Stop living where there are forest fires and there won't be such an urgency to put them out.
Also, I think there's a kneejerk reaction to blaming forest services for not taking care of the forests. When in reality (a) they do: brush clearing and controlled burns happen all the time in california & oregon, (b) forests are far too huge for even 10x the puny forestry service of today, and (c) budget is constantly being cut.
Also x 2: the west coast US is experience drought unlike any since humans settled the west coast. Letting forest fires burn in California, Oregon and Washington now wound remove the forests entirely. EDIT: Regardless it is gonna happen, there are completely brown/orange forests in central oregon just waiting to burn.
That's not how it works. Most larger trees survive fires just fine, they just don't look very pretty for a while afterwards.
In Australia, there are trees like the aptly named stringybark that exude flammable oils and peel off thin strips of their own bark to form highly flammable piles of tinder under themselves, which appears to ensure that any forest fire is powerful but passes through quickly (not killing the tree), and conveniently eliminates any nearby competition in the process.
Lots of small fires means it never gets that bad. We’re well past that point now.
In theory that's how it should work. The problem is when you have heat plus drought conditions... the wildfires consume everything.
For example, the Castle fire in California consumed over a tenth of the entire population of giant sequoias. Giant sequoias are pretty fire resistant due to their size and height, but this fire devastated them.
AFAIK over the last few decades it is well understood that fires should be left to burn and generally this happens unless they threaten population areas. In theory this should mean that the next fire season has less fuel to burn but it's not working.
I'm not sure what the author is talking about is really current practices since I've heard the opposite so many times. What he describes seem to be mostly past practices.
There are trees in the US that require fire to propagate. The lodgepole pine, for example, is ubiquitous across western North America
On the other hand city blocks, suburbs and good size lawns are boring in comparison but at least they are harder to burn down in dry weather.
Until the government/insurance companies stop paying for it people will keep rebuilding in the exact same spot.
I’ve concluded it’s actually more like NIMBY ism and willful ignorance. Nobody wants controlled burns in their backyard, and many don’t want to maintain defensible space. So everyone joins together to create this shared illusion that they can manage the land and their property however they want AND never suffer the consequences.
The current forestry management regieme around preventing forest fires was put in place to protect forests as an agricultural asset and resource for the timber industry.
That practice has morphed into a protection of real estate as people have built their homes in the wildfire zone over the past 40 years.
Prior to colonozation by Europeans in the Pacific Northwest, native americans regularly burned forests regularly. That practice stopped once their populations were decimated by disease and subjugation.
What was the thinking of these native Americans you speak of? Were they thinking "we should start wildfires because it will be better for the forest over a period of centuries"? Because...?
I agree that the practice of trying to stop these fires results in larger fires later. What I'd like is more information on why native Americans were able to realize and act on this. I'm willing to believe it, but not without some explanation.
Documentaries about Yellowstone at the time mentioned the importance of fired in the germination of new trees.
Of course, policy has not effectively reacted to well known science. Sigh.
I think building lots of houses in forests, is a similar problem as when people build lots of houses in flood plains.
In both cases, we sneak in some houses during a "good" year, and then we get to spend all the future years trying to defeat nature.
Also when I grew up we'd make burn piles once a year to burn all the deadwood that came down around the property. It was often impossible to light those piles of wood without kerosene since everything was so wet.
I think a lot of the forest living is inspired by places like VT and CT where building in a forest is fine and safe. In the middle of a pine forest in northern CA is a totally different ecosystem and can't be treated the same.
Then trim vegetation from your house at least 30'/10m, and keep things tidy out to at least 100'/30m:
* https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/get-re...
* https://www.nfpa.org/Public-Education/Fire-causes-and-risks/...
Make sure there are no dries leaves or pine needles gathered in places, ensure that your attic vent is properly screened from embers, that flammable furniture (e.g., cushions) is not laying about too close to the house.
Lots of simple, preventative measures that people can do to increase their odds.
Clearing vegetation and material selection can make a huge difference, just don’t expect a normal house to be ok anywhere near a fire.
* https://www.intermap.com/risks-of-hazard-blog/2015/03/does-y...
* https://ibhs.org/ibhs-news-releases/embers-cause-up-to-90-of...
It seems that by dealing with anything on/near your structure that can be ignited by them can reduce risk by quite a lot.
It is really amazing the amount of heat released, and how quickly, in one of these fires.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq6wy_tffpg
Quite often what happens with radiant heat is that it breaks a window, which then allows embers to go into the house and set it alight. Embers are actually the things that cause the most damage:
* https://www.intermap.com/risks-of-hazard-blog/2015/03/does-y...
* https://ibhs.org/ibhs-news-releases/embers-cause-up-to-90-of...
On the other hand radiant heat often kills people the most (e.g., through heat stroke).
Yes, it is a beautiful way to build. It's also completely indefensible in event of a wildfire.
So is the Bay Area a good place to build houses? Santa Rosa, CA?
The previous poster was comparing building California homes near trees to the folks who build on flood plains.
