Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western megafires of today
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it is a beautiful way to build. It's also completely indefensible in event of a wildfire.
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).
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.
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.
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...
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.
> "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...
> 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."
He was in control of the land he claims California is mismanaging. The guy is a fucking idiot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of small fires means it never gets that bad. We’re well past that point now.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
It seems past time to look into more radical alternatives than just doing a few prescribed burns.
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.
NSW vs Vic vs Qld. City vs Country. Farmer vs Townie. Farmer and Townie vs Traditional landowners
They get pretty heated, but I stress this is within a community of people who don fire-gear, get in trucks and actually have to deal with the damn things.
There's a generation gap, a gender gap, a culture gap, a politics gap, a you're-not-from-round-here gap...
I walked into the edge of the online flamefest. Wish I hadn't joined in. (yea. flamefest amongst fireies...)
I was wondering if there are climatic/ecological differences that make controlled burning more effective / less disruptive for the ecosystem in some places compared to others.
At least among people that I know[0], there is a widespread belief that when a forest burns it will never recover to its original state, or it will do it only after an exceedingly long time[1]. The same belief doesn't apply to agricultural land[2].
[0] Obviously this is just based on my direct experience, maybe in different parts of Italy or in different social circles it would be different.
[1] Again, I think this is more true in some environments than others - for example I seem to remember reading that, for tropical rainforests, the recovery time is very long. I don't know much about this topic though.
[2] Even though it's probably the case that agricultural controlled burning affects aspects such as soil biology, beneficial species, pests, etc.
> Why are all these idiots building houses with redgums so close you can reach out the window and touch them, and how do you do a controlled burn in a lightly populated area with risky houses like that?
Seems like this should be enforced at a government level.. either the house owner takes responsibility for poor fire preparation (i.e, they might lose their house, have increased insurance premiums), or the government fines people for endangering their neighbours.
Even when done safe as possible there will still be a wave of complaints when controlled burns cover someones property in ash or burns holes in their garden shade.
In addition to excessive fire suppression causing fires to become ever more extreme, I suspect that the fact that people move around so much caused there to be no "living memory" of the natural conditions of an area, and thus people collectively "forgot" that their areas burn, and need fuel removal and careful management, not just fire suppression.
In my head, I see reforested areas like the Potato Jesus painting with a bonus "Mission Accomplished" banner.
I can't be too many thousands of years. It doesn't take too many thousands to completely change the nature of forests (spruce to pine for example).
The core of the issue has little to do with the fire suppression policy and more to do with the interface between humans and wildlands. There just aren't many areas that are even safe to do proscribe burns en masse that won't threaten some property or structures even if prescribed burns were emphasized.
And I just don't understand how ever single one of these "The REAL problem is California doesn't let wildfires burn" threads is they always start with, "yeah climate change could possibly maybe be one cause but the REAL cause is..." No, really, climate change is not some incidental factor here, the climate conditions in CA are a huge contributor to these fires and possibly dominating factor in these fires.
All the more reason to focus on managing them, and remember the state's history of fires when deciding where and how to build structures and manage urban/wild interfaces in the future.
What reality are you guys living in that you think any of this will happen and why do I feel that that same type of people placing forth such armchair planning and development mandates will be part of the crowd up in arms when people are being told they can no longer live where they do because we need to give the land back to the earth to burn in a peace.
The reality of the situation is far more complex as is the solution.
Special taxing districts and/or community volunteer programs in high fire risk areas to fund fuel removal initiatives -- think a crowd of people with power tools clearing dry grass and underbrush.
Incentives and/or code changes for fire-resistant building. I know of someone in a fire-prone area who had to replace their cedar shake roof with a metal roof because the fire department told them they won't bother trying to save houses with wooden roofs.
Changing expectations and funding for controlled burns, and helping/expecting property owners to assist with clearing debris so that controlled burns remain controlled.
Ecosystem engineering beyond controlled burns -- it's a wicked hard problem, but it might be possible to breed, engineer, or import cultivars and species that are less prone to out-of-control fires.
There are policies, lots of policies. State, county, local. All up and down CA, but none of them are moving at the speed of climate change. Controlled burning is there, fire resistant buildings are there (although if you ez-bake a house it's gone regardless), building defensible areas (green belts) around cities that fuel control is economically feasible, all on the table. You can look at cities like Paradise, which was basically destroyed, for what these policies look like.
