> "I think climate change is no more than 20 to 25% responsible for our current fire problems in the state, and most of it is due to the way our forests are,”
It's refreshing to hear that. Human driven climate change is real and I'm not denying it, but we have to understand CA's climate for what it is.
CA plants are uniquely adapted to fire and they serve as a testament to the history of fires in CA. Las Pilitas Nursery, which specializes in CA natives, has a nice writeup here: https://www.laspilitas.com/advanced/advecology.htm
I find it especially interesting how the droughts typically preceding a fire suppress herbivore levels so that post-fire seedlings are protected from predators. It's really amazing how our ecosystem has adapted to the challenges of our historical climate.
He goes into the very interesting history of fire in the Western U.S. and California and how the Native Americans used fire to transform the landscape over centuries. When Europeans took over, they did not understand these practices or the reasons for them. It was as if they had acquired a complex machine that required regular maintenance, but had no instruction manual to perform it.
Instead, they imported European (specifically German) fire/forest management practices, which do not work in the Western U.S. In Europe, when a tree falls, moisture allows the tree to rot and release its energy slowly. This makes suppression a long-term viable strategy. In much of the Western U.S. though, when a tree falls, it just sits there until it burns. Here, the suppression strategy is just putting off an inevitable release of energy, and every year the amount of energy increases.
The real tragedy in this is that this situation is leading to the loss of trees that are over a thousand years old, that could survive countless smaller fires, but not one enormous one.
It's the same in Australia and the indigenous here are nomadic and still use wildfire to their advantage and to the betterment of the land.
The western settlers here also use fire regularly to cut down on fuel load in the forests, we call them controlled burns and they're mostly done by volunteer firefighters. They essentially have a slow burning firefront walk through the forest floor to burn up the brush which emulates a natural wildfire.
Big wildfires like we are seeing take out huge swaths of land in Aus and California are the consequence of excessive fuel load build up thanks to human intervention. Of course climate change will contribute by making the conditions required for wildfire more common but the root of the severity lies elsewhere for now.
I've thought quite a few times that some sort of robotic or semi-automated brush clearing system could be an interesting startup. In principle I don't see why you couldn't cut stuff, grab it, throw it in a wood chipper, and haul it out of the forest.
The devil is always in the details though and I have no idea what all is involved in operating in the forest or the economics, legality, and politics of it.
20-25% is an awful lot of influence though. 6 of the last 7 largest fires in recorded California history have been in the last 2 years. That wouldn't be the case if fires were 20-25% smaller and less frequent.
The policy of aggressive suppression and few prescribed burns started around a century ago in CA, allowing fuel to build up and fires to become that much less controllable.
That’s not very meaningful. We had an unusually wet last century, and now that we have major droughts for the first time in a while, our practice of suppressing fires has caught up to us. Recorded history doesn’t go back very far.
not everything in nature is linear. that 20% can be enough to push something into an exponential portion of the curve. Markedly if their proposal is true then there is far more underbrush and detritus than there was when there wasn't thousands of firefighters rushing out to stop the fires. Some people like to attribute everything to global warming because they're freaked out, but this article is describing why that -might- not be the case and this is a hybrid problem of global warming and over protection of the forests.
There are many places across the globe where climate change has intensified the results of local bad management of the ecology.
The frustrating thing is that this allows finger pointing between the different causes. Putting it as percentages can be deceptive. Global Warming 100% needs to be dealt with and California's suppression-based approach to fire 100% needs to change.
Yep here in CO when I go hiking there are layers and layers of downed trees waiting to be lit up like a tinderbox. It WILL start on fire, this isn't going to be stopped. The trees aren't piling up from climate change, it's from years of stopping fires. Unfortunately, now there's going to be a massive fire at some point instead of small recurring fires like there should be.
Just a heads up you are double double shadow banned, even though the troll was the one in violation. Only down points count for you now. Keep up the fight. No sarcasm.
Fire is part of the natural world. Trying to eradicate all forest fires tends to harm ecosystems. Some trees can't reproduce without fires opening their pine cones.
I'm really happy to see this research. I am aware that climate change is real, but "the news" tends to focus on bad things.
It was predicted that the Kuwait oil well fires would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When crack teams converged on the area from around the world and put them out in just six months, we did not party in the streets over having averted a global catastrophe.
