From the time I was a child to now, controlled burns have basically vanished. It correlated with people moving here.
Propublica recently confirmed this anecdote:
https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
> We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not.
> Megafires, like the ones that have ripped this week through 1 million acres (so far), will continue to erupt until we’ve flared off our stockpiled fuels. No way around that.
I'm from South Australia, so raging fatal bushfires were a part of my childhood.
Worst case predictions for complete loss of the ice sheets is 500 years [1] while the desertification of Mesopotamia only took a few hundred years of pre-Common era agriculture. Russia's forests are vast but we're on an industrial speed run and I've seen how fast the populations can collapse here in California thanks to some beetles and a single extended drought. Every time I visit my hometown I see the same thing happening in Russia in an ecosystem and society that are, like California and its chaparrals, completely unprepared for increasingly hostile weather.
[1] https://www.discovermagazine.com/environment/will-antarctica...
Many insurance companies in fire prone areas already require homeowners to clear their yards of fuel so with well funded, proactive fire departments, the vast majority of populated areas can be protected with a once a decade (or less frequent) burns.
False. Humid Mediterranean forest is designed to be fireproof. Mediterranean has aquatic ecosystems also.
I'll repeat again here. Some Mediterranean biocenoses are shaped by fire. Not all. Other NOT.
And shaped by fire means that they can stand fire, they can even promote it, and are frozen in its current state by fire. This does not mean that this is the better, or only possible outcome for that place. Ecosystems are always trying to reach the most higher level of organization possible. And those are very humid, even in Mediterranean climates.
I'm not sure what your argument is trying to accomplish- its pretty clesr to anyone reading that the discussion is about how the ecosystem has evolved such that forest fires are an important and integral part of maintaining equilibrium, and pushing the system into disequilibrium is a root cause of the current fire disaster. I could at least respect a pedantic technically correct argument, but technically, ecosystems arent trying to reach any level of organization and the concept of "better" does not apply to ecosystems- theres no moral or other ranking to biomes!
Such concept exists and is a clear one in fact. In ecology is called the climax of an ecosystem.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climax_community#Continuing_us...
If urban sprawl is the root cause of not conducting these, there should be more regulation and accountability on a small govt scale. They are the ones who approve/decline developer plans. Sounds like there may be a tragedy of the commons game theory issue here where certain counties are cashing in on local development projects while offloading the risk to outside counties.
I don't claim to be an expert, but I've talked to oldfarts^d^d^d^d^d^d^d^d people (partnered with First Peoples) who have designed controlled burns, forest management experts with degrees in the topic, and even folks who run timber companies... and it's known there's a lot that could be done, but... the Santa Cruz and West Sonoma redwood fires are unprecedented. It takes a lot to get those coastal forests ablaze... enough that you're not going to get a controlled burn in Cazadero, Bonny Doon, or Empire Grade. They (unlike the interior) don't typically burn more than every 50-100 years. You can log reasonably large areas and remove underbrush, but in a wildfire like these last few weeks the flames can jump miles and that's too much area to safely log (mud slides) or regularly burn. Big Creek lost a lot of good timber in well managed forest that didn't stop the fires.
I'm also confused by the idea that if the same areas of Napa and Lake county could just burn a few more times then they wouldn't burn the next few years. It hasn't worked the last 3 times (really check caltopo for the burn overlap). It's just low brush that grows back quickly, because all of the trees that were on it have been burnt off. Then you get to Sierras where the pine beetle has created huge areas of kindling... but where was that beetle 300 years ago? Not in the Americas. How invested were the Miwok in stationary real estate? Not so much, it was a different time and a different attitude.
This all just has the ring of climate change denial...
Walking around redwood groves of 1000 year old trees with burn scars, the reality is that California ecology has always had 'cleansing' fires. The humans, the abysmal electric grid that starts a lot of the fires and building in fire plains have predictable results in amplifying that at this time of year.
Paradise (which used to be called 'pair of dice') is one of the most dangerous places to live in California, a combination of winds, canyons and narrow roads. They've had endless fires in that part of the world, but more people moved there (cheap) and when the 1912 pge power pylon fell over on a 45% wooded hill the inevitable happened. Most of Houston Texas is built on a flood plain, yet people will be astounded and appalled when they have a 100 year flood and the UK Guardian etc will blame it on global warming...
Pretty obvious in retrospect, confusing that we're still doing it, unclear how we'd reverse it, probably no good way out...
...maybe I'm just being cynical, but that's often how disasters are handled. e.g. https://www.insurancehotline.com/resources/should-government...
But, not. Fire. Fire is a lot of fun. We need to send more CO2 to the air ASAP. How could we renounce to the lovely smell of barbecues?.
After all, that debris has to get moved somewhere, or it is just more fuel. Further, what are you running the wood chipper with? Where are you getting it from? How are the people doing the work getting there?
Planned/properly engineered burns just work, and the only reason they stopped was an accumulation of humanity that refused to adapt to the ecological needs of their environment to an excessive degree.
I'll concede we're now in the territory of arguing what constitutes "excessive" degree, which to me is any cessation of activity that tends to increase ecological stability over time, rendering an area unfit or overly risky for human population or sustainable economic/ecological value extraction. I'm generally open to a lot of pro-environmental policies as long as knock-on effects are generally counted into the equation, but your wood chipper idea falls foul of A) seeming to glance over them with little scrutiny, B) not taking into account the ecology of the area.
It really does sound like a fundamentally people driven problem.