A natural expansion of that tells you that you can't build in Santa Rosa (Tubbs Fire), Oakland hills (more fires), the Bay Area (earthquakes, someday the Hayward Fault will let loose), or really much of anywhere near the coast (rising sea levels, California Coastal Commission has decided that protecting your property with water barriers is no bueno).
This isn’t a big deal when property is cheap and can be paid off within 5-10 years, and rebuilt. But housing has become dramatically more expensive relative to cash flow than it has been historically.
With a cheap enough house, it's just the thing. Spend all of your money on land.
Maybe the future is in RVs. If they let me get away with it, I can see scraping a parking pad in Big Sur and sticking a motorhome on it. Relatively earthquake-proof. Fire? Simply drive away. Vacations to the desert can be slept in your own bed. Want to live the classic life? Buy a GMC Motorhome.
Maybe those behemoths make sense. Live the Jim Rockford lifestyle.
If there is anything new here, the internet and talk radio has shown a lot of people how to do this. Some of them mistake it for wisdom, and others just like to annoy people who hold nuanced views. Don't blame the victims for the fact that it is no longer possible to assume anything reasonable is implicit.
Look at https://twitter.com/CAL_FIRE/status/1298383464094265344/phot... and see how big a chunk 2020 is of all megafires in California history. And 2021 is on track to be even worse.
Past forestry management is why we have the the problem in the first place.
Climate change is why the problem just got so much worse, so quickly. And is why we can't attempt to fix it as gradually as we created it in the first place.
Both are actually important for understanding this subject. And climate change doesn't just come up because it is demanded by pop culture.
However extreme events become more extreme. We are now seeing extreme events that simply would not have been possible without global warming. For example the 2011–2017 California drought was the most extreme drought in at least 1200 years. And yet, here we are again in what's shaping to be an even more extreme one. And going forward, droughts like this one are going to become common.
This is the beef* I had with Cliff Mass when he said the June heat wave in the Pacific Northwest had nothing to do with climate change, it wasn't an extreme event, it was just natural variation. The temperatures may not have been more extreme than known outliers, but what he didn't say is much more important: How often would natural variations lead us to expect events like it and how long would they last?
You can't just say "oh, this is just a typical thing that happens once in a hundred years" when it's happening every year.
* I have lots of other beefs with Cliff, but they aren't relevant to this discussion.
Those numbers are extreme enough to make me question whether the model's tails are heavy enough, but yeah. It basically wouldn't have been possible without global warming.
Most likely because people don't know what they're talking about. There are a lot of potential causes, probably some more that never come up, but an awful lot of absolutely certain theories.
Oddly enough, everyone laughed too when the same administration suggested the lab leak hypothesis...
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/09/14/trum...
He was in control of the land he claims California is mismanaging. The guy is a fucking idiot.
> When Wade Crowfoot, California secretary for natural resources – identified climate change as the primary cause of the wildfires, Trump interrupted: "It'll start getting cooler – you just watch."
> "I wish science agreed with you," Crowfoot told the president.
> Trump responded, "I don't think science knows, actually."
> "Please respect, and I know you do, the difference of opinion out here as it relates to this fundamental issue ... of climate change,” Newsom said.
I don't see this as a disingenuis way to interpret it. Summarizing - OP's point is that we ridiculed previous administration for suggesting that forest mismanagement played a larger role in California fires. Newsom, as quoted above, was suggesting that Climate Change is the primary reason.
No where in the article does it say that previous administration only blamed forest mismanagement. They said that likely the larger role is played by forest mismanagement.
Furthermore, Newsom claims "Fundamental" issue. Meaning, it is the (sole?) basis for forest fires.
During a briefing with Trump, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, told him forest management is an issue, but "climate change is real, and that is exacerbating this."
And it's true, Winters are drier summer is hotter. Trump is ridiculed because he talks like an idiot and denies climate change.
No one denies that forrest management is a problem. it was a huge blaming thing for a couple years because the federal government actually maintains most of it. Remeber all of this?
All I am trying to do is to stay somewhat objective. I clearly recall how the entire media instantly discredited him for mentioning forest mismanagement.
I've seen time and again as a liberal how we get into mob thinking and seldom criticize ourselves or look at things objectively.
back in 2016 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/california-managing-its...
He's criticized for being an asshole https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/11/politics/california-wildfires...
https://www.factcheck.org/2019/11/trump-again-misunderstands...
Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population.
People attack credibility when they can't refute the facts!
> Likewise no one cares to listen to people who refuse to get vaccinated or do anything at all to reduce spread of a disease when those same people want to talk about whether the disease made a trip through a lab on it's way to the general population.
Of course, remember it was forbidden to mention the lab leak hypothesis on mainstream social media. They banned people for that.
Seriously, you should check out just how much of California used to burn in prehistory. I ran into a few papers on Sci-Hub about it. It's pretty crazy.
It looks like a large part of California would be uninhabitable given natural practices.
This is 100% true.
Unfortunately, better forestry practices require a LOT more money to be pumped into the departments which manage those forests for manpower. Go take a look at how much manpower and resource it took to clean up even a tiny area around the Grand Canyon.
In addition, climate change is making things like "controlled burns" increasingly dangerous. The number of days you have the conditions to do a controlled burn are getting fewer and fewer.