That's part for the course. We routinely wring our hand about how bad we expect it to be, then take it for granted when emergency response exceeds our expectations and move on to whining about the next gloom and doom scenario.
I'm fully well aware that the next gloom and doom scenario is likely all too real and not neurotic overactive imagination at work. But it just sucks the oxygen out of the conversation when people act like it's crazy talk if you aren't part of the "We're all gonna die!!" environmental belief cult.
Me thinking there is still hope, we can still find solutions, we aren't all doomed is not evidence of insanity, stupidity, cluelessness or denial. I'm an environmental studies major. My father fought in WWII. The entire world was doomed then too and survived.
I know we need to somehow get people to take things seriously and actually take action. I just don't think emphasizing how utterly doomed we are is the way to do that.
For lots of people, that will make them go "Why bother? We're doomed anyway. Me being all self sacrificing won't fix it. I might as well enjoy myself a little before we all die and this world turns into a smoking husk."
I agree with the spirit of large chunks of this comment.
> ... Me being all self sacrificing won't fix it. I might as well enjoy myself a little before we all die and this world turns into a smoking husk."
We won't get far enough with individuals making, for example, 1% changes in their consumption patterns. Rather than asking individuals "to do more", a better way forward is to emphasize systemic changes in policy. Policy includes a range of options: investment, taxation, and regulations.
To quote a line from one of my favorite Despair posters: "None of us is as dumb as all of us." I mention this because, left to our own devices, each individual (more or less) tends to spend most of their attention, time, motivation, and money to address their most immediate needs. Our systems are quite efficient at converting these needs into resource-extracting economies, without paying attention to externalities (i.e. downstream costs that an extractor doesn't face).
Long story short, it turns out a tribal species evolved to deal with scarcity isn't inherently driven to act in ways to ensure our long-term survival. That's a bug. Together, we have done an amazingly efficient job at throwing our planet off balance.
This is why we need collective action. If the word 'collective' makes you uncomfortable, feel free to substitute in 'organized', 'coordinated', 'intelligent', or 'wise'. Whatever word you pick, we need the political will (or, in the case of some countries, the autocratic will) to drive changes to our systems.
It doesn't necessarily have to involve self sacrifice. For example, we could build a world where life is comfortable for most people without a car.
I don't know how we actually get there from here. But I'm confident that it isn't effective to make everyone believe that our choices are between 1. short-term personal gratification at the cost of everyone being certainly doomed and 2. short-term personal sacrifice with a very slim hope of marginal collective gain.
In that scenario, most people will look out for themselves. Only crazy people sacrifice themselves for no real gain for anyone else.
We have to create a plan for short-term personal gain that leads to collective gain long term. Most conversations don't allow for that possibility to exist at all.
> Fire is part of the natural world. Trying to eradicate all forest fires tends to harm ecosystems. Some trees can't reproduce without fires opening their pine cones.
> I'm really happy to see this research. I am aware that climate change is real, but "the news" tends to focus on bad things.
It's not either/or. Death is also part of the natural world, yet the news tends to focus on avoidable things that cause death. People who want to reduce the negative effects of climate change shouldn't be accused of "trying to eradicate all forest fires" any more than doctors should be accused of "trying to eradicate all death."
Trying to eradicate all forest fires has a known track record of leading to worse forest fires. It's not some accusation. It's established historic fact.
For decades, complete suppression was the stated objective of various services in the US:
Wildfires are a bit like crop rotation in nature. I think we're returning to the idea that wildfires aren't a bad thing when done in a safe manner. Visiting Lassen National Park, there was a big area where it was nothing but blackened trees but an interesting caveat was that a lot of smaller trees were present in that same area.
Not just about safety but also intensity. Super-hot fires sterilize the soil, and total-destruction fires destabilize hillsides & dramatically change microclimate (no shade -> hot & dry). Both can delay recolonization decades or centuries.
You didn't actually present this take so I take responsibility for how I interpreted it, but...
Why does it seem like this is presented as a bad take? What's wrong with ecological changes and corrections taking centuries, or longer?
Too often I see environmental advocates wringing their hands over changes which absent humanity would be just a chance for other subsystems to adapt or related ecology to evolve while the initial system rebuilds itself.
Just because humanity "depends" upon the later results or effects of these processes (or just because humanity caused them) doesn't mean any anything, really.
There's a climate science "gotcha" which is that the Earth's average temperature has been much higher in the past than it is now. No one disputes this. The problem is not so much the absolute level as the rate of change, which gives less time for everything to adapt.
