California Megafires Are Solvable | Hacker News Reader

California Megafires Are Solvable

gabekleinman.medium.com

169 pointspanic158 comments

They don’t seem to address the elephant in the room. Environmental groups have sued to stop every single logging plan the USFS has tried to put in place since sometime in the mid 90s. This even includes logging burnt areas where dead trees are left to rot and feed the next fire. Until these organizations are held to task for the conditions they have helped create in the name of the environment, the fires will continue to burn over grown forests that have had all natural and artificial management removed from them.

It's time to re-educate or ignore the elephant, whose policies are what brought us what we have now. It was that elephant who eradicated logging, promoted extinguishing all natural fires, and told us that the best thing is to allow unchecked growth.

I'd rather burn the forest than allow logging.

Logging always turns into felling the valuable trees (read--old trees that fire leaves alone) and leaving behind the scrub that feeds the fires.

This used to be true, but really no longer is with modern logging practices and regulation

Given human nature and economic imperatives, I think some skepticism is warranted.

Exactly, so we better do nothing at all and cower behind the maybes as the world literally burns down around us.

That would not be the right approach. What’s a maybe, or perhaps which maybe are you referring to, since there are several possible ones. (Suggest you include a sarcasm indicator if you’re being sarcastic.)

Just pointing out that since people are involved, it’s very reasonable to think that there are going to be bad actors acting badly along with any benefit that might come from this. In response to words that said bad actors are gone from the scene. Do you disagree?

Loggers can be directly behind some fires also.

Is well known that loggers in the south of Europe had been caught starting wildfires with the goal to buy the logs cheaper later (still suitable for paper pulp) or to have an excuse to steal the oldest trees that were perfectly viable but slightly charred. The practice stopped by new laws regulating the sell of burnt wood, but it was popular once (and can be still active in other parts of the planet).

Anything that could be claimed as an excuse type 'this tree was ill so it must be taken down' is a temptation for promoting wildfires.

And these survivor elder trees are necessary also. Some caterpillars are borers and kill trees in mass, creating a lot of extra fuel. Woodpeckers are among the only animals capable to remove larvae that dig deeper in the trunks. Respecting a few dead trees (here and there) where woodpeckers nest can reduce the final amount of fuel. More dense population of woodpeckers -> less larvae -> more trees surviving the attack -> less extensive patches of new dead wood ready to burn. Another reason to be very careful with the idea of a free unlimited pass to logging after wildfires.

Modern logging does no such thing. These contracts limit the size of trees that can be cut. Prevent clear cutting and force replanting all as a part of good forest management. Clear cutting all trees in the forest are a thing of the past. Loggers have come to understand the need to manage and promote growth and long term usage. Not just clear and cut of years gone by.

That's not what I have seen the loggers in my neighborhood do in the last few years. They still just clearcut and don't even re-plant.

Are they logging public lands or private. Because those are two very different venues.

Fires are unconcerned with property lines.

Don’t confuse logging in a managed forest with what happens in a “tree farm”. The latter is much more aggressive at logging but also at planing new trees. It’s a business and the land is an asset they are taking care of.

Drive in a circle around Seattle and sigh at all of the rectangular clearcuts on hilly terrain. Worst of the worst.

Sounds like land clearing for building.

Nope. The PNW is prime logging territory.

Someone in another thread tried to make a distinction between public and private land, but last I checked wildfires don’t give a damn who owns the trees that are burning.

It doesn't matter if the flames don't reach to the tips of the largest tree's uppermost branches. These fires burn so hot it kills their roots and even little animals hiding in their burrows underground.

Driving through northern California on my way to Washington, a couple of weeks ago, I could see whole forests are dead where the fires went through. Large trees, scrub, everything.

burnt trees are not good fuel. areas that have "burnt through" are lower fire risk. dead, unburnt trees are the problem.

Dead burnt trees fall down and rot feeding the next fire that comes through that forest. Instead of logging those trees and using them leaving good trees and new growth behind.

Sounds like you're missing the concept of the fuel class of wood in a wildfire. https://www.fs.fed.us/rm/pubs/rmrs_gtr164/rmrs_gtr164_06_fue...

