business interest in getting legislators/officials distracted from what is really good land management, namely prescribed fires and public services around clearing combustibles away from infrastructure and homes.
The problem is not made public...except in the New Yorker? Except by the president of the United States?
Shifting blame towards land management practices - not necessarily by you, but for example by that particular POTUS - is often an attempt to downplay global warming and the urgent need to do take steps to stave it off, rather than a good-faith attempt to reform land management practices. If people detect a whiff of that, that's what makes them downvote; given the present and future consequences of downplaying global warming and the urgent need to take steps to stave it off, and the push that's been behind that for the past, oh, fifty-to-seventy years or so, can you blame them? No one's against reforming land management to prevent forest fires.
> is often an attempt to downplay global warming and the urgent need to do take steps to stave it off…
I mean so what…. I don’t see how having a conversation about taking a practical steps to avoid a disaster should be suppressed just because the person initiating the conversation might have a different opinion on a related subject.
You or I may want to have a conversation about taking practical steps to avoid a disaster, but personally speaking I don't want to have it with a hypothetical interlocutor who is not having that conversation in good faith, but rather weaponizing it in an attempt to further their catastrophic political goals.
“The northwest might burn to the ground, people may die or be displaced, but god dammit we simply cannot give that political party a win (even if we win too).”
Yep, that attitude that makes perfect sense for society.
Downvoting someone on HN for arguing in bad faith isn't keeping "a political party" from having "a win", much less determining whether or not the PNW is going to burn down.
I am a pragmatist so I am “results oriented” instead of “intention oriented”. But if you feel the need to try and suppress comments on here because it creates suspicion in you around the intentions of the commenter that’s your thing. For what it’s worth, I won’t downvote anyone on here for anything or any opinion whether I agree with the opinion or the commenter’s intention.
The forest ecosystems in Europe have not evolved in the presence of regular fires afaik. Large parts of Germany for example used to be an impassable swamp before they were clear cut and drained for agriculture a few hundred years ago.
Climate change is the skeleton key of doing nothing. "Climate change means there is a drought" Nothing we can do about it, not build desalination plants, or raise the cost of water, or eminent domain farmers' property who refuse to relinquish their century old "water rights". Literally just complain about climate change is all we can do.
> for thousands of years before they were colonized had this figured out
Yes, it is outrageous that we can't directly apply the same policies and methods considering we have the same level of urbanization, population, industrial and economic requirements and private property laws /s
IDK about 'outrageous', but it is kind of frustrating it has taken us so long to figure out that the people who lived here knew what they were doing, and adapting their methods to our current society.
On the ranking of frustrations regarding wildfires and climate change, not doing controlled burns (like the native peoples were doing) is really really low for me, especially considering all the things I just listed.
So do you believe that the lack of controlled burning is the issue here or is it
> I live in a place with a huge national forest just to the west
?
I think the urban sprawl is more to blame here. It's not that we as a society have forgotten about controlled burning or we've become so 'weak' and 'librul' that we don't do what needs to be done. There is a risk here (for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_Canyon/Hermits_Peak_Fire) and nobody wants to take responsibility over something which may cause immediate deaths or loses of property vs something which may or may not happen in the future. Sure, it's kicking the can down the road but who exactly is to blame for cities built right next to forests?
I have a huge issue with bringing up controlled burning as it is ALWAYS used as an argument against the obvious human created climate change. 'Hey, just burn the forest fuel from time to time, no big deal', etc..
It hasn't "taken us this long to figure out..." the issues around prescribed burning are fairly modern and related to overreacting/incorrectly responding to some major wildfires that killed lots of people in the late 19th and early 20th century. (See the formation of the USFS and the policies promoted by them, Smoky the Bear, etc.)
Fire was a regular tool in everyone in North America's toolkit, indigenous or otherwise, and not something white people were too stupid to figure out.
> If our industrial and economic requirements and private property laws prevent us from maintaining a planet we can live on, what fucking good are they?
I share the same view with you. But we are the minority, just FYI. I've expressed these sentiments in public and every single time I've been labeled a tree hugging commie.
This is very true, but also the Native Americans didn't build their houses in the forest (for this reason). The white man likes to have his cabin in the woods. This is perfectly fine in northern Europe and the NE U.S., because due to the different climate, wildfires aren't so common, and wood on the forest floor there is more prone to rot instead of burn.
Now that there are so many cabins in the woods, there's probably an opportunity for a startup that makes robots to clear out the forest floor. The only problem is that the forest ecosystem has evolved to have periodic fires, but perhaps this is still the best of a series of bad options.
All joking aside, there are tons of mitigation options for this, most of which wouldn't even require robots or startups, they just require the political will to allocate money to do a thing we know needs to be done. We don't need a company to do this. We can just say "to protect both our environment and tons of people who live in the forested areas most at risk, we need to implement a set of protection measures to mitigate the probability of disastrous fires." These can be some combination of clearing forest floors, probably revisiting construction guidelines for homes/businesses in these areas, and controlled burns in areas where that's required or necessary.
But no. We do nothing, and people's homes continue to burn, and we dump yet more masses of CO2 into the atmosphere and waste thousands of trees, and of course a requisite number of human casualties. Ridiculous.
> These can be some combination of clearing forest floors, probably revisiting construction guidelines for homes/businesses in these areas, and controlled burns in areas where that's required or necessary.
But that’s communism! You bureaucrats can’t tell me what to do! (You may think I am straw-manning but this is based on real, actual conversations that I have had with real, actual people in rural California. There is a terrible brain rot that has ossified in “conservative” culture in rural America and at this point I don’t think anything can actually be done about it. These people will happily burn to death with an ignorant smile on their face.
> It's infuriating to me that Native Americans who lived here for thousands of years before they were colonized had this figured out
Which tribes do you mean? Some were in the plains, some were in the forests, and many more were nomadic over vast areas. There were - and still are - many peoples with wildly different lives, cultures, and understanding encompassing the millions of square miles that make up North America. Don't call us "colonized" as you imagine we're all the same.
To address your specific point, the "figured out" part was the fact that fires could only be detected by sight (or smell if close enough) so they burned regularly without a massive build up of fuel. In present times, we detect and stop fires until we can't and then catastrophe occurs.
What are we to make of the photographs taken from fire lookouts that are used as evidence in this talk? Consider the Thorp Mountain photo from the 1930s. Prior to that, loggers had come in and largely wrecked that forest. The USFS GIS indicates that the area around Thorp Mountain is between 20-30% old growth, is mostly mature replacement forest. So a photo from the 1930s showing patchy forests would have been a reflection of the fact that industrial era Americans had already come through and taken most of the trees.
I am looking at the USDA Old Growth and Mature Forests GIS. Why do you doubt it? The Northern Pacific Railroad went right through that area, and Congress granted them lands 40 miles on either side of their route.
They could have easily stripped the lower areas fairly thoroughly, and left higher peaks alone. I'm not saying "I doubt it happened", just that I'm not convinced either way.
What is there to be convinced of? The loggers weren’t hiding their practices as they weren’t doing anything illegal. This is well documented and studied.
In addition to logging grazing was also happening throughout California, even in the high country for hundreds of years. This also decreased fire risk by eliminating fuel.
> but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.
So to go off on a bit of a tangent, in a fantasy book from 1998* there was a fire mage who had been preventing wildfires for decades. When green mage (plants/trees/etc) finds out about this she chews him out about the dangerous conditions he's creating by not letting the buildup on the ground burn away. By the end of the book the wildfires have reached the forest and the fire mage dies trying to stop the resulting firestorm.
Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.
> Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.
It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices. The problem has always been the people who live in and around fire prone areas. They've used public pressure, bureaucracy, and litigation to prevent State and Federal agencies from properly managing the forests since the post-war boom.
In California, for example, permits are managed by 35 different "Air Districts" created in 1947 each with their own local leadership that are easily lobbied. Residents can trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled burns are practically impossible, given California's pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions from the state Air Resources Board.
It's coming up now because the situation is so dire we need a concerted effort to sway public opinion towards the realistic solution. Now that insurance companies are giving up on these fire prone markets, the residents have no choice but to get with the program.