Bingo. Rapid temperature changes of only a few degrees can become mass extinction events. Of course, the natural world has eventually recovered from every mass extinction - but it can take millions of years to get back to the same level of biodiversity as before the extinction.
Thank you, this gives me some perspective regarding humanity's effect. I won't claim to understand it all, or agree/disagree with it, but it definitely helps me account for scale.
Perhaps some people dislike the fact that in many cases these quaint "ecological changes and corrections" that "would be just a chance for other subsystems to adapt or related ecology to evolve" also just so happen to be cases of a very small group of people profiting immensely from the inconvenience, suffering, and death of very large groups of people.
Hearing that very small group of people (or researchers and political advocates funded by that very small group of people) paint a quaint picture of humans as one tiny part of Gaia might make some people uncomfortable.
It’s pretty bad news for the creatures and plants in that ecosystem. Maybe in evolutionary terms it’s not a big deal, but it will mean the wiping out many populations and even species.
At a personal level, the extinction of the giant sequoias or the spotted owls doesn’t seem like a very desirable outcome.
that is the weakest form of nihilism. of course the state of the world has no deeper meaning. of course something will happen.
if you value things, then you have wishes and desires. if you consider people to be responsible for choices, you can assign value to actions and consequences.
some people don’t like devastation of the natural environment. if you understand yourself as part of the world, it feels a lot like self-harm.
In many cases because it’s ugly, or destroys the value of currently valuable property, or gives us unpleasant emotions at the destruction of something we considered beautiful.
It’s natural to want to stop it, same as someone wanting to not have their wallet stolen, or a house they love destroyed and replaced with an apartment complex.
Well yes and no. If the soil's been sterilised the entire thing needs to be rebuilt from the grasses upwards, forests don't spring up out of nowhere they build up from precursors.
Thanks, I was imagining the smaller stuff as being part of the forest but I suppose maybe the plants that arise first don’t necessarily stick around for the entirety of the forest lifecycle?
Exactly. I don’t remember the exact cycle but basically you first get grass type colonisers, then you might get shrubs, then possibly trees densifying to a forest. Even the tree presence would change as the forest builds up as some essences don’t like being crowded (so won’t replace themselves once the forest densifies) while others prefer shade (so won’t appear until there’s a canopy proper).
Perhaps a new forest, but plants in general (current conditions may favor grassland, or something else). It's "re" because there was an ecosystem there before, and now it's returning. Contrast with, say, a brand new island that is the result of volcanic action. Then it'd be just plain old colonization by way of wind-blown seeds, or seeds that survived a bird's digestive tract.
Are we? Since the 1990s as a school child I thought we already came around on this. But in recent years I am hearing that is not the case, or that we are only now coming around. Did we do a 360?
We've known since the 60s that letting forests burn is healthier for forest ecosystems. But we've known about a lot of good environmental practices since the 60s and just ignored them.
All it takes is one person building a cabin in the middle of a forest, and all of a sudden it's a fire that threatens property and can't be allowed to burn. We can let remote areas of the national parks burn, but it's going to take a lot of political and social change before it becomes acceptable to let people's vacation properties burn, Or to prevent development of large regions of forest so it can be allowed to burn.
There are a lot of small private holdings within public lands. They should receive some property tax relief, in exchange for understanding that the forest around them is going to be managed naturally.
That doesn’t mean that their property won’t be defended as much as possible, just that stopping the entire fire itself won’t be the goal.
Why should only the wealthy not only get to have remote cabins, but also the full might of the government to prevent natural forest fires from damaging their property?
Raising taxes to fix things is always the most regressive solution- the wealthy, and only the wealthy, will be able to afford it.
Instead, treat it like a rural flood plain, acknowledge that the land is simply worth less because it is prone to natural damage, and leave it at that. Fire coming? Issue an evacuation order and let nature take its course.
And that's why nothing will ever change. Everybody can't have their own little cabin some day, and nobody ever wants to be the one who has to tell people that.
Well, if all the cabins burn down one year due to it becoming a wildfire nuclear apocalypse, and therefore nobody wants to build cabins - I guess we might get a short window until everyone forgets about it? Usually <= 5 years from what I’ve seen. Though <= 2 years might be more realistic now a days.
And California seems to be heading in that direction, though not there yet.