"Better" forestry practices are not cheap, and nobody wants to spend the money until after their house burns down.
People want to, but are very bad at caring about quality.
For whatever subject, there will be a sort of platonic ideal -- and this ideal won't be the same for everyone as there is room for taste and priorities. BUT what that ideal actually is depends on a whole lot of subtlety and understanding... especially accounting for the marginally different outcomes for a different set of priorities which you get in diversity of cultures.
Instead, you get extremism. There are a few people talking about real quality who are completely drowned out by people who generally know quite a bit less who want quality but don't understand it and opt instead for maximizing or minimizing some value. (i.e. the practice of preventing all forest fires, defund/abolish the police, prohibition, etc.)
People can't handle subtlety or disagreeing with someone to a small degree.
This is the trend, absolutism, not understanding details, and yelling loudly about everything.
Try to get into a conversation about COVID-19 about actual risks and thresholds for certain actions and you'll either get complete deniers or advocates for every precaution (preferably forced on everyone at every level of possible control).
How do you silence the loudest people on the extremes without simply being authoritarian?
I don't mean this to sound trite. I think it's a fundamentally mistaken way to operate in the world and it makes it a lot harder to have honest conversations about complex issues like this one.
It seems past time to look into more radical alternatives than just doing a few prescribed burns.
Before the internet, there was some damping factor in how information was distributed. This allowed for time and place for debate. How do we balance this? We desperately need instruments of truth without care for what the majority/minority believes, thinks, accepts, rejects or promotes.
100 years from now we're going to look back at this chaotic time in human history when we didn't know what to do with the Internet.
For nature doesn't care about anything but the truth.
A red pill awakening moment.
Same thing happens with houses that flood because they were allowed to be built where they never should have been. Just blame climate change instead of government stupidity/corruption
It's clear that there's a catastrophic problem that's developed, and continues to accellerate, with wildfire incidence and severity in North America. And that past forestry practices have all but certainly contributed.
Starting over 20 years ago, the number and scale of fire scars I'd see whilst travelling through the Western US began impressing itself on me sharply. On one trip I'd headed out of Boise on state routes 21 and 75, through the Sawtooth Wilderness, and hit a fire scar that was over 20 miles long. I continued through to Yellowstone where the decade-plus scars of the 1988 conflagration there, one of the most severe in the US at the time, were still sharply visible, along with stands of unburnt, but clearly dead trees, on the mountainsides (beetle infestation I believe). There was still plenty of fuel.
Other portions of that trip brought me through other fire scars, as well as terrain that would burn over the next several years (some of these immediately adjacent or twice-burned ground). One of my road stops ended up being a command-centre for firefighting efforts. That made news of the subsequent burns far more visceral.
Some years later, I had a long road-trip talk with a retired US Forestry worker who gave the story of how mismanagement was fueling current burns --- this now nearly a decade and a half ago itself. I think about that conversation often.
But wildfire is an increasing problem around the world, including in locations which have not to the best of my knowledge been subject to total fire suppression, including large regions of Siberia, ablaze now, burning for months, and quite possibly the continuation of what have become annual fires errupting for much of the past decade. The regions are simply too remote for the type of suppression the US and Canada have practiced.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/08/05/siberia-feels-the-...
And much of the terrain I've seen burned isn't exactly "forest". It might have some trees, but is more scrubland. Whether or not that is also subject to overaccumulation of fuel load I'm not certain, but it's the type of terrain that would burn regardless ... and yet, still seems to be burning more frequently and more intensely than before.
I've also driven through forests (part of the region now on fire in California, in 2015), and despite years of backpacking and rural trips, feeling very uncomfortable over just how painfully dry and primed for ignition that portion of the trip, made late in the year with hot dry weather and months of no precipitation, felt. The Camp Fire followed within a couple of years, and the Dixie fire is literally burning up the path I'd blazed. Forestry management is part of that, but bone-dry dust, pine needles, shrubs, and trees take more than just misguided foresters.
e.g. If you bring up forestry management's role in setting the stage for megafires, you will typically be labelled a climate change denier unless you go out of your way to address climate change first, as this article does. Even then, you'll likely be seen by many as "minimizing the real problem".
Yes, climate change is a bigger problem, overall, than megafires, but past (and continuing) forestry practices are the larger part of the megafire problem. Should we ignore small problems until the big ones are all solved?
Of course not.
The problem with pop culture is that it influences everything. If you want to have any success with grant applications, finding ways to work in current pop-culture buzzwords in is essential. Anyone trying to do research on forestry would be well advised to have "climate change" somewhere in their proposal even if it's not important to their work at all.
If you want to get politicians to devote public funding to improving forestry practices, good luck! There's money for exploring the impact of climate change on forests, but not for improving forestry practices themselves. At least, not until enough megafires make people look more carefully at the problem.
The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades. It just wasn't something that fit into pop culture narratives, so we've let things get worse and worse.
The next time you hear someone saying that X is an important part of a problem that climate change also affects, pay closer attention. Don't just dismiss that person as a climate change denier. Make room for small problems as well as the big ones, because ignoring many small problems soon leads to big ones.