>It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices.
Actually, the Native Americans historically started the practice.
That's why I said "at least." Those practices inspired Aldo Leopold (among others) but he was the one to do most of the work to convince US government agencies of their merit.
Is there a way to build permanent housing in parts of California that are prone to fires even with controlled burns? Even controlled fires pose a risk to habitation; if you were a semi-nomadic tribe (like the former residents before Americans brought western "Reason" and domestication to the west coast), you could move everyone out of the area to be burned, and then come back X many months/years later when wildlife and vegetation returned.
If, on the other hand, the area to be burned has "invested capital" and houses and land on it--essentially, private property, which has this strange quality of fixity even in the face of something as destructive as the earth (which never fails to dissolve it), how would you guarantee, without incredibly high insurance premiums, that people's houses wouldn't burn down.
And even if people are willing to pay the premiums, they would do so knowing that the government might decide, almost randomly (to them), to burn a chunk of forest right next to their house. They'd get fair warning, sure, but who wants to own a house that might burn down in 10 years because the state decides that its too much of a risk to have that patch of land burn naturally?
> Is there a way to build permanent housing in parts of California that are prone to fires even with controlled burns?
Absolutely. A good starting point is to look to Australia's regulations for construction materials, methods, water storage and setback/firebreak requirements, etc. for fire safety in bushfire prone areas.
While it may be picturesque to have your house or cabin nestled in amongst the forest, your fire survivability is Zero.
Yeah, hopefully the forestry people over there realise that hazard reduction burns aren’t optional if you’re gonna build houses in the forest and then expect it to not burn down.
I don’t know anyone working on wildfires in the United States for free. Not saying there is no risk, but they are paid and understand the risks. Some nice neighbors have their own contract fire crews, which are not cheap.
In Australia, "most" rural firefighters are volunteers, but have equipment and training providing by their local Government run rural fireservice (that has fulltime paid administrators).
The population density between Australia and the US is radically different though which changes the dynamic (deserts and marginal land exist in both, but Australia is particularly water challenged with no high mountains, so no major rivers).
this happened with some East Coast settlers moving to California after 1870 or so.. many areas known for fire now were the sites of fine home building with expensive techniques and materials, plus the lower quality homes or whatever. English speaking people apparently did not get the memo?
I live in a wooded area in Washington state, and I'm not too worried about my buildings, because I have a relatively huge clearing around my house and garage. And I don't live in my outbuilding that's kind of too close to the forest. But I'd still need to evacuate, somehow, if there were a forest fire. The smoke would be dangerous, I imagine utility power would be lost, and my generator is actually a couple trees into the woods.
Insurance companies could presumably do inspections of clearings and cancel or charge more if you don't have sufficient clearing, but municipalities aren't going to like the tree cutting that results.
What's hard to appreciate about wildfire is just how horrific conditions can be.
Yes, defensible space helps, but temperatures can exceed 1,000 to 2,000 F / 500 -- 1,000 C. Sustained exposure to that can damage all kinds of materials, let alone be difficult to survive. Even at considerable distance the radiant heat of even a smaller wildfire is quite palpable, something I've had personal experience of.
The fire will also reduce or remove available oxygen, there can be tornadic-ferocity winds (and what the winds blow), embers, and all manner of other threats.
Assuming the windows are closed and any outside ventilation is turned off, there would be zero issues inside the house for the length of time required.
That said, sitting around in an active wildfire is a bad idea compared to not being there.
The biggest issue is usually fuel close to the structure (bushes or trees right next to the house), or openings in the structure like eaves. Rooftop sprinklers work decently well for wooden roofs, but it's more complicated than just installing them due to potential water pressure issues. Metal roofs shouldn't need them.
All it takes is a small hole in the armor though sometimes, and without someone there to watch it and fight it, it takes a big change in building styles to be 100% sure. Like cement structure + metal framing & roofing + minimal combustible furniture, etc.
The biggest issue IMO is that western style (really central european/north western european) construction tends to focus on greenery, windows, wood and natural materials, etc.
Spanish-Colonial style construction is better suited to these kinds of conditions, with some modifications (avoiding exposed beams, and dealing with earthquakes both major necessary changes).
Houses are not airtight, even the absolute best, newest ones. The average house has a lot of air exchange with the outside world. It would not take long to be quite dead in the middle of a wildfire.
If you live somewhere that the risk of being overtaken by a wildfire is not more or less zero, buying a firefighter's SCBA regulator and tank is not a horrible idea.
Wildfires tend to move fast. Active fire in the vicinity of a home for even an hour is very unusual.
As long as fuel is kept a decent distance and the house is closed up (and doesn't catch on fire), you'd be fine. SCBA would make sure you didn't get any red eyes from the little smoke that would get in.
If you have bushes and trees right up against the structure (or are in a tinder dry forest in a fully involved canopy fire), then you're having a different kind of party of course.
Concrete tends to get weakened by fire. So even if the concrete doesn't burn, the home may need to be rebuilt because the concrete has been dangerously weakened by the fire. Stone and brick can also be damaged by fire. They are more resistant to fire but in a really hot fire, they may not be resistant enough.
>Residents can trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled burns are practically impossible, given California's pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions from the state Air Resources Board.
Do they realize how much pollution is produced in the California's uncontrolled forest fires? Laws should not be that stupid.
I also recommend most of the sequels: The Circle Opens, another quartet where each of the four takes on their first students; The Will of the Empress, what happens after they return from their travels in the second quartet; and Battle Magic, which follows Briar's group on the return trip before The Will of the Empress, when they got caught up in a war.
I wasn't really a fan of Melting Stones, which mainly focuses on Briar's student and takes place at the same time as The Will of the Empress. If I remember right that book was also an experiment, written as an audiobook first then later released as a regular book, so that may explain why it doesn't feel as good to me.
The author has had another in mind for years too, a continuation of the problems Tris had been having from The Circle Opens onwards: she can't figure out how to make a living with her magic, because she refuses to use it as a weapon. Unfortunately, the author doesn't actually have the rights to this universe, so she has to wait for Scholastic to want another book.
More than 90% of forests are provoked by humans. Some are accidents. Other not. Starting in multiple locations at the same time; at night. The same pattern seen again and again and again In Chile, Canada, USA, Spain, Portugal, Greece... Coordinated and deliberated.
> the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor
Yeah, sure man.
123 killed in Chile and everybody is avoiding to see the huge elephant in the middle of the room painted with the word terrorism in uppercase letters.
We could remove every single leaf in the soil of the forest, and gasoline cans would still grow in the trees.
Isn’t the simple explanation the fact that non-human causes of wildfires are likely to start more than one in a given area?
- Lightning?
- Hot, dry winds + sparks from nearby power lines? (Debatably non-human, but usually not terrorists.)
At least in California we have forest ecosystems that practically require periodic fire for regeneration — seeds that require fire to germinate — suggesting forest fires have been common even on evolutionary timescales, long predating humans.
There is a even simpler explanation. Follow the patterns
Starting multiple fire outbreaks (aiming to overpower the firefighters) is the standard procedure of every "professional" arsonist.
Arsonists also do fire "tours". They drive, lights off, a secondary road without traffic and stop each few minutes to start outbreaks. This would easily mimick a chain of fire sparks starting from power lines in the road, but we know better because night-vision drones of the Spanish police videotaped some people red-handed doing exactly this. And this idiots had a surprise waiting at the end of the road.
The problem is that most [1] of this people just are sent and paid for doing the job. When caught they fake mental issues and claim to act alone, but then you see that every single one of they follow exactly the same procedures, and know all the tricks to maximize the effect.
[1] Arsonists searching revenge is the other category. They are strongly focused on smaller areas owned by the target
I'm not saying it's impossible that arsonists are starting some of these fires, and sure, some may be started in this way.
I'm just saying that "lightning" is a simpler explanation than "well-coordinated major conspiracy of terrorists that succeeds at keeping things under wraps"---and so when, in California, a bunch of fires are started in a bunch of places where lightning struck dry timber in a fire-reliant ecosystem, our initial assumption about the cause should maybe be "lightning".