I think the national park service fully accepted the idea that we should let fires burn around the lsat great Yellowstone fire, maybe 1990ish.
I don't know that they speak for the US Forest Service though. Between the different national level parks and forest services and then the state level ones, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are still a lot in the active suppression camp. Then there are municipalities where people can basically live in the WUI and the idea of preserving only structures is further complicated.
The way I’ve heard it described is that other priorities that are also important, like spare the air days or budget concerns, kinda edged out control burns in the recent past.
Yeah I have heard the same. And it makes sense with communities burning. They will always be the hardest places to coordinate controlled burns because of the concentration of interests.
It would be interesting to correlate forestry management practices and population density.
Yeah I learned about this forever ago, but as usual, its money that talks. People don't like their houses burned, and so fire suppression policy is dominant. Only now that we are having super-fires that people are opening up to it.
Wildfire management organizations' budgets have been so skewed to remedial action from preventative that indigenous "Cultural Burners" in British Columbia have complained that when they've sought agreement to do controlled burns in spring and autumn they are met with plans for batteries of firefighting equipment on standby. It is a colossal mismatch of scale, since the Cultural burners tend to limit their focus on their own local, ancestral territories. Thankfully the B.C. authorities are now doing a rethink in favour of the Cultural burner concept.
"Only you can prevent forest fires" lays the wrong mindset that humans are the only causes of forest fires. I grew up with that mindset, took some education to realize that nature (lightning) creates fires as well, and that fires have occurred throughout history for the benefit of the ecosystem.
Should also be noted that much of the California natural landscape evolved for several centuries (if not millennia) under the influence of human-initiated burns by the native tribes.
Exactly. Said another way, since fire is inevitable the ecosystem adapted to it, and the species that survived are those that actually benefit from it.
I'd love to see a future where we build houses with the expectation that wildfires will rage nearby. Put up some huge heat-resistant walls around civilization, let the fires burn next door. Wildfires feel like the last area where we feel entitled to destroy nature's evolved processes, just because humans want cheap land.
I remember one of the national parks I visited a while ago (I think it was Redwoods NPS in California but not sure) where the Ranger told me that one of the tough decisions sometimes they'd need to make when a wildfire is raging is to whether to put it out or just keep it spreading naturally to the benefit of health and biodiversity of the forest. In an extreme case, he mentioned that for a few occasions the Park Service even may need to ignite the wildfire and they have done it a few times before. This all was pretty surprising to me considering all these wildfires news I've been reading recently.
And other plants that can't survive this conditions. If you want water you need to promote the second ones
Why we should want water? because is a strong temperatures buffer, protecting people and providing a more stable local climate so we -should- aim to store as many water as possible in the forests.
And because all our economy is centered in water supply. A few months without absolutely no water and our big cities would collapse and be quit in mass.
And because putting the water in the ocean, and this is the main result of wildfires, will help to raise the sea level where the '90%' of the big cities are situated and would destroy zillions in people's property instead. We are risking more than a few forest cabins here.
Some conifers need fire to multiply yes, but this technology is easy to provide so is not a big problem. And those conifers are also a symptom; they are survivors that live only where the other plants can't. If you have only a sea of pine trees it means that the soil is too poor or the climate is too cold or harsh for the other trees.
To keep drying the area and destroying this soil is not always the better solution.
Smaller regular fires burn at lower temperatures and they clean up basic debris. If we fail to let the lower temp fires clean up debris the debris tends to grow. When there is more of that the fires burn at hotter temperatures and cause more damage. To avoid the hotter temperatures the debris needs regular cleaning. The natural method of that is fire.
That's what numerous articles written on the topic from experts have said.
I worry that we may committing a historical fallacy. Fires were good, back when the climate was very different. Can we extrapolate that forward given rapid changes in climate. Maybe there are other ways to accomplish similar effects. Logging gets a bad name, but maybe in today’s ecosystem and the ecosystem as it will be in future years leaving it up to fire to do naturally is longer optimal. We are no longer in the garden of eden. Some things do change.
I don't see why climate change would affect the positive aspects of fire.
Logging generally does not have the same effect (logging takes big trees and leave small stuff, fires leave big trees and kill small stuff. Also the heat from fire is important for the germination of some types of trees)
One thing is clear - it is impossible to stop fire in these areas. So either it happens on a small scale in a semi-controlled fashion, eliminating fuel when it won’t destroy everything and the like, or it happens catastrophically and in a uncontrolled fashion when some random event happens - often destroying everything in it’s path, and sometimes being so intense it sterilizes the soil and destroys everything.