The thing is, these policies take money, and time. Lots of both, and they already largely exist.
Something has to give, subsidizing those who live in harm's way; to continue living in harms way; isn't the answer.
Mistakes were made with zoning and building code. The proper fix seems situation dependent, but probably includes some combination of local engineering changes to safety (materials, what's allowed how close to what, evac routes, etc) and abandoning indefensible positions as unsafe for habitation. It generally makes sense for society as a whole to make a one time payment to reclaim areas for nature.
I actually know people who help fight these fires every year, and they seem to have some rather concrete ideas in mind of what should be done and I don't think it involves kicking people out of their homes.
Edit: but the main point here is listening more to the people who risk their lives to fight these fires, and the impression I get is that state politicians aren't doing that enough
If a fire comes, just let their houses burn.
"Proscribed" means prohibited. I think you must mean prescribed burns? I assume it's a typo but it conveys the opposite meaning.
Climate change explains why it is all catching on fire now. But if we had the forests that we had a century ago, and current climate conditions, we would have far smaller fires than we would if we had current forests and climate conditions from a century ago.
Did you know that in a healthy forest, most of the mature trees do not get killed by the fire when a fire comes through? It is easy to see that it has to be true - trees survive centuries and fires come through much more often than that. And the reason why it is true is that when you have minimal underbrush, it burns past quickly and doesn't catch the trunk on fire. But we have enough fuel that it burns, and stays burning long enough to catch the whole tree. Which generates such intense heat that you get local weather conditions that dry out the next area so that when it burns, its trees will catch fire more easily.
Guess what? Climate change may start the fire and make it hard to fight. But fuel load is the biggest factor in how intense it is. And that is the result of past forest policy.
The indigenous people practiced a careful system of controlled burns, to prevent megafires and to keep the land healthy for hunting.
It wasn't a wilderness, it was a garden. Failure to understand this is a big part of what lead us to what we see today.
* Cap radio: The Racist Removal Of Native Americans In California Is Often Missing From Wildfire Discussions, Experts Say https://www.capradio.org/articles/2020/09/16/the-racist-remo...
* Nature: Quiet Fire: Indigenous tribes in California and other parts of the U.S. have been rekindling the ancient art of controlled burning https://www.nature.org/en-us/magazine/magazine-articles/indi...
Edit: formatting
"Wilderness" is probably also more wild than would be intuitive, iff our sense of "wild" is based on a landscape that was actually actively managed to be an ideal habitat for hunting and gathering.
Not really. The most common image of a garden is a controlled nature space tended for human enjoyment.
“As it would be with zero humans around” is the definition of a wilderness.
Even if you pushed the definitions to extremes they don’t overlap (a wildlife garden is still a garden).
Either way natives didn’t have that degree of control. Even today, in places where forests are assigned to villages for such caretaking, they don’t have that degree of control, even with all the modern aerial firefighting power it is a struggle, as evidenced by current wildfires in the Mediterranean.
It's not limited to California, either, as it's now suspected that North America's vast inland prairies were largely created by people setting fires and that we'd see something closer to forests if it were truly untouched.
It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.
> It's not an implausible degree of control to have. They weren't fighting fires, they were setting them.
It doesn't matter what kind it was, garden metaphor implies human control over a certain boundary.
And in this context (both from OP and the linked article) the control is specifically about preventing mega-fires through controlled fires. Prairies and uncontrolled fires are irrelevant.
There is little reason to question this technique was being applied locally with some success, but there is no evidence that this could be to an extent that made California their garden, in any meaning of the word you want to imagine.
If anything, I don't think the historical population vs landmass numbers can match up, hence my original objection. Disappointingly, only counter-arguments so far has been finessing over the definition of "garden" instead of working on the manpower and efficacy questions.
The population density was considerably higher before the arrival of in particular smallpox, for one thing. Other posters were kind enough to link you to some references, so I won't bother.
But yes, West Coast natives in fire country absolutely set fires and managed the forests to make it easier to hunt and prevent as much conflagration as they could. They had 12,000 years to get good at it, that's a long time.