The largest Californian wildfire (2020) was attributed to lightning in an isolated area.
But there are solid proofs that link one arsonist (at least one) with the --second largest-- wildfire in the full history of California (2021).
Gary Stephen Maynard, an ex-teacher of criminology, was caught driving to several locations and setting multiple fires on public lands for no obvious reason.
He was not the only people linked with wildfires on California. Not at all.
This articles happily parroting that the problem is that we don't burn the forest enough, just add fuel to the future wildfires and groom the new pool of gullible puppets online.
And burning is not free. It has nasty undesirable consequences on soil and water storage that newspapers always forget to remind.
"A 2017 study looking at wildfires fought by state or federal agencies from 1992 to 2012, found that people caused 84% of the blazes, adding an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the USA".
Look, your original post claimed “terrorists” but now you’re pointing to an article that merely says that most wildfires are caused by people.
I even included accidental human-started wildfires (sparks from powerlines) as an example in my original post, where I use the regrettable phrase “non-human causes” to refer to “fire not deliberately caused by a human”, and I should have been more clear. If there were no people in the forests, there would be fewer fires, yes.
It’s the conspiracy of “terrorists” claim that seems spurious. And again, sure, there may by lone criminals out there committing arson, but the claim that most wildfires are started by terrorists is what needs backing up, not the claim that there’s a human in the loop.
I wonder how would you define what is happening in Chile at this moment
Well, It does not matter. This is not what the article says. Two important ideas in the article.
1) Most wildfires reported on USA (on a particular time interval) were started by an human. Natural wildfires are not so common as we think, even on ecosystems adapted to fire.
2) Natural wildfires and human wildfires seen to have very different dynamics. The second burn much faster and cause much more damages. If proven with more studies, this is a really powerful piece of knowledge.
Strangely, we are being spoon-feed by newspapers with the opposite idea: "nothing to see here", "This is how nature works", "humans should start more wildfires" and, implicitly, "arsonists are heroes doing gods work". And this is terrible advice.
After all this people that lost their lives, homes, all their life on wildfires started deliberately, claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers is extremely awful.
We need also to have in mind that wildfires fuel climate change, and accelerating climate change is exactly the opposite of what each scientist recommend for decades, so probably not a wise idea. Not if we want our species to survive for the next two thousands years.
1) I'm not sure this is the right metric -- by acres burned, depending on the source, natural fires are comparable to human-ignited fires.
2) Fully natural wildfires are typically caused by lightning -- which of course often also means rain, humidity, or other moisture.
But the reality is that human fire suppression is actually quite effective most of the time. It does lead to debris buildup. It does lead to more intense fires--as does climate change and the widespread tree death associated with infestations and drought.
We don't seem to have a great idea of what these ecosystems were like before people, but it's not unreasonable to think that a lot of land would burn a little bit with quite some regularity, but not as intensively as these human-ignited fires because of the whole thunderstorm thing. It's also not clear that wildfires fuel climate change--after all they're not really carbon reserves: those tries will eventually die and decompose anyway, it's not like oil underground that had been locked away for millions of years. And, crucially, they'll regrow.
Lastly: why, again, with the conspirational thinking? "Claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers" as though the people writing these articles are knowingly lying, when almost all are just perpetuating what they hear from scientists/nonprofits/others. Why?
> why, again, with the conspirational thinking? "Claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers" as though the people writing these articles are knowingly lying, when almost all are just perpetuating what they hear
I’m not an expert, so I could be wrong about this, but this sounds like a case of not addressing the elephant in the room. Isn’t the number one reason the changing climates as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
Sure there are bad forest management, alien species, build up of vegetation on the forest floor etc. But are these actually the number one reason when the climate is a whole degree warmer on average, with prolonged droughts, with native species dying from said heat and droughts, etc.
This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.
I can look it up (and so can you) but it is irrelevant for this conversation.
This matters if you are a climate scientist and are constructing a model to make predictions or shape policy. But for this conversation, all we need to know is that the percentage has increased because of human activity (specifically as a result of fossil fuel extraction and usage for energy consumption) and this increase is enough to cause significant warming, shaping the climate, and escalating wild fire intensity and frequency.
About 420 ppm, an increase of about 120 ppm in the past 100 years? This is a strange question since it is obvious that it’s heavily “looked into” and easy to look up, and simultaneously hard to figure out what rhetorical point is being made in asking people to cite it out of context.
There are plenty of systems where the difference between 0.04% and 0.03% is dramatic, after all it’s an increase of 30% — and what matters is not the paltry decimal representation but rather the effects.
For example: consider concentration of sodium in human blood. The normal range is 0.31%-0.33% by weight. By 0.4% you’re pretty much dead.
Or consider chromium, an essential trace element: the normal amount is practically infinitessimal, in blood it’s 0.0000007% by weight, approximately. But not enough and you end up with diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
“0.04% vs 0.03%” is not an effective takedown of global warming.
Exactly. Represented as decimal numbers, we could also say that is only 0.0004 vs 0.0003, which looks like even less. Seeing that there is a 30% difference is the important thing here.
We probably need different solutions for the pacific northwest and the southwest. From everything I've read, Chaparral tends to turn into grasslands if it burns too often. And Chaparral is the wildfire problem in the LA region.
And in many places the trees that grow back are not the same species that were cut to begin with, and don't necessarily function in the same fire ecology, either because they have evolutionary advantages in clean cut environments or because they were planted for their supposely greater economic value.
The 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico was caused by controlled burns that got out of control. One part of the fire was from a controlled burn that was completed in January and then "reignited" in April!
In any case, some regions might have frequent episodes that are hot, dry, and/or windy so that techniques that easily worked a hundred years ago are no longer useful.
Trump was being Trump: simplify complex issues and claim there is an easy answer, blame everyone else and boost yourself.
It has long been recognized that overreaching burn prevention has led to the situation we are in. There are often "controlled" burns that get out of control. There are inhabited/developed areas within and next to the forests that don't want to deal with the smoke of the burn and the chance that it gets out of control. The total area is immense and so the costs of burning 30% of the state which is forest would also be immense. The point is: it is complicated and there are practical considerations why it isn't an easy fix.
The next thing is Trump said they should "rake" the forests, which is asinine. Finally, much of California's forests are federal land ... which Trump was responsible for. How many people did he send out to rake the forest?
Your cognitive dissonance is real. He proposed what the parent comment said. Either Trump and the parent comment were both wrong or they were both right.
Trump blamed California for not raking their forest, and presented it as a simple solution. Trump was not right, for three reasons. One doesn't rake the forest to solve the problem, there are reasons (political and financial) why doing a controlled burn on 1/3 of the state hasn't happened, and finally, most of that is federal land -- Trump's responsibility.
BTW, I lived in California from 1985-2003; this issue existed then, and for decades before my time, and it continues to this day. It was there when California had Republican governors, Democratic governors, Republican presidents, and Democratic presidents.
Complex issues have multiple layers, often on opposition to each other. When you claim it is a black and white issue, you (like Trump) demonstrate you don't understand the topic.
According to more up to date reports I got to from that website, none of those years were exceptionally bad. The worst one recently (2020), was slightly worse than 2017, and approximately equal to 2015. It seems to be a trend of more moderately bad years (and, probably just them happening in California when they normally happen elsewhere, so more headlines). Not particularly large individual years.
It does look like the 10 year average has come up a bit, as 2010s report lists the 10 year average at ~6.8 million acres and our current 10 year average is ~7.2 million.
These numbers seem to support the grandparent comment that the absence of controlled burns was causing more fires that covered more area. 2023 was a ridiculously low fire year, and at least one reason for that is the last few years of destructive fires finally kicked in the political will to do controlled burning. https://www.fire.ca.gov/incidents/2023
imagine for a moment, a firetruck driving down a street at 12 miles per hour; next to the truck is a dog from the firehouse, running along side.
What you describe is similar to "the dog decided to turn left at the corner, so things are better now"
The sheer number of people involved in fire response, and the deadly and immediate nature of their work, has natural links to military style leadership and organizational behavior.
No way, at all.. is "more controlled burning recently" the driving factor in the new stats.