So the point you’re making is kind of besides the point I think?
There is no apparent option where we don’t have fire. Lightning, utility failure, random people smoking, a trailer with a flat tired (that happened), prescribed burns - it’s inevitable it happens at some point.
> I don't see why climate change would affect the positive aspects of fire.
... since it has a strong effect on the fire and the forest, both pre and post fire. It changes a lot of calculus, including the relative benefit of letting things burn out.
We could have a really long discussion on the best wildlands management practices, and the tradeoffs. Prescribed burns, in recent history, have only covered a very very tiny fraction of land. Scaling that up would be logistical difficult, expensive, and probably politically infeasible. Letting things burn is also problematic, as the species mix is no longer well adapted for fire in many places. Suppressing every fire is equally problematic, kind of like plugging the vent in a pressure cooker. Fire breaks, logging, prescribed burns, and other means of fuel load reduction are all traditional fixes that we can use tactically (around cities, etc), but are only going to go so far. In my opinion, we've backed ourselves into a corner in the US west, and with climate change there isn't necessarily a good option going forward.
(disclaimer: I study wildfires as part of my work in a Climate & Energy R&D group, though by no means an expert)
We have essentially never been in the garden of eden. Humans have been shaping the landscapes that they live, hunt, gather and farm in for at least 10s of thousands of years.
Logging is such a different process that I can't imagine this working well. As one example, certain seeds require extremely hot temperatures from forest fires in order to germinate. Forest ecosystems are so complex, trying to micro manage them is probably impossible.
Well, our current choices may be between 2 fallacies.
First one is the one you described, and the second one is that given the changes in climate that it's even possible to contain these wildfires using mechanical means, such as trenches and water drops.
It may not be.
The question then is which one is the lesser evil.
The article mentions that climate change only has a small effect, and that with or without it, natural management works to improve forest ecology as well as reduce the impact of fires.
> For millennia, wildfires sparked by lightning, or lit by Native American tribes, regularly shaped the landscape of the western U.S.
It'd be interesting to learn more about the differences between the two. There are places that don't get a lot of lightning and would probably not burn that regularly on their own. So in those places a truly 'natural' state would look different from a 'managed by native peoples' state.
Pretty much all of California matches this description. Lightning, outside of a few areas, is rare. Precipitation varies heavily, from short but wet winters to months of zero precipitation.
When europeans arrived, the state had regular fall wildfires (smoke was constant during this time) from natives setting regular fires to burn out undesirable plants and keep things useful for them. In Yosemite for instance, this allowed the land to support them with acorns from the black oaks there. Trees were monstrously huge compared to areas now, and relatively sparse and manageable. No known mega fires, although it probably still happened from time to time.
Now in most areas, it’s tangled brush and super dense and diseased trees (or just tangled brush where it is too dry for trees), with large scale mega fires and tree mortality due to disease.
Cutting down the old growth didn’t help of course - but even in places where trees have regained nearly the same sizes or were kept intact, the brush growth is a big problem. It’s natural for regrown forests to be dense, and the weaker trees die as they get crowded out. It isn’t normal for nearly every forest to be doing this all at the same time in a region due to suppression of the fires that normally clean out the junk and/or reset the clock in small areas.
Big Basin state park for instance was not logged, and it burned to the ground during the CZU complex fires due to all the built up fuel. If burned every year, it would have died out before being able to do much if any damage.
Big Basin state park didn’t burn to the ground. Unlike the sequoia groves in the castle fire, most of the coastal redwoods in big basin survived the CZU fire.
Where does evidence of tribes starting burns for plant management come from? All I've ever heard of is fires used in hunting and buffalo runs/ jumps. Anything beyond that implies a level of sophistication in planning and environmental knowledge that seems far fetched at best.
There are many other sources as well but this can get you started.
It's a mistake to underestimate the sophistication of other civilizations. Native Americans depended on the forests and grasslands for food. They were very well-informed in matters of land management. The US Forest Service and other have begun (belatedly) to try to understand and incorporate these practices in their own forest management.
It only seems far fetched if you have a preconceived idea of Native peoples being uneducated simpletons, which unfortunately is the prevailing myth. They did indeed have environmental knowledge and planning abilities that allowed them to prosper in a completely different model of land management than what we think of today.