The romanticism was thinking of North America as a "wilderness" when it had been inhabited for, again, 12,000 years. Humans shape their environments, the indigenous people of this continent were not an exception to this.
This looks quite different when hunting is the main source of protein, rather than animal husbandry.
I merely made what was implicit into explicit; using the term "garden" implies a total control.
> The population density was considerably higher before the arrival of in particular smallpox, for one thing.
I'm not interested in the density over time. Do we know the acres of forest-land per capita and the total area a certain manpower can manage this way? Especially since you scale back to 12k years, I wouldn't be surprised if there are orders of magnitude mismatch between the work-load and the population's capacity.
> West Coast natives in fire country absolutely set fires and managed the forests to make it easier to hunt and prevent as much conflagration as they could
No question they did. Local village populations do this around the world today. "As much as they could" doesn't make it their garden though, nor guarantees that the methodology scales to today's land use practices. As a proof you can look at this month's Mediterranean wildfires in Italy, Greece, Spain and Turkey.
> The romanticism was thinking of North America as a "wilderness" when it had been inhabited for, again, 12,000 years. Humans shape their environments, the indigenous people of this continent were not an exception to this.
Roughly 25% to 45% of the world today is still wilderness depending how it is measured. It was probably 99% 12k years ago (I don't have data on this one).
People shape environments but not uniformly, nor necessarily forever. People being evil destroyers of nature is a last century outlook (and maybe rightly so) but in the times of those indigenous tribes, nature used to be the main adversary of humans, destroyer of populations. The idea of "wild man in harmony with nature" is a new age anachronism by people who probably haven't even camped in the wilderness, at least without a full-spectrum REI gadgetry of 21st century.
The indigenous people lived in a different world than today. Not extensive agriculture sucking the earth dry. Not sparks from buildings or cars. Not gasoline spills. Not glass bottles around. Less people doing barbeques or smoking.
The implication of this article is that we should have let the forests burn, and as a corollary we should go back to doing that.
The former seems like a reasonable argument. This article misses a couple of important details, though, notably the effects of invasive species and how climate change affects the regrowth of forests post fire. As a result, the latter is by no means obvious. At this point, it's unlikely that forests will go back to how things were, even if we stop suppression.
The current practice is not a good equilibrium, but neither is going back to allowing most fires to burn out naturally. Going back to what worked before sounds appealing (minus the smoke), but really it's not likely to work again the second time around because of everything else that has changed. So an ideal solution is probably going to need to be more complicated.
https://www.dnr.wa.gov/publications/em_leg_dnr_wildfire_fore...
Who knew that densely planted tall pine trees burn so much?
Much of north america is naturally "a sea of pine trees". It would have been like this in 1700.
> In the United States the pine tree, Pinus palustris, known as the longleaf pine, once covered as much as 90,000,000 acres (360,000 km2) but due to clear cutting was reduced by between 95% and 97%. The trees grow very large (up to 150 feet), taking 100 to 150 years to mature and can live up to 500 years. The wood was prized and cutting resulted in many hundreds of thousands of stumps that are very resinous, do not rot, and eventually become fatwood. This ushered in a new industry for many years.
Some of these trees burn like firebombs, they probably find it useful too. As a species. The individual tree, maybe, but if so far more briefly.
The dangerous fires mostly seem to erupt from hard-to-access river canyons. Do you just let those burn? Light 'em up on purpose?
As a side note, these areas are filled with highly flammable buildings. 100 year old wood construction, shared attics in the small towns, nowhere near modern code.
The trade-off is between the probability that a controlled burn will accidentally spread to houses and the eventual big wildfire that will take out a subdivision or entire town.
To be fair, we had big, honkin', town-killin' fires back when it rained and snowed more than average for decades.
It's hard to tell how much is due to drought, how much to a shift from snow to rain, how much is home development, how much is homeless people torching off areas (more than you'd like to think).
So, maybe you're referring to an earlier period, in which case, cool.
I don't fully agree with this statement, it's more that you're not just affecting your rainfall, but neighbors as well. As we speak, 8 of the Western states in the US are performing scientific trials together.