The budgets and the size of the destruction, are hard for a person to think of.. in California
Real devastation was caused by "catastrophic" fires, burning at higher temperatures than previously recorded. Extensive forest die-off preceded these events in California. This is not over in one or two rainy years, since recent shrub growth is subject to die-off in a dry year and will burn.
>We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.
Correct. But we can blame PG&E for whatever negligence lead played its part in a forest fire, and enact legislation to make combat it.
Along with that, we can use controlled burns to mitigate the problem as well. It's well known that different indigenous tribes in North America did controlled burns for the positive effect it had.
I'm confused. I first read an article along these lines over 20 years ago and it seemed a fairly intuitively solid argument with lots of evidential support.
It is never that simple. Some geographies naturally trap smoke in ways that make controlled burns disruptive to nearby communities. There must also be resources available in case controlled burns get out of control. All of this takes coordination and costs money. Going from a general agreement to a specific implementation is turning out to be difficult in many areas.
They have to live somewhere. In much of the PNW, you basically have three landscapes: established cities, clear-cut farmland, and dense coniferous forests. City expansion starts with rural residences in the woods. If you want to get to the "paved over and non-flammable" stage, you gotta let the rural homesteads happen first.
You can educate or coerce homeowners to maintain defensible spaces, and they often comply. But in these regions, roughly 50% of the land is owned by the federal government, and another good chunk belongs to the state. Almost none of it is proactively logged, burned, or maintained in any other meaningful way. These big fires don't start in people's backyards, they start in the government-owned wilderness - and by the time they reach residences, they are so intense that a metal roof and some cleared vegetation around your home make little difference.
I suspect the pendulum had swung too far away from exploiting natural resources to conserving them at any cost. The solution probably isn't to tell people in the PNW "too bad, move to Iowa, Oregon is closed" - it's to decide where to maintain healthy forests and where to make room for safe development.
The difficulty, as I understand it, is largely that doing these actions are not themselves risk free. And the risk is not at all easy to insure against, such that people do what they can to avoid taking on any actions that could lead to liability on them. Which leads to nobody having the courage to do it.
In the US, different agencies are responsible for different tracts of land. At a federal level, the BLM has understood the value of prescribed burns for many years now, although they're still wrestling with the result of decades of prior fire-suppression policies. Meanwhile, state agencies in fire-prone states are beholden to the voters of fire-prone states who don't want to be told that they can't have their cake (a year-round smoke-free residence in the lovely arboreal countryside) and eat it too (not having their house burn down in an unstoppable manmade maelstrom), so you can imagine how that's going.
I saw a section of Forest in Yosemite that is being managed according to modern forestry practices. The section has far fewer trees in it compared to the non managed section. Apparenlty there are too many trees in the Western US Forests, which also makes fires worse.
This is true. My region (Oregon's Willamette Valley) consisted of oak savanna and grassland prairies which were maintained by controlled fires set by the native tribes. Since European settlement, this ecosystem is 99.5% gone, having been lost to thick woodlands consisting mostly of Douglas fir and maple.
Visiting the region, you'd think that dense evergreen forests are the "natural" state of the ecosystem, but this is largely an artifact of 150+ years of fire suppression.
In this case "natural" might be better described as "sustainable". Of course it was natural, we are all part of nature.
The issue is the sustainability of these ecosystems and the impact on life around it. The indigenous peoples lived a much tighter connection to the land, with a give and take, recognizing the fundamental interdependence.
The theme for the last hundreds years has not been sustainability, but value extraction. Value extraction without regards to sustainability is a classic trade giving away long term success while gaining short term rewards.
Why would tribal land management be "natural" but not more recent land management? It seems more like we just need to decide how we want the land to be and burn or not burn to achieve our goals.
That was why I used air-quotes. What is "natural" isn't always healthy, and I'd argue leaving ecosystems to nature is impossible these days. I'm advocating for responsible stewardship.
I get what you're saying, but "native tribes" were just part of the ecosystem as much as we are. The is nothing magical or pure about them.
The "true" natural state of a region is one without any management or intervention from anyone.
We are not "invasive" species and contrary to what the rocket man says, Earth is our home and we will not be anywhere else, so the only solution is to use our brains and judgment.
You may have misread my statement. Dense evergreen forests in the valley weren't natural even before tribal settlement. The tribes innovated by practicing controlled burns, and part of this was due to wanting to survive; fires caused by lightning and other non-human causes are rare in the valley, so the "natural" state was catastrophic fires every decade or so as forests encroached and provided tinder.
I'm not claiming Australian Aboriginals are "magic" but holy shit did they do a great job of looking after ecosystems compared to any modern civilization?
I personally think there was some magic about their way of doing things. The oldest known civilization on Earth which some how didn't destroy the climate, pollute the ocean, poison fish stocks with mercury, kick start mass extinction events and litter the world with microplastics.
I've been to remote parts of Australia where they still have traditional land management practices going on. It's a wonderful thing to see. The forest was so beautiful and pristine looking, it was as if the whole landscape looked like a beautiful garden. It was more inspirational than any city I've seen.
As someone with young kids, I was thinking to myself how absurd our situation is. I wanted to feed my kid some tuna and then I realized that it's not healthy for them to eat it. Can you believe how freaking bad this is? We've poisoned the ocean so badly, kids shouldn't eat from it. It's like the whole of our civilization needs an honest performance review but we're not going to get one because we're also our own manager.
GP didn't make any allusion to the 'noble savage' myth. The quote:
> you'd think that dense evergreen forests are the "natural" state of the ecosystem
They are speaking of the current state of the forests and how they would appear natural, not that one land management practice was more or less natural than the other.
Or you know, we could actually log the lands like these agencies were supposed to enable in the first place.
There's a lot of healthy logging that can exist on the spectrum between clear cutting and total preservation. So for conservationists to advocate literally letting the forests burn before considering even a bit of actual forest management is insanity. We're sitting on one of the largest reserves of renewable resources in the world, and we would literally rather let it burn to the ground.
Most of these forests in question (USFS and related agencies) shut down logging on these lands decades ago, mostly as an act of conservation hubris. And the irony is they are now spending more money on replanting and thinning than they ever did when they were getting paid to do it by logging companies.
Managed logging not only thins out the forests so that burns are less damaging. And trees being logged instead of burned not only reduce the carbon, they act as a store of it!
Much of the land is not commercially profitable to log due to competition with much larger, less steep, and more uniform forests. Also, there would be significant externalities to those living there (you can argue with them, but there are millions), including wildlife disruption/movement, surface water contamination/flooding/landslide, road obstruction/damage.
Once you allow a significant number of people to live there, the easiest political thing is just to make the costs of insurance/rebuilding/maintenance so high that people move out.
> Numerous interrelated factors, including statutory, administrative, biological, and market influences, may have contributed to the decline in timber harvesting on NFS lands. The effect of each individual factor is not settled, as is the effect of each factor over time. These factors occurred at varying points in time and may not coincide directly with observed harvest level changes. Some sources have noted that statutory changes added complexity to forest management and increasing litigation frequency, while also increasing transparency and public participation.48 Other sources have noted changing management priorities. Others have noted decreasing domestic demand, volatile prices, and the prevalence of less valuable timber due to high harvest levels in previous decades. The listing of the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 is often discussed in regard to declining timber harvest levels.
So, the declining demand for wood probably means the industry is probably pretty happy to use the tree farms they have developed over the years. But it still seems like they would be happy to log public lands if it was made more convenient.
The following is an uncharitable take but here goes: the stereotypical social media conservationist will be 100% anti-logging because there's no room for nuance - you either love the planet or you're a corporate money grubber - while people who recognize that complex problems typically aren't black and white and who genuinely care enough about the environment to become informed on the topic generally agree that some amount of controlled logging is a very good thing.
I will be even more specific - most modern conservationists are generally pro-logging! It's a renewals resource that's carbon negative!
Anti-logging activism is a holdover from a specific time in the 80s when we had no other environmental concerns other than to superficially preserve the beauty of nature.
Anyone who tied themselves to a tree to stop a logger is now in their 50s and 60s. A minority, but at a peak age to influence policy.
