Fire on the Mountain: Rethinking Forest Management in the Sierra Nevada (2018) [pdf]
lhc.ca.gov
lhc.ca.gov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_California
Welcome to normal. I think California is so young, many people living in California just don't have a realistic expectation for California's climate.
> Pointing out the blue peaks of the Marysville Buttes, seen far away in the smoky distance, [Kit Carson] said "Yonder lies the valley of the Sacramento!"
This was in 1846; was it smoky because of persistent forest fires? Since it was still before the gold rush, the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas presumably weren't particularly populous.
Wikipedia, "Great Smoky Mountains".
> Before Europeans arrived (pre-1800), when the area was much more forested and the ecology much more resilient, 4.4 million acres (1.8 million hectares) of forest and shrubland burned annually.[1]
> During the 2020 wildfire season alone, over 8,100 fires have contributed to the burning of nearly 4.5 million acres of land, making it the largest fire season in California's modern history.
4.4 million acres of burn in an already historically thinned forest is going to be entirely different than the same area of burn in a mostly un-thinned forest. The damage to the forest, the CO2 produced, the smoke levels ... all could be at least an order of magnitude different.
I live in a place that is likely to be even adversely affected (in terms of human living conditions) by the move out of the last several thousand years of relatively wet weather in the American southwest. Note that this change isn't expected to involve increasing temperatures of much note all by itself, just increasing dryness. AGW will likely do that, however.
I'd also note that talking about the climate of "California" doesn't make a lot of sense. If state boundaries were based on biomes/climatic zones, CA would likely be at least 3 different states. The coastal zone of Northern CA is essentially unrelated, climate-wise or ecologically, to either Central Valley, the high Sierras or the start of the great basin to the east.
My point is this: Fires in California will get worse and this shouldn't be news to anybody who cares. Both AGW and California's history point to fires becoming increasingly common. One without the other would be bad enough, but California has both.
What is so hard to understand about this?
Central Valley agriculture isn't sustainable. The lower their ground waters get, the more they'll try to pull from the rest of the increasingly dry state. Californian politicians have no answer for this because there is none (other than 'scale back or move out') and they probably know it.
All is not lost though. If you want to say what you think is important about an article, you're welcome to. Indeed, that's helpful. Just please do it as a comment in the thread. Then your view will be on a level playing field with everyone else's [2].
The main thing we're trying to avoid is submitters using the title field to promote their interpretation of an article. Titles are by far the largest influence on threads, so it's important that they reflect the underlying content neutrally. Otherwise, simply by virtue of being the first (or luckiest) person to submit an article, one user would have the power to frame it for everyone else, and that would lead to an entirely different kind of site.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: maybe one clarification would help. Factual accuracy is good and necessary but not sufficient; there are many facts one could choose from, and cherry-picking the fact that you think is most important and making that be the title is a form of editorializing. It's actually the main form of editorializing.
I grant you that the title you used is probably what most of us would consider most interesting, when looking at that article from the present moment.
* State leaders should continue to remind federal lawmakers and policymakers of federal obligations to its forests within California.
* State agencies should plan to make greater use of the Good Neighbor Authority to perform treatments on federal land.
"""
51% of forests in California are on Federal Land.
> By far the largest forest landowner in the state is the fed-eral government, which controls 57 percent of Californiaís forests.
Edit since I'm getting downvoted: https://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44267.pdf
Also, "could" doesn't mean that they do. From your very own link:
"States can obtain authority to own and manage federal lands within their borders only by federal, not state, law. Congress’s broad authority over federal lands includes the authority to dispose of lands, and Congress can choose to transfer ownership of federal land to states. States have legal authority to manage federal lands within their borders to the extent Congress has given them such authority. As an example, Congress has to a large extent allowed states to exercise management authority over wildlife as a traditional area of state concern. Congress could give states authority to manage certain other activities, resources, or other aspects of federal lands. Congress also could give federal agencies authority to delegate or assign responsibility for aspects of federal land management to states or other partners."
https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/08/13/california-u-s-forest-serv...
> Although Congress has ultimate authority over federal lands under the Property Clause, states have legal authority to manage federal lands within their borders to the extent that Congress has chosen to give them such authority.
So whether California is able to manage forests on federal land within state borders to address the risk of uncontrolled fires isn't immediately clear, and presumably someone would need to dig up a relevant statute, if any, to show who is actually responsible.
