Wildfire restored a Yosemite watershed
news.berkeley.edu
news.berkeley.edu
It's refreshing to hear that. Human driven climate change is real and I'm not denying it, but we have to understand CA's climate for what it is.
CA plants are uniquely adapted to fire and they serve as a testament to the history of fires in CA. Las Pilitas Nursery, which specializes in CA natives, has a nice writeup here: https://www.laspilitas.com/advanced/advecology.htm
I find it especially interesting how the droughts typically preceding a fire suppress herbivore levels so that post-fire seedlings are protected from predators. It's really amazing how our ecosystem has adapted to the challenges of our historical climate.
He goes into the very interesting history of fire in the Western U.S. and California and how the Native Americans used fire to transform the landscape over centuries. When Europeans took over, they did not understand these practices or the reasons for them. It was as if they had acquired a complex machine that required regular maintenance, but had no instruction manual to perform it.
Instead, they imported European (specifically German) fire/forest management practices, which do not work in the Western U.S. In Europe, when a tree falls, moisture allows the tree to rot and release its energy slowly. This makes suppression a long-term viable strategy. In much of the Western U.S. though, when a tree falls, it just sits there until it burns. Here, the suppression strategy is just putting off an inevitable release of energy, and every year the amount of energy increases.
The real tragedy in this is that this situation is leading to the loss of trees that are over a thousand years old, that could survive countless smaller fires, but not one enormous one.
The western settlers here also use fire regularly to cut down on fuel load in the forests, we call them controlled burns and they're mostly done by volunteer firefighters. They essentially have a slow burning firefront walk through the forest floor to burn up the brush which emulates a natural wildfire.
Big wildfires like we are seeing take out huge swaths of land in Aus and California are the consequence of excessive fuel load build up thanks to human intervention. Of course climate change will contribute by making the conditions required for wildfire more common but the root of the severity lies elsewhere for now.
https://blog.nature.org/science/2018/01/12/australian-fireha...
The devil is always in the details though and I have no idea what all is involved in operating in the forest or the economics, legality, and politics of it.
Addressed in more detail here: https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...
until the small fire grows out of control [1]. Then it should have been put out earlier [2][3].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/23/us/california-tamarack-fire-b...
[2] https://mcclintock.house.gov/newsroom/press-releases/rep-mcc...
[3] https://twitter.com/Wheeler4Nevada/status/141831383122321817...
The frustrating thing is that this allows finger pointing between the different causes. Putting it as percentages can be deceptive. Global Warming 100% needs to be dealt with and California's suppression-based approach to fire 100% needs to change.
shifting blame is like politics 101
Long-term, the planet will be fine. Maybe not us.
I'm really happy to see this research. I am aware that climate change is real, but "the news" tends to focus on bad things.
It was predicted that the Kuwait oil well fires would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When crack teams converged on the area from around the world and put them out in just six months, we did not party in the streets over having averted a global catastrophe.
That's part for the course. We routinely wring our hand about how bad we expect it to be, then take it for granted when emergency response exceeds our expectations and move on to whining about the next gloom and doom scenario.
I'm fully well aware that the next gloom and doom scenario is likely all too real and not neurotic overactive imagination at work. But it just sucks the oxygen out of the conversation when people act like it's crazy talk if you aren't part of the "We're all gonna die!!" environmental belief cult.
Me thinking there is still hope, we can still find solutions, we aren't all doomed is not evidence of insanity, stupidity, cluelessness or denial. I'm an environmental studies major. My father fought in WWII. The entire world was doomed then too and survived.
I know we need to somehow get people to take things seriously and actually take action. I just don't think emphasizing how utterly doomed we are is the way to do that.
For lots of people, that will make them go "Why bother? We're doomed anyway. Me being all self sacrificing won't fix it. I might as well enjoy myself a little before we all die and this world turns into a smoking husk."
> ... Me being all self sacrificing won't fix it. I might as well enjoy myself a little before we all die and this world turns into a smoking husk."
We won't get far enough with individuals making, for example, 1% changes in their consumption patterns. Rather than asking individuals "to do more", a better way forward is to emphasize systemic changes in policy. Policy includes a range of options: investment, taxation, and regulations.
To quote a line from one of my favorite Despair posters: "None of us is as dumb as all of us." I mention this because, left to our own devices, each individual (more or less) tends to spend most of their attention, time, motivation, and money to address their most immediate needs. Our systems are quite efficient at converting these needs into resource-extracting economies, without paying attention to externalities (i.e. downstream costs that an extractor doesn't face).