> Anyone who tied themselves to a tree to stop a logger is now in their 50s and 60s. A minority, but at a peak age to influence policy.
Here in Germany, it's routine. 2021 had the Forst Kasten in Munich occupied to protest against a gravel strip-mining operation [1], and the Hambacher Forst adjacent to a lignite strip-mining operation is still occupied [2].
Problem is that you would have to do the logging in a very uneconomic way.
Basically you would want to leave the most profitable trees (big/old ones) and cut down all the small ones. This is because big trees don't really burn down and survive the fires for the most part. After a fire they provide a canopy stopping the forest from growing to be as dense in the future. With the less dense forest the fires after that won't be as intense.
Determining trees for cutting is usually determined by the forester, not the logger. If the forest manager wants to leave the big trees, that's on them and their management plan.
All the more reason to have logging happen on publicly managed lands than private ones where "controlled wildfire burns" might not be a consideration.
True but let's not pretend the logging industry has a long and rich history of good conservationism.
They are there ( obviously ) for the money, and clear cutting everything and "investing" by planting huge areas of mono cultures is anything but "less damaging"
Also, most of the timber doesn't actually burn during these fires, most get cut and sold as it's perfectly good wood if you don't let them rot in 1-2 years.
As always and anything, the virtue is in the middle. A good system where these companies can cut tree and be economical viable but also rules that keep the biodiversity alive and well. A long and not-corrupt department.. That's why these things are so difficult.
Sure, but it's the whole reason this model was set up in the first place! It's like we built a school for the kids and banned them from it for being uneducated.
There's enough forests in the US west for loggers to log bits and pieces of it and not return for a hundred years. Perfect for biodiversity. They have been forced onto dense monoculture lots out of necessity.
Unless we want to want to go back to the 80s and pretend plastic is more environmentally friendly than paper products (which was a real argument of the time), we shouldn't be so hostile to forestry concerns.
whenever I feel frustrated I think to some of the people involved in this debacle for over 30 years
30 years of the idiocy of public bureaucracy and government politics getting in the way of a better world. the people on that fight are my personal heroes in withstanding frustration
The wildfire problem is also a case of the long reach of short-term interests. We would be able to put up with short-term inconvenience in the form of smoke from smaller fires otherwise. Instead we produced a perverse result the opposite of what was desired. Attempts to reduce small problems lead to bigger problems.
One thing that is hard for people to conceptualize is the difference between old growth forests (which are exceedingly rare) and secondary growth forests.
Replanted, secondary forests are what most people are familiar with. They tend to have one or two types of tree, maybe some scrub brush on the ground, and whatever fell over in previous seasons. These forests tend to be very vulnerable to wildfire. The ground gets dried out really quickly, the stuff on the ground is pretty minimal, and under summer conditions, it is a tinder box.
Most people have never actually been into a true old growth forest. The ground can have a few feet of wet moss, plants, and fungi that overtakes the fallen trees and breaks it down. The ground is usually soft, even in the dead of summer. Under really extreme conditions these forests can still be vulnerable, but they have far more robust defenses against fire than the secondary growth.
Water management is also a big piece of this puzzle. Rivers, creeks and lakes are supposed to spill their banks every spring and soak everything around it. When you divert, contain and withdraw trillions of liters of water, you are creating a lot of unintended consequences down the road. The soil can hold onto a lot of water over long periods of time --- especially if there is significant vegetation on top of the soil to protect it.
The discussion about controlled burning is important, but it pales in comparison to the broader conditions that are driving the trend.
> Native Americans routinely burned the landscape—to foster the growth of useful plants, to clear space for farming, and to improve the conditions for hunting.
> ...
> In addition to maintaining parklike conditions, these managed blazes prevented fuel from building up, and so staved off larger, potentially unmanageable conflagrations.
Much of the world still operates like this. Check out the Chiang Mai, Thailand burning season[1].
The US and Canada are some of the only countries where wood is the primary building material. In the rest of the world, stone is used which doesn't catch fire so easily. That might help explain the fear of fires in the US.
The government of Russia, home to the world's largest forest reserves, is trying to subsidize wood-frame buildings. Most modern buildings are made from stone, though, because of fire regulations[1].
Is there a correlation between recently (last 10 years?) logged areas and wildfires? I watched Wasted Wood by Harvey Richards lately and was surprised to see how much waste is left on the forrest floor, 15-30% of the tree. Seems like it could be an unnatural dense source of flammable material.
The US is the world's biggest lumber producer and Canada is often #2 as far as I can tell.
I'm a woodworker and this movie from 1964 was fascinating. At one point it said 'one day the 16" board will be a museum piece' and I just laughed because it is too true! The only non-composite boards I have seen that wide are $100s of dollars per foot and have such funky grain, checking, cracking, or splitting that I'm sure would have been ripped down by traditional pre-industrial revolution carpenters.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadWe're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.
Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.
A good read is "The Big Burn" by Timothy Egan. It details how at its founding, the Forest Service knew the fire suppression regime they were creating was unhealthy. But it was the only politically possible path for them at the time.
I'm thinking that mother nature generally plants trees at far higher than 2X density.
Nature does plant trees densely. But most of them don't make it to maturity when the "natural" rhythm of wildfires is allowed to proceed.
Likewise the composition of species in the ecosystem also changes when the fire is suppressed.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...
> For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn whole hillsides at once, or sit smoldering in the underbrush for months.
> The result is approximately 60 square miles of forest that look remarkably different from other parts of the Sierra Nevada: Instead of dense, wall-to-wall tree cover — the outcome of more than a century of fire suppression — the landscape is broken up by patches of grassland, shrubland and wet meadows filled with wildflowers more abundant than in other parts of the forest. These gaps in the canopy are often punctuated by the blackened husks of burned trunks or the fresh green of young pines.
You can do burns when things are wetter, but how many $Bs are you going to be liable for? Or you can just make the insurance unattainable.
Forest management has become politicized. Massive blazes, homes destroyed, fire fighters dead are just props for political theater to push a political agenda.
There are a lot of reasons fires are more and more common and more and more devastating, but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.
A lot more effort needs to be undertaken to build fire breaks and conduct controlled burns in the forests of North America to mitigate this problem and provide the fire the ecosystem evolved around and nutrients for new trees. It would also help beat back the various fungal and beetle pandemics in the western forests. We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.
The media attribute it to global warming which means noting gets done about it.
You can see what happens right here in the downvotes I have got. Just because I shift blame for something away from global warming to another cause, people feel they most downvote me.
Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to no other cause can be blamed.
I partly made that comment to see how much a rational and reasonable comment would get downvoted for that reason. I think the experiment proved something.
There is a profit to be made from selling EVs.
> "global warming increases wildfires, let's improve our forest management to manage the impact (while also fighting against climate change)"
Better forest management IS fighting climate change. Well managed land can be a carbon sink whereas fires release huge amounts of CO2 and are damaging in many other says. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27353-x bout just one region of the world
But doing this is costly and there is not much to be sold to do it.
There is always a lobby for doing something that that means someone can sell something. For things that do not increase sales, particularly things that involve not doing things (e.g. no cutting down forests) there is no equivalent lobby.
We've already blown right past the Paris accord, I'm sure we'll soon come up with a new accord that will set a target that we will also blow past.
In the meantime, invest in an air conditioner and an air purifier for your city home, and try not to own any summer dachas in heavily forested areas.
Shifting blame towards land management practices - not necessarily by you, but for example by that particular POTUS - is often an attempt to downplay global warming and the urgent need to do take steps to stave it off, rather than a good-faith attempt to reform land management practices. If people detect a whiff of that, that's what makes them downvote; given the present and future consequences of downplaying global warming and the urgent need to take steps to stave it off, and the push that's been behind that for the past, oh, fifty-to-seventy years or so, can you blame them? No one's against reforming land management to prevent forest fires.
I mean so what…. I don’t see how having a conversation about taking a practical steps to avoid a disaster should be suppressed just because the person initiating the conversation might have a different opinion on a related subject.
Yep, that attitude that makes perfect sense for society.
They might have different views from you, that you are certain are wrong, but they might be entirely sincere.