The insinuation of that statistic is that federal land management should be blamed as much or more than the state of California. That may be true. It also may be true that the actual lands that have been burning and been poorly managed are more state lands than federal lands. California is obviously a large state. That's why we need to know what percent of the burnt lands are actually state versus federal before I'd deem the statistic in question to be useful.
By acres burned in California, Federal lands are still usually in the lead but not by as much; very roughly in proportion to Federal landownership, which is 57% of state forests. See overview at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wildfires-forests-ins.... The hard numbers seem to come from the historical state-by-state statistics from https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_statistics.html
From the Reuters article:
> The number of acres treated by the U.S. Forest Service in California during fiscal 2020 was the second lowest under Trump's administration, and 40% below a recent peak of 424,486 acres treated in the state during the last year of the Obama administration, according to the data.
But that seems a little misleading considering the impact of COVID-19 on 2020. Here's a nice table of historical prescribed burns broken down nationally: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_prescribed.html (also https://www.predictiveservices.nifc.gov/intelligence/2019_st...). From that it doesn't seem Trump's administration is substantially any better or worse than Obama's. Other than that Trump's accusation seem off-base--if California is to blame, to a first approximation so too must be the Feds, and in any event states seem to perform several times more prescribed burning by acreage than the Feds--I don't think there's much else that can be said without some domain expertise. The types of lands and their locations, the appropriateness of mitigations (or lack thereof), the distribution of fires, etc, would all seem to be important to drawing any serious conclusions about what has happened and what is practicable in the future.
No one has ever been able to explain to me why the climate seems only picks on CA, and why it has nothing to do with the decades and decades of fire suppression they've been doing that have built up a huge tinder box in a drought-prone area.
This 'whistling in the dark' about simple explanations for climate change is not helping anybody.
<edit> Yes there was lots of thrashing around, and not all of it helped. But the last decade of drought created simultaneously 150 Million dead trees. It might have taken the combined industrial output of California for a decade to get them all cut, hauled and disposed. There was no time, most of the trees were in impassable terrain, and heck that activity would inevitably have created a few unintentional fires.
What was done or not done, couldn't have blunted the tsunami of dead wood that inundated the state. Arguing over a teacup in a tempest is fun but not informative.
More pesticides equal to less birds and bats. Not having birds and bats plus sucking all the water that trees need equal to more beetles. The disdain of politicians (and their voters) for this themes is the root of this problem.
It doesn't say that making the trees further apart prevents the movement of the beetles, it's saying that the tree density is so high that the individual trees can't draw enough water to produce the sap that protects them from the beetles.
>> Isn't this report advocating that thinning the tree population would have blunted the effect of the bark beetle problem?
Thinning the tree population wouldn't solve it. Removing part of the dead trees could mitigate it but those trees are essential to beetle predators like woodpeckers. Things in ecology are complex and always connected.
The real problem here is the lack of water.
I had seen this narrative lots of times before. "Fix it for me for free whereas I take the money" because you like the trees, don't you?.
Not. Sorry. Is nor is my mission, neither I have the private resources to "draw any water" or fix the consequences of the greed of others.
I assume that US government could fix the problem if they wanted, so don't blame on the messenger, please. The current narrative seems to be "forests are expensive so lets remove them and problem solved". Will not work.
The state government made it a practice to stifle any potential wildfire for so long that a significant overgrowth and buildup of flammable materials has occurred, which otherwise would have burned in minor incidents over the years.
Mother Jones had a great piece on this - https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2017/12/a-century-of...
And yet, over the last 100 years, there weren't routine wildfires like this. It's only been the last 20 years--when underbrush management was prohibited because of environmental concerns--that we've had this problem.
Go back another hundred years and you'll find that there were. 100 years ago was during an unusually wet period of Californian history.
Which is my point. Modern industrial forest management figured out how to fix this problem. There were economic incentives for lumber, and cooperative regulation allowing controlled burns + underbrush clearing by loggers solved the problem. Industrial humans allowed there to be more trees, not fewer.
Everybody else in the world is experiencing the same global climate issues as California, and yet California's burned acreage over the last 2 decades is out of control.
There are direct policy consequences of disallowing controlled burns and underbrush management. And it's California's fault. People in the southern Central Valley have been complaining about these policies for decades. And it's because once all the Bay Area's pollution and fires get swept downwind, those people have the luxury of breathing it as it stays in the basin.