They literally domesticated many of the fruits and vegetables that feed you. Corn, Tomatoes, Peppers, Avocado, Beans, Cocoa, Peanuts, Potatoes, Squash, Quinoa, Sweet Potato, list goes on...
Clearly had a lot of info on plant management.
It shocked me when I learned a couple of years ago that common vegetables like potatoes actually originated in the Americas. I always thought of them as European foods because of their popularity there and stuff like the Irish potatoe famine.
I do remember learning in elementary school how the natives would plant plants in groups (tall corn shading shorter plants like squash and beans that don't need as much sunlight and to keep away weeds, etc.). But somehow I never connected that these were fundamentally American foods.
They weren’t dumb? And even if they were, it doesn’t take a genius to notice that where fires have been the land is more accessible, and certain plants and animals thrive - and where a fire hasn’t been for awhile the opposite happens
Here is the National Park Service page, but there are hundreds of papers on it I’m sure [https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/nature/firehistory.htm]. There is extensive archaeological evidence of frequent small scale fires in the Sierras.
You seem to simultaneously be underestimating the sophistication of Native American tribes, while overestimating the amount of sophistication in planning and environmental knowledge required to carry out regular burns to ensure the land supplies food.
The early european colonists & explorers reported vast pristine forests covering the land. There's some evidence to suggest that these were very recent second growth, the diseases from the europeans having wiped out 50-90% of the native american population, and having spread much faster through the continent than the europeans did. Without the native americans maintaining the land with controlled burns and rotations, forests quickly regrew over their pastures and plains. Of course, by the late 1700s, colonists were themselves clearing forests and converting them to farmland.
Well, I dunno about Smokey. Here's there to remind people drinking around a campfire to be careful about it. I can't imagine people sitting around a campfire drinking is a recipe for controlled, limited burns.
I don't know of a resource that overlays histories of such events with indigenous cultural burning activities, but maybe the data is out there somewhere.
M. Kat Anderson's Tending The Wild details how the Yosemite indians warned Congress more than a century ago that it was a mistake to suppress fires in the national park and allow brush to build up on the forest floor. I can't find the exact passage, but the entire book is worth reading.
> the current fuel density in much of the Sierra, mixed with the hotter, drier conditions already triggered by climate change, has made managing wildfire even riskier than it was when forest managers started allowing fires to burn in Yosemite in 1972.
So if fire fighters and politicians do not want to start a burn policy now that there is so much fuel, why not log an area for a while then start burning? Is there something I am missing about the nature of the problem?
Logging takes the healthiest and largest trees. The ones most likely to survive a fire. While leaving behind all of the fuel. Doesn’t seem like it would help much.
I feel like in a better world we could log the bad ones and make paper or something, but everyone knows the logging would be 100% regulatorily-captured and so no one wants to go this route. :/
Logging increases fire risk in the short term, because it leaves behind a lot of slash fuels and stimulated brushy undergrowth. It is not analogous to a burn.
Could we place some requirements on the logging companies to leave the ground in a certain state? Or would hauling off the undesirable material make logging unprofitable?
Doing prescribed burns outside of the normal fire season allows them to reduce the fuel load and restore more natural conditions without the risk of creating giant runaway fires.
I must admit the log + fire approach sounds tempting: sequestering the carbon (in buildings or, hell, buried logs) sounds too good to pass up.
To be clear the idea isn't logging > fire, but logging just to undue the past mismanagement such that a very loosely controlled burn would be mild and as if the extra stuff hadn't accumulated the past 100 years in the first place. Definitely still need the fire.
California is not the problem here. A policy of controlled burns is not tenable anywhere in the United States right now, because we've spent so long fighting wildfires in order to protect the logging industry. The problem is that we've had almost eighty years of Smokey Bear telling people that wildfires are always bad.
It took the catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988 to even make the current Yellowstone policy possible. That policy is to allow a naturally caused fire to continue until it threatens humans or buildings, but to stamp out human caused fires with extreme prejudice. This obviously makes no sense -- the forest does not care a bit whether the fire was started by a lightning strike or by a campfire -- but it's the only thing that is politically tenable.
Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming. It's not a California problem; the problem is a national population that's been misled about what constitutes good forest management. We need controlled burns, building bans in large areas of forest, and judicious use of eminent domain to purchase properties in forest areas so that they can be permitted to burn.