> "focus on global warming means no one will do anything about poor land management"
Gross generalization, a lot changed long and still lately, you are just saying: all lazy because of global warming excuses.. and then
> "Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to no other cause can be blamed."
Any quote where someone official reasoned like that? Btw funny, seeing that actually you are the one here blaming "global warming" for something?
That's why no one does them.
When there is a clear causal connection, it will be easier. By then, it will be a pretty crazy mess.
Yes, it is outrageous that we can't directly apply the same policies and methods considering we have the same level of urbanization, population, industrial and economic requirements and private property laws /s
The speed with which this fire ripped through was no joke, as an example:
https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/awbrey-hall-fire-20-...
And the city got lucky because the wind was out of the NW, rather than from the west, which might have driven it straight into the city.
> I live in a place with a huge national forest just to the west
?
I think the urban sprawl is more to blame here. It's not that we as a society have forgotten about controlled burning or we've become so 'weak' and 'librul' that we don't do what needs to be done. There is a risk here (for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_Canyon/Hermits_Peak_Fire) and nobody wants to take responsibility over something which may cause immediate deaths or loses of property vs something which may or may not happen in the future. Sure, it's kicking the can down the road but who exactly is to blame for cities built right next to forests?
I have a huge issue with bringing up controlled burning as it is ALWAYS used as an argument against the obvious human created climate change. 'Hey, just burn the forest fuel from time to time, no big deal', etc..
Fire was a regular tool in everyone in North America's toolkit, indigenous or otherwise, and not something white people were too stupid to figure out.
I share the same view with you. But we are the minority, just FYI. I've expressed these sentiments in public and every single time I've been labeled a tree hugging commie.
This event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_North_America_hea... radicalized me.
Now that there are so many cabins in the woods, there's probably an opportunity for a startup that makes robots to clear out the forest floor. The only problem is that the forest ecosystem has evolved to have periodic fires, but perhaps this is still the best of a series of bad options.
But no. We do nothing, and people's homes continue to burn, and we dump yet more masses of CO2 into the atmosphere and waste thousands of trees, and of course a requisite number of human casualties. Ridiculous.
But that’s communism! You bureaucrats can’t tell me what to do! (You may think I am straw-manning but this is based on real, actual conversations that I have had with real, actual people in rural California. There is a terrible brain rot that has ossified in “conservative” culture in rural America and at this point I don’t think anything can actually be done about it. These people will happily burn to death with an ignorant smile on their face.
Which tribes do you mean? Some were in the plains, some were in the forests, and many more were nomadic over vast areas. There were - and still are - many peoples with wildly different lives, cultures, and understanding encompassing the millions of square miles that make up North America. Don't call us "colonized" as you imagine we're all the same.
To address your specific point, the "figured out" part was the fact that fires could only be detected by sight (or smell if close enough) so they burned regularly without a massive build up of fuel. In present times, we detect and stop fires until we can't and then catastrophe occurs.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/about/people/phessburg
So to go off on a bit of a tangent, in a fantasy book from 1998* there was a fire mage who had been preventing wildfires for decades. When green mage (plants/trees/etc) finds out about this she chews him out about the dangerous conditions he's creating by not letting the buildup on the ground burn away. By the end of the book the wildfires have reached the forest and the fire mage dies trying to stop the resulting firestorm.
Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.
* Circle of Magic #3, Daja's Book
It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices. The problem has always been the people who live in and around fire prone areas. They've used public pressure, bureaucracy, and litigation to prevent State and Federal agencies from properly managing the forests since the post-war boom.
In California, for example, permits are managed by 35 different "Air Districts" created in 1947 each with their own local leadership that are easily lobbied. Residents can trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled burns are practically impossible, given California's pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions from the state Air Resources Board.
It's coming up now because the situation is so dire we need a concerted effort to sway public opinion towards the realistic solution. Now that insurance companies are giving up on these fire prone markets, the residents have no choice but to get with the program.
Actually, the Native Americans historically started the practice.
If, on the other hand, the area to be burned has "invested capital" and houses and land on it--essentially, private property, which has this strange quality of fixity even in the face of something as destructive as the earth (which never fails to dissolve it), how would you guarantee, without incredibly high insurance premiums, that people's houses wouldn't burn down.
And even if people are willing to pay the premiums, they would do so knowing that the government might decide, almost randomly (to them), to burn a chunk of forest right next to their house. They'd get fair warning, sure, but who wants to own a house that might burn down in 10 years because the state decides that its too much of a risk to have that patch of land burn naturally?
Absolutely. A good starting point is to look to Australia's regulations for construction materials, methods, water storage and setback/firebreak requirements, etc. for fire safety in bushfire prone areas.
While it may be picturesque to have your house or cabin nestled in amongst the forest, your fire survivability is Zero.
Especially when volunteer firefighters then have to risk their lives to save people with the lovely view. (Ditto California...)
The population density between Australia and the US is radically different though which changes the dynamic (deserts and marginal land exist in both, but Australia is particularly water challenged with no high mountains, so no major rivers).
Insurance companies could presumably do inspections of clearings and cancel or charge more if you don't have sufficient clearing, but municipalities aren't going to like the tree cutting that results.
Yes, defensible space helps, but temperatures can exceed 1,000 to 2,000 F / 500 -- 1,000 C. Sustained exposure to that can damage all kinds of materials, let alone be difficult to survive. Even at considerable distance the radiant heat of even a smaller wildfire is quite palpable, something I've had personal experience of.
The fire will also reduce or remove available oxygen, there can be tornadic-ferocity winds (and what the winds blow), embers, and all manner of other threats.
Smoke is only one of your worries.
Sprinklers on the roof work pretty well too.
That said, sitting around in an active wildfire is a bad idea compared to not being there.
The biggest issue is usually fuel close to the structure (bushes or trees right next to the house), or openings in the structure like eaves. Rooftop sprinklers work decently well for wooden roofs, but it's more complicated than just installing them due to potential water pressure issues. Metal roofs shouldn't need them.
All it takes is a small hole in the armor though sometimes, and without someone there to watch it and fight it, it takes a big change in building styles to be 100% sure. Like cement structure + metal framing & roofing + minimal combustible furniture, etc.
The biggest issue IMO is that western style (really central european/north western european) construction tends to focus on greenery, windows, wood and natural materials, etc.
Spanish-Colonial style construction is better suited to these kinds of conditions, with some modifications (avoiding exposed beams, and dealing with earthquakes both major necessary changes).
[https://firesafemarin.org/articles/should-i-put-a-sprinkler-...]
As long as fuel is kept a decent distance and the house is closed up (and doesn't catch on fire), you'd be fine. SCBA would make sure you didn't get any red eyes from the little smoke that would get in.
If you have bushes and trees right up against the structure (or are in a tinder dry forest in a fully involved canopy fire), then you're having a different kind of party of course.
Do they realize how much pollution is produced in the California's uncontrolled forest fires? Laws should not be that stupid.
I wasn't really a fan of Melting Stones, which mainly focuses on Briar's student and takes place at the same time as The Will of the Empress. If I remember right that book was also an experiment, written as an audiobook first then later released as a regular book, so that may explain why it doesn't feel as good to me.
The author has had another in mind for years too, a continuation of the problems Tris had been having from The Circle Opens onwards: she can't figure out how to make a living with her magic, because she refuses to use it as a weapon. Unfortunately, the author doesn't actually have the rights to this universe, so she has to wait for Scholastic to want another book.
> the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor
Yeah, sure man.
123 killed in Chile and everybody is avoiding to see the huge elephant in the middle of the room painted with the word terrorism in uppercase letters.
We could remove every single leaf in the soil of the forest, and gasoline cans would still grow in the trees.
must say -> More than 90% of forest wildfires
- Lightning?
- Hot, dry winds + sparks from nearby power lines? (Debatably non-human, but usually not terrorists.)
At least in California we have forest ecosystems that practically require periodic fire for regeneration — seeds that require fire to germinate — suggesting forest fires have been common even on evolutionary timescales, long predating humans.
Starting multiple fire outbreaks (aiming to overpower the firefighters) is the standard procedure of every "professional" arsonist.