There's no hard data that shows exactly how much weather modification actually works. Some data shows 5 to 15% increased snowfall, but that's just statistical analysis. Once we get hard data that shows the cost/benefit, you're likely to see more weather modification efforts (e.g. how many dollars per acre-foot of water? Is this cheaper or more expensive than pipelines, or drinking water reservoirs? What would a budget look like for bolstering our agriculture? Can a state government budget a few million for the next year due to an anticipated reduction in rainfall? How many million would we need? What's the human and ecological (particularly beneficial bacteria and algae) impacts of being exposed to AgI?)
We also don't know how wide-scale it works. Yes, China can seed clouds to reduce smog to have blue skies for PRC meetings in Beijing, but can it work on the scale of say, an entire mountain range? Or the agricultural area of an entire state? Can't say. It's only been in the last few years that we've gotten RADAR and compute that's capable of analyzing our experiments.
Also another thing, you can generate precipitation, but even weather modification technology can't overcome a drought. If you have a high pressure system (like the one currently sitting over most of the West US at the moment) you're stuck with dry skies.
California has an agriculture problem.
* Since 1987, the United States has been the largest producer of almonds worldwide. The success of the California crop in seizing the No. 1 rank in world almond production is due in large part to the use of irrigation and mechanization, resulting in higher yields and cost effectiveness.
The US produces 10x more almonds than number two on the global biggest exporters list: over 2m tons/year, #2 on the list is Spain with 200k tons. California is the #1 producer of almonds in the world. It takes 1.1 gallon of water to grow one(!!!) almond.
https://www.atlasbig.com/en-in/countries-by-almond-productio..., https://keepcaliforniafarming.org/produce/california-almonds..., https://www.paesta.psu.edu/podcast/how-much-water-does-it-re...
Look at page 4: https://www.cdfa.ca.gov/statistics/PDFs/2017-18AgExports.pdf
Pistachios, walnuts, dairy, wine, beer, kiwis(!), avocados, grapes, rice!
I wouldn't be so sure. It looks like a lot of the fires don't wipe out the fuel load, a lot of burnable stuff grows back quickly, it doesn't take all that many years for everything to grow back.
Living in one of the uber-flammable areas, it's funny how fast all of the plants grow. This entire locality is (2nd (or 3rd (or 4th))) generation trees.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firebreak
[2] https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-popular-li...
For example, I know that in recent years we observe unprecedented fires in Siberia region where, due to wast areas and very low population/infrastructure, smaller natural fires were never artificially suppressed.
> By the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run into the woods.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/the-ame...
We also forget that pre-european cultures in the Americas seem to have regularly practiced deliberate forest burning, for several reasons. They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s, but American human-driven forest management didn't started with Europeans.
I doubt it. There just weren't nearly as many of them.
Human nature is one of the few things that seems to be consistent throughout all of history across all civilizations. The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.
If one person can cause a tragedy by mistake, you have a systematic failure, not a failure of the individual. A sign of a good system is that the occasional fool doesn't end up with the horizon burning.
A quick look at some papers indicates that prehistoric California burned much more acreage than the modern variety.
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...
These issues were known to the US Forest Service at least 20 years ago, and broadly speaking nothing was done about it.
Climate change is helping forest fires to ignite and burn hotter due to reduced moisture in both trees and the soil. To the extent that it may also increase the incidence of lightning, and thus the probability of naturally started fires, it can also influence the numbers of fires.
But gross mismanagement of forests for most of the 20th century caused by misguided ideas about what keeps forests healthy is what has led to an almost unimaginable pile of fuel sitting on forest floors that would never have existed in the past.
[citation needed]
Actually no, none needed this is obvious nonsense, everyone with a basic understanding of physics can spot that.
It appears you have a very basic understanding of physics.
It mentions in multiple places that climate change is increasing the duration of the forest fire season and worsening conditions that promote wildfire.
The point of the article is that outcomes of poor forestry management practices (a build up of fuel that lead to truly enormous wildfires when they finally burn) were bad enough, and now climate change is dramatically exacerbating those effects.
As a result, changing our forestry management practices to adopt controlled burns, thinning, and other techniques, will be a critical element of climate change adaptation.
That's not to say we shouldn't stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible to avoid even worse future effects. But we've already warmed the globe enough that adaptation is already necessary, and this is just one example.
Global warming is an accelerant, but not the root cause.