Most of the Californian land in question is owned and managed by the federal government. See eg. this map of land ownership in CA - green, orange, and pink are various federal agencies, while brown is CA state/county lands and yellow is private:
Land management in the west is different from the east. On the east coast almost everything is private, then divided up into municipal, county, and state governments. In the West large chunks of land are still owned by the federal government. Private ownership under state authority is only about 40% in CA and less than 20% in NV.
Much of the forest in CA is managed by the US Forest Service, so you can't blame CA officials for everything. Plus, you can only safely do controlled burns in certain weather windows (not super hot, rain likely coming, etc.). Given we are in the middle of a historic drought, the dry fuel levels are likely much too high to safely start controlled burns.
Here in Florida, prescribed burns are a common sight at the larger state parks. The burns are required to keep longleaf pine trees alive which support a lot of species of animals. Red-cockaded Woodpeckers in particular are very picky and prefer to live in these trees.
The burns kill all the competing vegetation and burns up some of the fuel in the area to prevent larger fires.
A now-rare ecosystem in Southern Ontario, Canada -- the oak savanna -- was the dominant ecosystem in the region until colonization started suppressing the cycle of wild-fires in the region. This enabled foreign invasive species to take hold and redefine the forest composition and character.
the academic environmentalists have been advocating for the controlled burns for half a century now - the folks you wanna be pissed off at are the homeowners
> “I think climate change is no more than 20 to 25% responsible for our current fire problems in the state, and most of it is due to the way our forests are,” Stephens said.
Directly in contrast with Gavin Newsom vs. Trump argument last year. I’m not aligned with Trump at all, but I have qualms about how we as liberals are easily strapped down by the media. Trump said “Mostly due to forest mismanagement” while Newsom said “With all due respect, Climate Change is the fundamental reason for forest fires”. I clearly remember how the entire media pounced on Trump. Not good.
We ought to isolate character from facts. If you challenged Newsom in any way last year, you would have been labeled a right-wing Trumper instantly.
It gets a little more nuanced than that; if you want to blame forest management, you have to tackle the fact that the majority of California's forest is Federally owned.
Quibbling over the degree of culpability and denying the existence of climate change entirely - remember, in that exchange, Trump said he thought it'd be getting cooler soon - are not the same, either.
I didn’t see this kind nuanced discussion last year - which is my point.
Trump has said some of the most egregious things about climate change. I just see those orthogonal to this particular incident. I don’t think Trump was blaming California for it, he was blaming forest mismanagement whether federal or state.
Anyhow, I’ve become extremely suspicious of any traditional media or social media driven story these days - the more people are aboard, the less I am inclined to believe because the machinery for argument no longer exists. Media has a conflict of interest with engagement metrics.
Oh right, Trump was in no way trying to lay blame off on California.
“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” he added. "I’ve been telling them this now for three years, but they don’t want to listen,” Trump said on Thursday.
Can we critize them both? I mean, Trump could be 100% wrong and it still doesn't change what Newsom said which was also politically motivated. Newsom was with leaders of Forest management agencies and yet wildly exaggerated claims that CC is the reason for forest fires.
Sure. I have a whole book of complaints about the Governor of California. But whether he raked national forests enough is not one of the complaints. Only the Secretary of Agriculture and their boss, The President of the United States, get the blame for that.
This topic is one of the first ones that really took liberal academia down a few notches in my eyes.
I grew up with a national forest as my backyard, and my grandfather was a logger in the area in the 70s. When I was a teenager, he and a bunch of old timers, including the Native American ones, were complaining about the forest management policies. They literally begged them to allow more thinning of the forest, more and larger control burns, etc.
The out of town forest service (etc) PhDs all had a ton of reasons why they were wrong, and ignored their advice. At the time, I though the old timers just werent hip to science, were being curmudgeonly as old timers tend to be, and surely the PhD environmentalists knew what was what.
Then, the pine beetle infestation hit, and they could not keep up with the needed thinning... and a few years after I left, boom, two ~500k acre fires hit, and it was absolutely devastating to the forest.
At that point, I had learned how to read scientific papers, and started going back and looking at some of the justification papers for some of the policies (including wolf reintro) and I was astonished at how shoddy and poor the science was from these liberal academics.