Arsonists also do fire "tours". They drive, lights off, a secondary road without traffic and stop each few minutes to start outbreaks. This would easily mimick a chain of fire sparks starting from power lines in the road, but we know better because night-vision drones of the Spanish police videotaped some people red-handed doing exactly this. And this idiots had a surprise waiting at the end of the road.
The problem is that most [1] of this people just are sent and paid for doing the job. When caught they fake mental issues and claim to act alone, but then you see that every single one of they follow exactly the same procedures, and know all the tricks to maximize the effect.
[1] Arsonists searching revenge is the other category. They are strongly focused on smaller areas owned by the target
I'm just saying that "lightning" is a simpler explanation than "well-coordinated major conspiracy of terrorists that succeeds at keeping things under wraps"---and so when, in California, a bunch of fires are started in a bunch of places where lightning struck dry timber in a fire-reliant ecosystem, our initial assumption about the cause should maybe be "lightning".
But there are solid proofs that link one arsonist (at least one) with the --second largest-- wildfire in the full history of California (2021).
Gary Stephen Maynard, an ex-teacher of criminology, was caught driving to several locations and setting multiple fires on public lands for no obvious reason.
He was not the only people linked with wildfires on California. Not at all.
This articles happily parroting that the problem is that we don't burn the forest enough, just add fuel to the future wildfires and groom the new pool of gullible puppets online.
And burning is not free. It has nasty undesirable consequences on soil and water storage that newspapers always forget to remind.
"California wildfires caused by humans are more dangerous than fires sparked by lightning"
https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2022-06-22/california-...
"A 2017 study looking at wildfires fought by state or federal agencies from 1992 to 2012, found that people caused 84% of the blazes, adding an average of 40,000 wildfires per year across the USA".
I even included accidental human-started wildfires (sparks from powerlines) as an example in my original post, where I use the regrettable phrase “non-human causes” to refer to “fire not deliberately caused by a human”, and I should have been more clear. If there were no people in the forests, there would be fewer fires, yes.
It’s the conspiracy of “terrorists” claim that seems spurious. And again, sure, there may by lone criminals out there committing arson, but the claim that most wildfires are started by terrorists is what needs backing up, not the claim that there’s a human in the loop.
Well, It does not matter. This is not what the article says. Two important ideas in the article.
1) Most wildfires reported on USA (on a particular time interval) were started by an human. Natural wildfires are not so common as we think, even on ecosystems adapted to fire.
2) Natural wildfires and human wildfires seen to have very different dynamics. The second burn much faster and cause much more damages. If proven with more studies, this is a really powerful piece of knowledge.
Strangely, we are being spoon-feed by newspapers with the opposite idea: "nothing to see here", "This is how nature works", "humans should start more wildfires" and, implicitly, "arsonists are heroes doing gods work". And this is terrible advice.
After all this people that lost their lives, homes, all their life on wildfires started deliberately, claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers is extremely awful.
We need also to have in mind that wildfires fuel climate change, and accelerating climate change is exactly the opposite of what each scientist recommend for decades, so probably not a wise idea. Not if we want our species to survive for the next two thousands years.
2) Fully natural wildfires are typically caused by lightning -- which of course often also means rain, humidity, or other moisture.
But the reality is that human fire suppression is actually quite effective most of the time. It does lead to debris buildup. It does lead to more intense fires--as does climate change and the widespread tree death associated with infestations and drought.
We don't seem to have a great idea of what these ecosystems were like before people, but it's not unreasonable to think that a lot of land would burn a little bit with quite some regularity, but not as intensively as these human-ignited fires because of the whole thunderstorm thing. It's also not clear that wildfires fuel climate change--after all they're not really carbon reserves: those tries will eventually die and decompose anyway, it's not like oil underground that had been locked away for millions of years. And, crucially, they'll regrow.
Lastly: why, again, with the conspirational thinking? "Claiming this just to sell a few more newspapers" as though the people writing these articles are knowingly lying, when almost all are just perpetuating what they hear from scientists/nonprofits/others. Why?
Fair point
Sure there are bad forest management, alien species, build up of vegetation on the forest floor etc. But are these actually the number one reason when the climate is a whole degree warmer on average, with prolonged droughts, with native species dying from said heat and droughts, etc.
This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.
This matters if you are a climate scientist and are constructing a model to make predictions or shape policy. But for this conversation, all we need to know is that the percentage has increased because of human activity (specifically as a result of fossil fuel extraction and usage for energy consumption) and this increase is enough to cause significant warming, shaping the climate, and escalating wild fire intensity and frequency.
Illustrates how silly the comment is that I was replying to.
There are plenty of systems where the difference between 0.04% and 0.03% is dramatic, after all it’s an increase of 30% — and what matters is not the paltry decimal representation but rather the effects.
For example: consider concentration of sodium in human blood. The normal range is 0.31%-0.33% by weight. By 0.4% you’re pretty much dead.
Or consider chromium, an essential trace element: the normal amount is practically infinitessimal, in blood it’s 0.0000007% by weight, approximately. But not enough and you end up with diabetes or cardiovascular disease.
“0.04% vs 0.03%” is not an effective takedown of global warming.
"Feels like" and "clear case" don't mix. Just say "I'm bluffing".
The new growth is much more likely to be devastated by fires. Trees are smaller, branches are lower, brush is thicker etc.
In any case, some regions might have frequent episodes that are hot, dry, and/or windy so that techniques that easily worked a hundred years ago are no longer useful.
https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/...
It has long been recognized that overreaching burn prevention has led to the situation we are in. There are often "controlled" burns that get out of control. There are inhabited/developed areas within and next to the forests that don't want to deal with the smoke of the burn and the chance that it gets out of control. The total area is immense and so the costs of burning 30% of the state which is forest would also be immense. The point is: it is complicated and there are practical considerations why it isn't an easy fix.
The next thing is Trump said they should "rake" the forests, which is asinine. Finally, much of California's forests are federal land ... which Trump was responsible for. How many people did he send out to rake the forest?
Your cognitive dissonance is real. He proposed what the parent comment said. Either Trump and the parent comment were both wrong or they were both right.
BTW, I lived in California from 1985-2003; this issue existed then, and for decades before my time, and it continues to this day. It was there when California had Republican governors, Democratic governors, Republican presidents, and Democratic presidents.
Complex issues have multiple layers, often on opposition to each other. When you claim it is a black and white issue, you (like Trump) demonstrate you don't understand the topic.
Maybe some individual fires are more devastating, but the statistics don't really bear out the "more and more common" narrative.
According to the US forest service, the 5 year average for both number of fires and acreage burned is lower than the 10 and 15 year averages.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/wofambrief/firest...
Same story in Canada where the number of fires and total burned acreage has been decreasing slightly over the past four decades.
https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb
It does look like the 10 year average has come up a bit, as 2010s report lists the 10 year average at ~6.8 million acres and our current 10 year average is ~7.2 million.
Full report (PDF warning), page 13 for what I'm looking at: https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/files/NICC/2-Predictive%2...
Link to more reports for other years: https://www.nifc.gov/nicc/predictive-services/intelligence
What you describe is similar to "the dog decided to turn left at the corner, so things are better now"
The sheer number of people involved in fire response, and the deadly and immediate nature of their work, has natural links to military style leadership and organizational behavior.
No way, at all.. is "more controlled burning recently" the driving factor in the new stats.
The budgets and the size of the destruction, are hard for a person to think of.. in California
Real devastation was caused by "catastrophic" fires, burning at higher temperatures than previously recorded. Extensive forest die-off preceded these events in California. This is not over in one or two rainy years, since recent shrub growth is subject to die-off in a dry year and will burn.
Correct. But we can blame PG&E for whatever negligence lead played its part in a forest fire, and enact legislation to make combat it.
Along with that, we can use controlled burns to mitigate the problem as well. It's well known that different indigenous tribes in North America did controlled burns for the positive effect it had.
Has it still not become official policy?
We basically are, except for the zoning thing. Keeping people from living near forests is hard politically.