That explains some of it, but different types of fuel take different amounts of time to catch fire, so like a dry prairie can catch on fire about instantly, but live saplings of 1" will not burn unless the fire keeps going for an hour.

A decomposing log on the forest floor won't really burn till it has been in a fire for somewhere around 100 hours.

Until you have walked through a modern fire nuke zone. It’s like walking on the moon. Nothing under a foot across is left. This picture is very typical of what is being left behind by the large self sustaining fires.

https://images.app.goo.gl/jcLatNG6dAdpoALY8

Source: Spent 10 years as a wildland firefighter on major fires my whole career. And still have friends and family that are deployed on fires today.

I appreciate you defending this position. I bought 50 acres of land burned in a very hot forest fire 9 years ago. While there is some grass and some bushes around, the 50 acres of trees have now all fallen by now and are rotting. Some of them have stayed hard and are super annoying to cut with a chainsaw, but others I can kick apart with my boots. Either way I use them for firewood at my campsite and they ignite instantly with no work on my part. Until you have walked through a real fire zone, you can't fathom what it really looks and feels like.

Also, thanks for being a wildland firefighter, lots of us who live in hills and forests really really appreciate you.

How's your land looking now?

No living trees that I didn't plant myself. The fire was so hot all the seeds died as well. So the idea that a new forest would spring up from the ashes was sort of wishful thinking.

Ouch! I know of someone that put in about 10,000 small trees and had them almost all cleaned out by rabbits.

Do you write/post about your land anywhere? Would be an interesting story to follow.

Can you point to one of these suits and its outcomes? The USFS opens up every national forest in California to timber harvesting, every year, and has done so since I can remember. You only have to spend about 1 minute hiking a national forest in California to hear the saws and trucks.

Here, for example, are all the currently-available timber sales in the Plumas Nat'l Forest, which is currently extensively on fire.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsinternet/cs/resourcelis...

Here is an opinion article for Montana of one such group. This is typical of most of these groups. They prevent logging by getting injunctions against any logging project on National Forest Land.

https://mtstandard.com/news/opinion/editorial/allow-the-fore...

Well OK, you said they had sued every logging plan without exception. That seems like an exaggeration. I'm looking at a USDA document right now that says 50 million board feet were harvested in California in the first 90 days of 2021, and last year totaled 2.5 billion board feet nationwide. Maybe that's not as much as you'd like, but it is still the case that timber is harvested in every forest, every year. The entire purpose of the USFS is to provide wood products to America. They aren't parks.

I was being hyperbolic to make a point, but you have at best proven that some suits do seem get overturned and some logging does happen. I will say that I think more logging, under regulation, should be allowed as the current 2.5b BF doesn’t seem to be enough considering the vast acreages that the federal government controls in the west. And given fire load of dead and down trees that I’ve seen over the years in our National Forests. To quote the article I posted.

“Frivolous lawsuits over the past 20-30 years have nearly eliminated logging from forest management, and our forests have suffered and much of the current wildfires around us are the results. What once were healthy, diverse ecosystems with early successional and mature forests are now too often monocultures of insect and disease-ridden dead and dying trees primed for catastrophic wildfire.”

https://sempervirens.org/about/story/

Santa Cruz mountains burned last year and it could have been less devastating to f there were more thinning allowed. Thinning != clearcutting. Often there are interests besides the environment that come into play. People live in these forests. Trees prevent landslides. It’s complicated.

Homeowners in that area are required to remove brush and fuel around their houses by insurance companies. Why do you think thinning (cutting down live trees) is needed?

The link you give doesn't talk about thinning, and is (unusually) mostly talking about old growth forest. Is an organization preserving old growth forest actually calling for cutting down live trees?