Not only was the science bad, but they essentially would ridicule the locals as a dumb redneck stereotype, given that the forest service etc would often cycle in people from across the country.
The fires taught me that there is a lot of bad science out there, and that the term is often used as a cudgel against the lesser educated, so I can emphatically say, despite not being pro-Trump at all, that he was right on that one occasion. I said the same thing here when it happened and it spurred some decent discussion.
I wish the article was desensationalized a bit, but from what's written it's a pretty encouraging experiment.
I think the most important part is the virutuous combination that comes from allowing regular small fires to burn to help remove the conditions and prevent the catastrophes of the huge fires we've seen that come about because of the buildup of fuel debris, while at the same time providing the different ecological niches to reoccur side-by-side, the grasslands, meadows, shrubs, etc. instead of just a forest canopy.
Everyone is noting that fire is good for California forests. Which is correct. Some trees actually depend on it, and seeds in the ground will wait for a fire before sprouting - I don't know, a temperature change makes it happen, not sure.
But, what is happening is that there is SO much extra wood and flamable materials because of suppression, that it is actually TOO hot and the seeds get burned to ashes.
I've always found that the concept of natural parks was turned on its head. We basically allow human economic activities everywhere it's physical possible, except in natural parks. It should be the opposite. All of the world's landmasses should be designated as natural parks, except for specially designated "human development areas".
Let's stop trying to preserve patches of the natural world. Let's start constraining human development in space.
I wish some of the people who down vote this could explain more why. Is it just that they don't like the idea of valuing other life on this planet that highly or that it's not politically feasible because humans are so human-focused?
I did not downvote, but while I too saw this article and thought that we should concentrate population more to allow more nature to be unmanaged, there's also just something incredible impractical about that. Humans aren't just a thinly spread collections of houses, farms, water supplies, electric transmission need to cover a vast area of earth if we're to keep something like our current quality of life and honestly I do value humans above all else. I'd go almost as far as to say all value flows from people. Nature doesn't I think have intrinsic value. Maybe some of the animals that live in it, but certainly not the plants and insects.
Well, it's a nice vision. But we have 7 billion people now. How many of them fit into that vision? Sure, I know, we could fit them all in Texas, but could we also feed them? Provide them with computers? And everything else?
So I think it's being downvoted because it would be anti-human in some concrete ways. I like nature, but how many people are we willing to let starve to preserve nature? How many are we willing to condemn to a life of no economic opportunity?
The proposal sounds good, but the actual practicalities of it are going to cause a lot of human misery, and even death. Fine-sounding "let's do this" proposals that have high human costs tend to get downvotes, since the voters are humans.
It’s fundamentally misanthropic, and the kind viewpoint a rich first world we can hold from the safety of their expensive urban home (while outsourcing out the farming to others).
(I didn’t downvote it though - and I’m actually supportive of substantially expanding nature preserve land area in Earth, but only after we become a multi-planet species)
That's how it's supposed to work in Canada. Most of the land is crown land managed by the government who should carefully manage it but in practice lease it to anyone as long as it brings in money.
I love the effort on spinning "wildfires" as a good thing - even calling them "wildfires" hides the human factor behind them. If a fire happens on North America on Europe, it's a "wildfire", if it happens on a developing country in the southern hemisphere, it's a reason for international intervention. (I'm not claming that the former form of fire is good, but the hipocrisy on this is huge)
Different places have different expected rates of fire. Some fire is natural and expected in many ecosystems. This article is basically arguing that the ecosystems in the west would be healthier with more frequent smaller fires, that is dramatically different than the intentional burning to clear agricultural land that's happening in south america. No one's saying the massive hot fires happening in CA now are healthy and good
There is international intervention in wildfires in North America and Europe every year. You don't hear about it because it's boring that rich countries work together.
The vegetation native to the western portion of the north american continent is adapted to fire. It's a necessary part of the natural life-cycle of many plants.
It's refreshing to hear that. Human driven climate change is real and I'm not denying it, but we have to understand CA's climate for what it is.
CA plants are uniquely adapted to fire and they serve as a testament to the history of fires in CA. Las Pilitas Nursery, which specializes in CA natives, has a nice writeup here: https://www.laspilitas.com/advanced/advecology.htm
I find it especially interesting how the droughts typically preceding a fire suppress herbivore levels so that post-fire seedlings are protected from predators. It's really amazing how our ecosystem has adapted to the challenges of our historical climate.