Long story short, it turns out a tribal species evolved to deal with scarcity isn't inherently driven to act in ways to ensure our long-term survival. That's a bug. Together, we have done an amazingly efficient job at throwing our planet off balance.
This is why we need collective action. If the word 'collective' makes you uncomfortable, feel free to substitute in 'organized', 'coordinated', 'intelligent', or 'wise'. Whatever word you pick, we need the political will (or, in the case of some countries, the autocratic will) to drive changes to our systems.
I don't know how we actually get there from here. But I'm confident that it isn't effective to make everyone believe that our choices are between 1. short-term personal gratification at the cost of everyone being certainly doomed and 2. short-term personal sacrifice with a very slim hope of marginal collective gain.
In that scenario, most people will look out for themselves. Only crazy people sacrifice themselves for no real gain for anyone else.
We have to create a plan for short-term personal gain that leads to collective gain long term. Most conversations don't allow for that possibility to exist at all.
> I'm really happy to see this research. I am aware that climate change is real, but "the news" tends to focus on bad things.
It's not either/or. Death is also part of the natural world, yet the news tends to focus on avoidable things that cause death. People who want to reduce the negative effects of climate change shouldn't be accused of "trying to eradicate all forest fires" any more than doctors should be accused of "trying to eradicate all death."
For decades, complete suppression was the stated objective of various services in the US:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_wildfire_suppress...
Why does it seem like this is presented as a bad take? What's wrong with ecological changes and corrections taking centuries, or longer?
Too often I see environmental advocates wringing their hands over changes which absent humanity would be just a chance for other subsystems to adapt or related ecology to evolve while the initial system rebuilds itself.
Just because humanity "depends" upon the later results or effects of these processes (or just because humanity caused them) doesn't mean any anything, really.
Consider from the environment's perspective:
This, too, shall pass.
There's a climate science "gotcha" which is that the Earth's average temperature has been much higher in the past than it is now. No one disputes this. The problem is not so much the absolute level as the rate of change, which gives less time for everything to adapt.
Hearing that very small group of people (or researchers and political advocates funded by that very small group of people) paint a quaint picture of humans as one tiny part of Gaia might make some people uncomfortable.
At a personal level, the extinction of the giant sequoias or the spotted owls doesn’t seem like a very desirable outcome.
if you value things, then you have wishes and desires. if you consider people to be responsible for choices, you can assign value to actions and consequences.
some people don’t like devastation of the natural environment. if you understand yourself as part of the world, it feels a lot like self-harm.
It’s natural to want to stop it, same as someone wanting to not have their wallet stolen, or a house they love destroyed and replaced with an apartment complex.
All it takes is one person building a cabin in the middle of a forest, and all of a sudden it's a fire that threatens property and can't be allowed to burn. We can let remote areas of the national parks burn, but it's going to take a lot of political and social change before it becomes acceptable to let people's vacation properties burn, Or to prevent development of large regions of forest so it can be allowed to burn.
That doesn’t mean that their property won’t be defended as much as possible, just that stopping the entire fire itself won’t be the goal.
Raising taxes to fix things is always the most regressive solution- the wealthy, and only the wealthy, will be able to afford it.
Instead, treat it like a rural flood plain, acknowledge that the land is simply worth less because it is prone to natural damage, and leave it at that. Fire coming? Issue an evacuation order and let nature take its course.
And California seems to be heading in that direction, though not there yet.
I don't know that they speak for the US Forest Service though. Between the different national level parks and forest services and then the state level ones, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there are still a lot in the active suppression camp. Then there are municipalities where people can basically live in the WUI and the idea of preserving only structures is further complicated.
This talk is by someone who works for the US Forest Service.
Popular conservation, which tends towards absolute preservation, has not come around.
When the state allows construction and utility connections and so forth, it should also take up responsibility for fire management.
It would be interesting to correlate forestry management practices and population density.
The Longleaf Pine episode on Smarter Every Day was also educational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJWG7raBlT8
Why we should want water? because is a strong temperatures buffer, protecting people and providing a more stable local climate so we -should- aim to store as many water as possible in the forests.
And because all our economy is centered in water supply. A few months without absolutely no water and our big cities would collapse and be quit in mass.
And because putting the water in the ocean, and this is the main result of wildfires, will help to raise the sea level where the '90%' of the big cities are situated and would destroy zillions in people's property instead. We are risking more than a few forest cabins here.
Some conifers need fire to multiply yes, but this technology is easy to provide so is not a big problem. And those conifers are also a symptom; they are survivors that live only where the other plants can't. If you have only a sea of pine trees it means that the soil is too poor or the climate is too cold or harsh for the other trees.
