To manage wildfire, California looks to what tribes have known all along

Now we are suffering from that ideological purity stupidity. The forests were just a bomb waiting to go off and at least in the Bay Area were triggered by the massive number of lightning strikes.

Some additional points.

This isn’t due to urban encroachment. Just look at the number and extent of the forest fires. They are basically everywhere including areas with very few people.

Forest fires are a natural occurrence but our actions tilted it toward massive fires and massive numbers of simultaneous fires.

Must we again suffer from ideological purity stupidity? This isn’t directly caused by global warming.

Edit: people who downvote because this strikes too close to home are sad

Don't y'all remember between 2012 and 2017 the west coast went through a MASSIVE DROUGHT? Are Californians really this forgetful?

The constant dry heat waves killing off large swaths of our forests is the thing that is now providing the tinder for our massive fires. Other states like Washington, Oregon, and Idaho are experiencing the same thing. It's not just California.

I've been here a long time and I don't ever remember experiencing smoke smothering our cities for weeks on end until these past few years.

Calling out forest management like it's some sort of magic bullet is kind of like telling individuals to stop using straws to clean up ocean waste.

Sure, it might help a little but it doesn't really solve the root cause systemic issue: Climate Change.

I remember a couple of decades ago people were talking about how they weren't allowed to clear or perform controlled burns on the dead underbrush. People can think they are doing good but are actually being shortsighted, causing more problems than they fix.

As this article notes, controlled burns are an important tool, and based on personal observation they seem vastly underused today compared to the frequency with which we used to see them in the past. We also need responsible forest management to thin trees and clear brush. We also need proper management (or funding) of power utilities, which have been responsible for many wildfires on the West coast - and I don’t mean just PG&E in CA (see https://www.wsj.com/articles/pg-e-sparked-at-least-1-500-cal...), as some recent fires in WA were also sparked by power lines downed by trees that were too close and poorly managed. We also need relaxed regulations for private land owners - I know home owners in WA who were prevented from removing dangerous trees on their land and the difficult, expensive, time consuming process of getting permits caused them to give up and ignore the trees ultimately until they naturally fell. Unfortunately I had a tree fall on my house that my neighbor ignored for the same reasons.

It feels to me like basic common sense techniques to prevent wildfires have been abandoned, and rules intended to protect the environment have backfired in some cases.

Forestry management works: WaPo has noted that Finland does a lot better than its neighbors when it comes to wildfires due to controlled burns and compartmentalization of forests (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/11/19/why-finland-...). That compartmentalizations comes in part from a dense forest road network that makes the forests accessible and has also subdivided them (https://www.is.fi/ulkomaat/art-2000005903733.html). Another interesting note is that Trump was widely ridiculed for his “raking” comment, but he was somewhat correct, although he misunderstood the term. Visit a clear cut of a timber stand in WA or OR and you’ll see a tangled mess left on the ground (brush, branches, stumps) that’ll dry up into a mass of fuel waiting for a spark. In Finland, they invest in clearing the land of what would otherwise be prime forest fire fuel in a process known as a “root rake” (see example video of machinery at https://youtu.be/o_EZeAiy3ew).

Voters need to draw more attention to preventative techniques and ask that funds be redirected accordingly. In Washington state, our Department of Natural Resources has been asking for increased investment in managing the fuel load and thinning forests for years (see https://www.dnr.wa.gov/StrategicFireProtection). The private forestry industry also has been asking for increased investment/assistance from the state in thinning and prescribed burns (http://www.wfpa.org/sustainable-forestry/reduce-wildfire-ris...). However these calls have been ignored, despite ever increasing state budgets, and our governor and legislature have done little to address the issue. Please contact your representatives and don’t let them get away with foregoing responsibility by blindly blaming just climate change for wildfires.

Trump is brazen, you now have political coverage to be just as brazen to fix these issues. We should be expecting more from our leaders because what we have now is a poor rationalization for shitty leadership. 16 of the past 20 years have been record breaking fires in California, this isn't a new problem. It's just long overdue to be solved.

P.S. I have zero faith that this will be fixed. It's fairly clear to me that the entire political servants aren't actually leading, they're apathetic while the country literally burns. It's not a difficult thing to ask that our elected leaders stop this in the short-term, let alone the long-term. It's difficult when we rationalize their bullshit, so expect more.