You can educate or coerce homeowners to maintain defensible spaces, and they often comply. But in these regions, roughly 50% of the land is owned by the federal government, and another good chunk belongs to the state. Almost none of it is proactively logged, burned, or maintained in any other meaningful way. These big fires don't start in people's backyards, they start in the government-owned wilderness - and by the time they reach residences, they are so intense that a metal roof and some cleared vegetation around your home make little difference.
I suspect the pendulum had swung too far away from exploiting natural resources to conserving them at any cost. The solution probably isn't to tell people in the PNW "too bad, move to Iowa, Oregon is closed" - it's to decide where to maintain healthy forests and where to make room for safe development.
Visiting the region, you'd think that dense evergreen forests are the "natural" state of the ecosystem, but this is largely an artifact of 150+ years of fire suppression.
The issue is the sustainability of these ecosystems and the impact on life around it. The indigenous peoples lived a much tighter connection to the land, with a give and take, recognizing the fundamental interdependence.
The theme for the last hundreds years has not been sustainability, but value extraction. Value extraction without regards to sustainability is a classic trade giving away long term success while gaining short term rewards.
GGP's statement was talking about the appearance of the current state of these forests, not comparing two types of human intervention
Also, GP never made this assertion you're claiming if you read the actual comment
The "true" natural state of a region is one without any management or intervention from anyone.
We are not "invasive" species and contrary to what the rocket man says, Earth is our home and we will not be anywhere else, so the only solution is to use our brains and judgment.
I'm not claiming Australian Aboriginals are "magic" but holy shit did they do a great job of looking after ecosystems compared to any modern civilization?
I personally think there was some magic about their way of doing things. The oldest known civilization on Earth which some how didn't destroy the climate, pollute the ocean, poison fish stocks with mercury, kick start mass extinction events and litter the world with microplastics.
I've been to remote parts of Australia where they still have traditional land management practices going on. It's a wonderful thing to see. The forest was so beautiful and pristine looking, it was as if the whole landscape looked like a beautiful garden. It was more inspirational than any city I've seen.
As someone with young kids, I was thinking to myself how absurd our situation is. I wanted to feed my kid some tuna and then I realized that it's not healthy for them to eat it. Can you believe how freaking bad this is? We've poisoned the ocean so badly, kids shouldn't eat from it. It's like the whole of our civilization needs an honest performance review but we're not going to get one because we're also our own manager.
> you'd think that dense evergreen forests are the "natural" state of the ecosystem
They are speaking of the current state of the forests and how they would appear natural, not that one land management practice was more or less natural than the other.
There's a lot of healthy logging that can exist on the spectrum between clear cutting and total preservation. So for conservationists to advocate literally letting the forests burn before considering even a bit of actual forest management is insanity. We're sitting on one of the largest reserves of renewable resources in the world, and we would literally rather let it burn to the ground.
Most of these forests in question (USFS and related agencies) shut down logging on these lands decades ago, mostly as an act of conservation hubris. And the irony is they are now spending more money on replanting and thinning than they ever did when they were getting paid to do it by logging companies.
Managed logging not only thins out the forests so that burns are less damaging. And trees being logged instead of burned not only reduce the carbon, they act as a store of it!
Once you allow a significant number of people to live there, the easiest political thing is just to make the costs of insurance/rebuilding/maintenance so high that people move out.
> Numerous interrelated factors, including statutory, administrative, biological, and market influences, may have contributed to the decline in timber harvesting on NFS lands. The effect of each individual factor is not settled, as is the effect of each factor over time. These factors occurred at varying points in time and may not coincide directly with observed harvest level changes. Some sources have noted that statutory changes added complexity to forest management and increasing litigation frequency, while also increasing transparency and public participation.48 Other sources have noted changing management priorities. Others have noted decreasing domestic demand, volatile prices, and the prevalence of less valuable timber due to high harvest levels in previous decades. The listing of the northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina) under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 is often discussed in regard to declining timber harvest levels.
So, the declining demand for wood probably means the industry is probably pretty happy to use the tree farms they have developed over the years. But it still seems like they would be happy to log public lands if it was made more convenient.
The following is an uncharitable take but here goes: the stereotypical social media conservationist will be 100% anti-logging because there's no room for nuance - you either love the planet or you're a corporate money grubber - while people who recognize that complex problems typically aren't black and white and who genuinely care enough about the environment to become informed on the topic generally agree that some amount of controlled logging is a very good thing.
Anti-logging activism is a holdover from a specific time in the 80s when we had no other environmental concerns other than to superficially preserve the beauty of nature.
Anyone who tied themselves to a tree to stop a logger is now in their 50s and 60s. A minority, but at a peak age to influence policy.
Here in Germany, it's routine. 2021 had the Forst Kasten in Munich occupied to protest against a gravel strip-mining operation [1], and the Hambacher Forst adjacent to a lignite strip-mining operation is still occupied [2].
[1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-forst-kasten-k...
[2] https://hambacherforst.org/besetzung/waldbesetzung/
Basically you would want to leave the most profitable trees (big/old ones) and cut down all the small ones. This is because big trees don't really burn down and survive the fires for the most part. After a fire they provide a canopy stopping the forest from growing to be as dense in the future. With the less dense forest the fires after that won't be as intense.
All the more reason to have logging happen on publicly managed lands than private ones where "controlled wildfire burns" might not be a consideration.
They are there ( obviously ) for the money, and clear cutting everything and "investing" by planting huge areas of mono cultures is anything but "less damaging"
Also, most of the timber doesn't actually burn during these fires, most get cut and sold as it's perfectly good wood if you don't let them rot in 1-2 years.
As always and anything, the virtue is in the middle. A good system where these companies can cut tree and be economical viable but also rules that keep the biodiversity alive and well. A long and not-corrupt department.. That's why these things are so difficult.
There's enough forests in the US west for loggers to log bits and pieces of it and not return for a hundred years. Perfect for biodiversity. They have been forced onto dense monoculture lots out of necessity.
Unless we want to want to go back to the 80s and pretend plastic is more environmentally friendly than paper products (which was a real argument of the time), we shouldn't be so hostile to forestry concerns.
30 years of the idiocy of public bureaucracy and government politics getting in the way of a better world. the people on that fight are my personal heroes in withstanding frustration
[0] https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/...
Short post about the morals of that type of problem: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/morals-of-the-moment/
Replanted, secondary forests are what most people are familiar with. They tend to have one or two types of tree, maybe some scrub brush on the ground, and whatever fell over in previous seasons. These forests tend to be very vulnerable to wildfire. The ground gets dried out really quickly, the stuff on the ground is pretty minimal, and under summer conditions, it is a tinder box.
Most people have never actually been into a true old growth forest. The ground can have a few feet of wet moss, plants, and fungi that overtakes the fallen trees and breaks it down. The ground is usually soft, even in the dead of summer. Under really extreme conditions these forests can still be vulnerable, but they have far more robust defenses against fire than the secondary growth.
Water management is also a big piece of this puzzle. Rivers, creeks and lakes are supposed to spill their banks every spring and soak everything around it. When you divert, contain and withdraw trillions of liters of water, you are creating a lot of unintended consequences down the road. The soil can hold onto a lot of water over long periods of time --- especially if there is significant vegetation on top of the soil to protect it.
The discussion about controlled burning is important, but it pales in comparison to the broader conditions that are driving the trend.
Much of the world still operates like this. Check out the Chiang Mai, Thailand burning season[1].
The US and Canada are some of the only countries where wood is the primary building material. In the rest of the world, stone is used which doesn't catch fire so easily. That might help explain the fear of fires in the US.
1: https://thaifreu.de/chiang-mai/burning-season/
1: https://nordregioprojects.org/blog/2021/02/02/wood-in-constr...
The US is the world's biggest lumber producer and Canada is often #2 as far as I can tell.
I'm a woodworker and this movie from 1964 was fascinating. At one point it said 'one day the 16" board will be a museum piece' and I just laughed because it is too true! The only non-composite boards I have seen that wide are $100s of dollars per foot and have such funky grain, checking, cracking, or splitting that I'm sure would have been ripped down by traditional pre-industrial revolution carpenters.
<https://archive.org/details/csfsc_000011>