To Help Prevent the Next Big Wildfire, Let the Forest Burn

Aren't forest fires necessary for the some trees' seeds to open? So if we were able to prevent all fires, then either a large portion of the forest would die off, or we'd have to engineer another huge intervention effort to repopulate the forest?

We don't actually have good records for the number of fires in the past. As soon as white men came to North America they started putting out fires. The natives here before then didn't keep detailed written records, though the general verbal reports suggest they were actually lighting fires)

Letting the fires burns clears out the fuel. IF we go in next year and light that area again there won't be much fuel, so the fire will burn much colder - humans and wildlife caught in that second fire can easily leap over the flames to relative safety (don't get me wrong, some will die in the attempt, but it isn't a death sentence like the larger fires we have now).

That second fire has an additional benefit: carbon sequestration. The big fires we have now turn all carbon to CO2. The smaller fires we could have won't burn hot enough for that and so unburnt carbon will fall to the ground.

Would it be analogous to the OP saying let's do water flow management and you suggesting let's dam everything but build a monitoring system so when thing fail and leak, we'll go patch up as soon as possible

Controlled burns don't destroy the bigger trees the way unintentional, out-of-control fires do. So, your stats aren't very applicable to mature (sparser and taller) forests in which underbrush is managed more effectively. This is not a novel approach, and while there may be problem species in California, in the areas that have burnt and are prone to create the most dangerous fires, I don't think enough attention is paid to what kind of forests can be catered to be more fire-resistant (less brush and slower burning).

Trump is apparently an insensitive moron for putting the blame on forest management, but I don't understand why the spotlight isn't already on them since things aren't improving year over year. PG&E power lines caused multiple fires last year as well. I wonder if raking and cleaning and doing things underneath power lines would have helped. That may be simplistic logic, but the logic behind recent policy seems even worse and this article makes it sound like they are still figuring out the basics. I am not sure why that is the case.

Do you have any links to support such a broad statement? I've lived in Northern CA almost my entire life, and I would not classify the Oaks etc. as "high oil" or any more flammable than trees in the rest of the continental united states.

In fact, looking at this study utilizing GIS data - it looks to me like the SE US actually contains some of the largest concentrations of fuel / fire risk:

https://eos.org/articles/assessing-u-s-fire-risks-using-soil...

The places these fires are burning have no natural sources to start fires. California never gets lightning except in the Sierra's.

I heard this decades ago, and heard that practices were changing, albeit with problems where people have towns/homes up against forest. I even think I recall a big fire a few years ago that was a controlled burn that broke free.

Is the issue truly that practices still havent changed?

There will never be “no more rain in California”. Also, fires are not becoming more frequent, but roughly the same number of fires are burning more acreage.

Apparently any and all weather pattern changes are “caused by climate change” whether that be drought or monsoon, heat or cold spells, increased or decreased hurricanes, etc.

And interestingly, no matter which direction the change is said to be occurring (e.g. more rain in the mid-west) it’s always predicted to lead to a catastrophic outcome.

Here's a Nature paper to set your mind at rest. "Little change in global drought over the past 60 years", Nature volume 491, pages 435–438 (15 November 2012) and no evidence of dramatic changes since 2012,

Smaller forest fires manage dead wood. If a forest burns on a regular basis, felled trees (naturally fallen, in this case) will burn more often and there will be less fuel for a bigger fire in the future.

This is a big issue on forestry management across the entire United States (and probably elsewhere).

[0] https://www.ksl.com/?nid=148&sid=15218114

For reference, I was a seasonal firefighter with Cal Fire (CDF at the time) for 6 years.

First off, if there is a fire burning on state land, federal land, BLM land, a national forest, a national park, etc. I'd call it a forest fire, it's just common parlance. To some that know better, I may use the term wildland fire. So, if it isn't a structure or vehicle fire, it's probably a forest fire. Specifically though, many of these fires are considered in the wildland–urban interface, that is where homes and wildlands meet or intermingle.

There is a problem happening and I'm not sure how to solve it. The amount of wildland-urban interface land keeps increasing. This land is much more difficult to defend against fire; structure protection is much harder than straight wildland fire management. We've aggressively fought all forest fires (see above), especially when there is a threat of homes being destroyed (again this is increasing due to the wildland-urban interface increasing). Forest fires are natural and should happen on a regular basis, when they do, they clear fuel from the ground. Note, some trees require this for seed release (serotinous cones), resprouting, and germination (fire activated seeds). When fires don't burn and the fuel loading increases (due to aggressive firefighting), a catastrophic fire can burn, one we can't easily put out. These fires burn so hot, they can jump into the tree canopy (crowning fire) and kill the tree, they can completely burn fire activated seeds and make them nonviable, and they typically burn much larger sections of land. This is all bad.

I'm really not sure how to deal with this. There are some steps homeowners in the wildland-urban interface (within 1/2-mile of the wildland) should do to protect their homes including defensible space, fire-resistant roofs and siding, enclosed eaves and vents, etc. These steps should be enforced through insurance company's policy (vastly reduced rates for "safer" homes, and no insurance or drastically higher for "unsafe" homes), keep in mind, these unsafe homes put firefighters at risk. Ideally we stop encroaching into the wildland, but I'm not sure how to stop that. But we do need to let forest fires burn more. We need to set more prescribed burns (controlled burns) We need to know that some will get out of control, but there shouldn't be any lawsuits for this, fighting fire is tough.

(I previously posted this on a CleanTechnica discussion)

Here's a 99 Percent Invisible podcast on the topic that goes against what you're suggesting. I thought it was pretty convincing but I haven't seen much argument for the current practices being helpful, so maybe those are also convincing.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

Did the fire gain intensity where there was a recent burn, or just happen to include that area? I'd like to know where the fire gained momentum, what areas were critical to it being a disaster rather than a nuisance.

Presumably that could be caused by the intensity of the fire? I understand if you really do regularly burn the forests the fires become fast and light skipping the undergrowth rather than these intense conflagrations we see today?

It would also help if the local authorities would not give people permits anymore to build houses close to forested areas. Instead more emphasis should be put on building taller houses/buildings which would accommodate more than one family.

When they say "let it burn" they don't mean wildly out of control like the Paradise fire. They're talking about letting it burn under optimal conditions, where crowing and running are less likely to happen, to consume fuel that could burn sub-optimal conditions where there is little chance of control.

Less fuel = less intense fire = more likely to control.

I went through fire training for the CA Conservation Corps about 30 years ago and they brought up the let-it-burn theory in a class about forest management.

As support for the theory, they had a map showing recent wild land fire activity in California vs. Mexico. In CA the fires were growing larger over the decades while in Mexico they were not.

A quick search for updated data didn't yield anything for me. I would like to see if the comparison still holds up.

Other than making sure forest fires pose minimal risks to man-made infrastructure, what is 'practicing proper forestry'? These forests existed for millions of years before humans started managing them.

It's natural for forests to burn from time to time. Preventing such is actually much worse in the long run.

One of the goals stated in the article of proper forest management is returning of nutrients from the burned trees to the ground. That wouldn't be accomplished by harvesting the timber.

Besides which, sustainable fires (i.e. ones which don't, in the long run, substantially change forest coverage or makeup) are by definition carbon neutral.

Doing that is part of the problem, as pointed out in the article.

We harvest from those forests currently — the problem is we harvest the big healthy trees because their wood is the most desirable. They're also the most resistant to burning.

The smaller, shade-tolerant trees that we leave behind are both less commercially valuable and more vulnerable to fire.