To keep drying the area and destroying this soil is not always the better solution.
That's what numerous articles written on the topic from experts have said.
Logging generally does not have the same effect (logging takes big trees and leave small stuff, fires leave big trees and kill small stuff. Also the heat from fire is important for the germination of some types of trees)
So the point you’re making is kind of besides the point I think?
There is no apparent option where we don’t have fire. Lightning, utility failure, random people smoking, a trailer with a flat tired (that happened), prescribed burns - it’s inevitable it happens at some point.
> I don't see why climate change would affect the positive aspects of fire.
... since it has a strong effect on the fire and the forest, both pre and post fire. It changes a lot of calculus, including the relative benefit of letting things burn out.
We could have a really long discussion on the best wildlands management practices, and the tradeoffs. Prescribed burns, in recent history, have only covered a very very tiny fraction of land. Scaling that up would be logistical difficult, expensive, and probably politically infeasible. Letting things burn is also problematic, as the species mix is no longer well adapted for fire in many places. Suppressing every fire is equally problematic, kind of like plugging the vent in a pressure cooker. Fire breaks, logging, prescribed burns, and other means of fuel load reduction are all traditional fixes that we can use tactically (around cities, etc), but are only going to go so far. In my opinion, we've backed ourselves into a corner in the US west, and with climate change there isn't necessarily a good option going forward.
(disclaimer: I study wildfires as part of my work in a Climate & Energy R&D group, though by no means an expert)
First one is the one you described, and the second one is that given the changes in climate that it's even possible to contain these wildfires using mechanical means, such as trenches and water drops.
It may not be.
The question then is which one is the lesser evil.
It'd be interesting to learn more about the differences between the two. There are places that don't get a lot of lightning and would probably not burn that regularly on their own. So in those places a truly 'natural' state would look different from a 'managed by native peoples' state.
When europeans arrived, the state had regular fall wildfires (smoke was constant during this time) from natives setting regular fires to burn out undesirable plants and keep things useful for them. In Yosemite for instance, this allowed the land to support them with acorns from the black oaks there. Trees were monstrously huge compared to areas now, and relatively sparse and manageable. No known mega fires, although it probably still happened from time to time.
Now in most areas, it’s tangled brush and super dense and diseased trees (or just tangled brush where it is too dry for trees), with large scale mega fires and tree mortality due to disease.
Cutting down the old growth didn’t help of course - but even in places where trees have regained nearly the same sizes or were kept intact, the brush growth is a big problem. It’s natural for regrown forests to be dense, and the weaker trees die as they get crowded out. It isn’t normal for nearly every forest to be doing this all at the same time in a region due to suppression of the fires that normally clean out the junk and/or reset the clock in small areas.
Big Basin state park for instance was not logged, and it burned to the ground during the CZU complex fires due to all the built up fuel. If burned every year, it would have died out before being able to do much if any damage.
There are many other sources as well but this can get you started.
It's a mistake to underestimate the sophistication of other civilizations. Native Americans depended on the forests and grasslands for food. They were very well-informed in matters of land management. The US Forest Service and other have begun (belatedly) to try to understand and incorporate these practices in their own forest management.
The Wiki article about Native fire management cites a variety of reputable sources. It's a good read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in...
I do remember learning in elementary school how the natives would plant plants in groups (tall corn shading shorter plants like squash and beans that don't need as much sunlight and to keep away weeds, etc.). But somehow I never connected that these were fundamentally American foods.
Here is the National Park Service page, but there are hundreds of papers on it I’m sure [https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/nature/firehistory.htm]. There is extensive archaeological evidence of frequent small scale fires in the Sierras.
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087406
Smokey The Bear needs to be retired.
https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=oss;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=;...
I don't know of a resource that overlays histories of such events with indigenous cultural burning activities, but maybe the data is out there somewhere.
So if fire fighters and politicians do not want to start a burn policy now that there is so much fuel, why not log an area for a while then start burning? Is there something I am missing about the nature of the problem?
https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
Doing prescribed burns outside of the normal fire season allows them to reduce the fuel load and restore more natural conditions without the risk of creating giant runaway fires.
To be clear the idea isn't logging > fire, but logging just to undue the past mismanagement such that a very loosely controlled burn would be mild and as if the extra stuff hadn't accumulated the past 100 years in the first place. Definitely still need the fire.
It took the catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988 to even make the current Yellowstone policy possible. That policy is to allow a naturally caused fire to continue until it threatens humans or buildings, but to stamp out human caused fires with extreme prejudice. This obviously makes no sense -- the forest does not care a bit whether the fire was started by a lightning strike or by a campfire -- but it's the only thing that is politically tenable.
Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming. It's not a California problem; the problem is a national population that's been misled about what constitutes good forest management. We need controlled burns, building bans in large areas of forest, and judicious use of eminent domain to purchase properties in forest areas so that they can be permitted to burn.
https://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/California_forests/
Land management in the west is different from the east. On the east coast almost everything is private, then divided up into municipal, county, and state governments. In the West large chunks of land are still owned by the federal government. Private ownership under state authority is only about 40% in CA and less than 20% in NV.
In the middle of a drought it’s mostly too dangerous even in winter. To an extent it’s also a pollution issue.
The burns kill all the competing vegetation and burns up some of the fuel in the area to prevent larger fires.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-pre...
Directly in contrast with Gavin Newsom vs. Trump argument last year. I’m not aligned with Trump at all, but I have qualms about how we as liberals are easily strapped down by the media. Trump said “Mostly due to forest mismanagement” while Newsom said “With all due respect, Climate Change is the fundamental reason for forest fires”. I clearly remember how the entire media pounced on Trump. Not good.
We ought to isolate character from facts. If you challenged Newsom in any way last year, you would have been labeled a right-wing Trumper instantly.
Quibbling over the degree of culpability and denying the existence of climate change entirely - remember, in that exchange, Trump said he thought it'd be getting cooler soon - are not the same, either.
Trump has said some of the most egregious things about climate change. I just see those orthogonal to this particular incident. I don’t think Trump was blaming California for it, he was blaming forest mismanagement whether federal or state.
Anyhow, I’ve become extremely suspicious of any traditional media or social media driven story these days - the more people are aboard, the less I am inclined to believe because the machinery for argument no longer exists. Media has a conflict of interest with engagement metrics.
Allow space for counter arguments and discussion.
“Maybe we’re just going to have to make them pay for it because they don’t listen to us,” he added. "I’ve been telling them this now for three years, but they don’t want to listen,” Trump said on Thursday.
I grew up with a national forest as my backyard, and my grandfather was a logger in the area in the 70s. When I was a teenager, he and a bunch of old timers, including the Native American ones, were complaining about the forest management policies. They literally begged them to allow more thinning of the forest, more and larger control burns, etc.
The out of town forest service (etc) PhDs all had a ton of reasons why they were wrong, and ignored their advice. At the time, I though the old timers just werent hip to science, were being curmudgeonly as old timers tend to be, and surely the PhD environmentalists knew what was what.
Then, the pine beetle infestation hit, and they could not keep up with the needed thinning... and a few years after I left, boom, two ~500k acre fires hit, and it was absolutely devastating to the forest.
At that point, I had learned how to read scientific papers, and started going back and looking at some of the justification papers for some of the policies (including wolf reintro) and I was astonished at how shoddy and poor the science was from these liberal academics.
Not only was the science bad, but they essentially would ridicule the locals as a dumb redneck stereotype, given that the forest service etc would often cycle in people from across the country.
The fires taught me that there is a lot of bad science out there, and that the term is often used as a cudgel against the lesser educated, so I can emphatically say, despite not being pro-Trump at all, that he was right on that one occasion. I said the same thing here when it happened and it spurred some decent discussion.
I think the most important part is the virutuous combination that comes from allowing regular small fires to burn to help remove the conditions and prevent the catastrophes of the huge fires we've seen that come about because of the buildup of fuel debris, while at the same time providing the different ecological niches to reoccur side-by-side, the grasslands, meadows, shrubs, etc. instead of just a forest canopy.
But, what is happening is that there is SO much extra wood and flamable materials because of suppression, that it is actually TOO hot and the seeds get burned to ashes.
https://www.fs.fed.us/research/people/profile.php?alias=phes...
Let's stop trying to preserve patches of the natural world. Let's start constraining human development in space.
So I think it's being downvoted because it would be anti-human in some concrete ways. I like nature, but how many people are we willing to let starve to preserve nature? How many are we willing to condemn to a life of no economic opportunity?
The proposal sounds good, but the actual practicalities of it are going to cause a lot of human misery, and even death. Fine-sounding "let's do this" proposals that have high human costs tend to get downvotes, since the voters are humans.
(I didn’t downvote it though - and I’m actually supportive of substantially expanding nature preserve land area in Earth, but only after we become a multi-planet species)
https://www.coastal.ca.gov/fire/ucsbfire.html
https://www.nps.gov/articles/wildland-fire-lodgepole-pine.ht...