Californian climate is relevant, not just global climate. Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet. This is for California, not the whole world. 100 years ago, when you say California's fire management was working well, California's climate was unusually wet. California is naturally more inclined to burn than most other parts of the world, up there with Australia and Siberia. Most of the rest of the world is not nearly so imperilled as California and it's not because everybody is is better at managing forests.
> Climate varies from region to region and the past 150 years in California were unusually wet.
And the last 20 have not been. These patterns also have not shown up in other places with the same climate patterns but different policies.
Australia, for instance, has had nightmare fires forever. It's only been the last few decades that underbrush removal has been made more difficult or illegal in many cases.
Clear all the brush you want, California will almost certainly continue to get hotter and dryer than it was a century ago, and the fires will continue. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for California, only an orange glow on the horizon. Fire management strategies that worked a century ago for wet California will not continue to work. That was never maintainable.
California's prohibiting underbrush removal due to environmentalism was just the preview of Delta Smelt Dust Bowls last decade.
(The Dust Bowl, also being something that humans fixed with industrial policy, and the reason Oklahoma, despite no natural lakes, has more lakefront property per capita than anywhere in the U.S.)
Except for one thing. There was actually nothing keeping that water from flowing except for the delta smelt. The Central Valley went from green to brown in a single year. Nobody else was affected.
Irrespective of the politics of "who should get this water", the reality is that the people who were for protecting the Delta Smelt created an environmental disaster.
It's the same logic that they used to prevent thinning forests via logging and clearing underbrush--and lo and behold we have too many trees and when the fires burn, they're too hot!
It's the same logic that the U.N. used to ban mahogany exports, which led to those countries burning thousands of years of trees to make room for farmland, as it was their only economic recourse.
At some point, the environmentalists might want to ask themselves if "they're the baddies", given that other, supposedly less enlightened cultures have similar ecological situations and different outcomes.
> The Central Valley went from green to brown
This is a normal tactic of California water cranks, to use "Central Valley" to mean something else. The "Central Valley" is a huge, 400-mile-long flood plain, most of which is always ankle-deep in water. But the place you are talking about is just the bit of western Fresno County that you can see from I-5, what informed people call Westlands. Before 1968, the Westlands was never green. Not even once. Its natural hydrology is that of absence.
> Nobody else was affected.
Not sure what you could possibly be talking about with this sentence. The whole state was greatly affected by the drought.
You have bought into the propaganda of a Beverley Hills billionaire. If you are actually interested in the reality of this topic, i urge you to read Mark Arax's latest book:
https://www.amazon.com/Dreamt-Land-Chasing-Across-California...
I've lived in Bakersfield for over 15 years. All of these arguments are things that people have been talking about when I was there 20 years ago.
There's no crankery about it. It's just now--all of a sudden the effete sensibilities of San Franciscans are affected by these problems. Oh we care now.
What is remarkable, and I know you won't listen, but is to consider that perhaps a certain worldview got this wrong. When information goes one way, from privileged to unprivileged, the unprivileged know more than the privileged. They know both the situation of the privileged (because the privileged are sure to tell them) as well as their own. People in the Central are directly affected by this stuff constantly. It's the reason they'd leave and make a new state if the Bay Area wasn't holding them hostage.
And not only that, but California didn't use to have this problem. It used to be that as a condition for allowing loggers to harvest trees (1 out of 200), they'd have to clear the underbrush.
It is zero cost to fix this problem. There would be more trees and fewer fires if CA just allowed the policies they had in the 90s. Unbelievable incompetence.
As a result, its forests can get real hot and dry.
A drive from the San Bernardino basin up highway 38 to Big Bear either in real life, or on Google StreetView will show how dry, hot areas very gradually transition into forest. This is how a stupid gender-reveal party ignited 23,000 acres of hot, dry transition zone between hot desert, and alpine forest, resulting in me not being able to see across the street.
Well for one thing, let's start with the fact that this is wrong. CA is not the only state experiencing dangerous and widespread forest fires. It just seems to be the only state that is actually being discussed here.
No, it does not have "very little" to do with climate change.
We just had the worst heat wave in the recorded history of CA. To suggest that climate change is an insignificant factor is just plain wrong.
> In early September 2020, an intense heatwave broke temperature records in several locations in Southern California. The dry, hot conditions helped fuel new and existing fires, which have consumed tens of thousands of acres of land.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147256/california-h...
Source: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/60/8/602/305152
When everyone was talking about the drought in CA a few years ago was it really a stretch of the imagination that fires would follow?
So what can citizens who are not in government do to move this along?
I'd venture that "not enough controlled burns" should be the first hypothesis for why these fires are so common. I learned how important controlled burns are in boy scouts -- this isn't exactly a well kept secret. Before any other explanations are suggested, this one should be addressed.
I'd also venture that the state of California would prefer if the fires were outside of their control rather than caused by forest mismanagement. I will neglect to mention any other political reasons that might influence what these fires are blamed on.
Can anyone who rejects the controlled burns hypothesis explain the basis of their beliefs and also explain what they think would happen if the frequency of controlled burns were increased?
They can't change incentives placed on them. And we have to be willing to voluntarily accept man-caused air quality tradeoffs (and e.g. make liability exemptions, or have the state pay for harm caused by the side effects of intentional, planned burns)
- Most recent "Redbook": https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/11146/2018_redbook_final.pdf
- "Stats and Events": https://www.fire.ca.gov/stats-events/
- "Vegetation Management Program" (sub-programs (2-tick "--") existence and structure shows how much CalFire has been able to invest in these): https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resourc...
-- Forest Practice (other portals mentioned here): https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/forest-...
--- Open Data Hub, mainly timber mgmt: https://forest-practice-calfire-forestry.hub.arcgis.com/
-- ...Landowner Assistance: https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resourc...
-- Environmental (e.g. Air quality): https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/resourc...
--- CEQA CA Env. Quality Act: https://wildlife.ca.gov/Conservation/CEQA/Purpose#what
-- Climate Change: https://www.fire.ca.gov/programs/resource-management/climate...
> Certain Department activities may be exempt from CEQA due to their emergency nature (e.g., firefighting, flood response) or their minimal likelihood for causing significant impacts (statutory or categorical exemptions). Other actions may require the Department's development and approval of environmental documents, including Environmental Impact Reports. The following is a summary of CAL FIRE approvals that are subject to environmental review under CEQA:
> Fire Protection: ... Fuels Management Projects
This not only set up a perfect storm for massive wildfires, but also makes you think it this had something to do with the droughts. If there's millions of extra trees consuming/holding water, it's not crazy to think this may be related.
The Governor was wrong when he said that it is mostly caused by climate change and only partially due to forest management. It's the other way around.
And creating almost a fire-industrial complex that justifies why you need so spend so much money.
Honestly, I would be glad to see some analysis and find that my uninformed impression is incorrect.
I also find it interesting that I'm being downvoted for raising such a fundamental question. As if the money is clearly being used in the right way.
More money for planes, firefighters, modeling fire behavior: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2020/07/09/ahead-of-peak-fire-season-...
https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4172
Although some discussion of prevention: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/867395353/california-was-set-...
I wouldn't be worried about the macro budget, look at your actual firefighting policies and decide from those if the money will end up spent well.
Whether or not a given crew is assigned to fuels or other fire prevention tasks in a given jurisdiction depends entirely on the budget priorities of that jurisdiction. In turn, that jurisdiction has to work with whatever annual budget trickles down from administrative and executive levels.
Regarding California, I know too little to speak with confidence on government spending. People I know who live there are work in land management have always said that forest (fire) management has been neglected for many years.
In Australia, cut funding to firefighting caused a reduction in preventative measures, which significantly worsened our 2019/2020 fire season to say the least. An outcome that was signaled to policy makers by the firefighters well in advance of the fires. Pretty much the opposite to the scenario you've described, but in my opinion an outcome that was fairly obvious.
> The California Little Hoover Commission (LHC), officially the Milton Marks "Little Hoover" Commission on California State Government Organization and Economy,[1] is an independent California state oversight agency modeled after the Hoover Commission and created in 1962, that investigates state government operations and promotes efficiency, economy and improved service through reports, recommendations and legislative proposals.[2]
> Created by SB 37 in 1993, the California State Auditor operates under the direction of the Little Hoover Commission.[3]
The cover page footer also mentions Milton Marks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Marks
> Milton Marks, Jr. (July 22, 1920 – December 4, 1998) was a California politician who served in the California State Assembly and California State Senate, as both a Republican and a Democrat,[1] representing San Francisco for 38 years.[2]
It's presumably named in deference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Commission
> The Hoover Commission, officially named the Commission on Organization of the Executive Branch of the Government, was a body appointed by President Harry S. Truman in 1947 to recommend administrative changes in the Federal Government of the United States. It took its nickname from former President Herbert Hoover, who was appointed by Truman to chair it.