It’s not a great example of an area that would benefit from thinning but it is an example. Fires in coastal zones in California are very different from those in the Sierras where thinning is more important. Parent asked for an example though and so the Santa Cruz mountains fires last year came to mind. Logging of any sort, even on your own property, is strictly prohibited. Most of the area was cleared a hundred years back, the old growth is in isolated areas like big basin. It’s important to understand that coastal California fires are less due to over abundance of fuel and more due to human encroachment. Certainly the Santa Cruz mountains were due for a big one given the abundance of fuel and increasingly dry climate. Like I said it’s very complicated. The sierras in contrast would undoubtedly benefit from logging/thinning. We have now the largest fire on record with the Dixie fire. Comparisons to the past miss the point. We can’t just go back to how things used to be with occasional fires taking out small areas, making the ecosystem more heterogeneous. Fires are bigger and hotter now, the fuel is more abundant and drier.

Great that you have all of the answers, do you have any sources to back up the need for thinning?

Not directly fire science related but it’s not the old growth that fuels fires. I just googled for this, there’s plenty more if you look. https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/55436

The OP Medium post links to numerous sources. I would direct you to Blue Forest's white paper from 2017 that kicked off their founding. It's extremely well written and cited[0].

The coastal redwood forest still needs lots of ecological thinning.

Here are some articles and papers you might find interesting from non-profit and governmental organizations:

San Vicente Redwoods [1]

- SV Redwoods is a collaboration between The Nature Conservancy, Save the Redwoods League, Sempervirens Fund, Peninsula Open Space Trust, and The Land Trust of Santa Cruz County

- One goal is to accelerate the return of the forest to old-growth, increase fire resiliency, and improve biodiversity and habitat.

Mill Creek Restoration Project in Redwood NP and CA Redwood SPs [2]

- A collaboration between Save the Redwoods League, Smith River Alliance, and Redwood National and State Parks.

-Video link[3] showcasing the forest restoration segment (starts at 4m00s and runs until 6m20s; it continues into road removal and salmonid benefits if you’re interested).

Thinning Stands Boosts Wildlife Diversity [4]

- Conducted in Redwood NP and Del Norte Redwood SP and supported by Save the Redwoods League.

- Found that small mammals and birds increased dramatically within five years of areas that were thinned vs. unthinned areas.

- “At a minimum, thinning results in vegetative developmental and ecological trajectories that are several decades, if not substantially longer, ahead of stands that were not thinned,” Slauson said. “The overall result is that restoratively thinned stands have begun to develop the understory vegetative complexity and productivity to support small vertebrate communities that much more closely resemble old-growth stands than stands that have not been thinned.”

Old Redwood Forest Restoration: Quantifying Forest Characteristics and Development of Initial Restoration Treatments [5]

- Funded by Save the Redwoods League.

- How do you move toward old-growth characteristics most efficiently? “With judicious thinning,” said Joe McBride, University of California, Berkeley, Forestry Ecology Professor. “You can look at old-growth stands as representing a process of natural thinning that took hundreds of years. You have a few survivors per acre that are now the big trees—they’ve outcompeted adjacent trees over time.”

- The results showed that at the better-watered sites (both in Humboldt), large, medium, and small redwoods were all randomly distributed. At the drier site (Armstrong), small and medium trees were clumped and large trees were randomly distributed. “One has the idea based on the fairy rings you see in redwood stands that the big trees are all clumped,” McBride said. “We found that not to be the case.”

[0] https://collaboration.worldbank.org/content/usergenerated/as...

[1]https://openspacetrust.org/blog/redwood-forest/

[2]https://smithriveralliance.org/millcreek/

[3]https://youtu.be/t_vWK7Kyix8?t=240

[4]https://www.savetheredwoods.org/grant/thinning-stands-boosts...

[5]https://www.savetheredwoods.org/grant/old-redwood-forest-res...

Compared with forest prior to our fire suppression policy (~1930), tree densities have increased from ~50/ac to >300. Many that are clearcut and then reseeded with Doug Fir approach 1000/ac. Historically, low intensity fire on a 4-17 year cycle would have cleared the understory of 80-90% of seedlings and brush, so we now have 4-5 generations of trees that we shouldn’t have.

This has given us dense forests with more vigorous, younger trees competing with mature trees for water and nutrients. Coupled with drought and higher temps from climate change, the mature trees become stressed and susceptible to beetle infestations and disease. The younger trees also serve as ladders for low intensity ground fires to become high intensity crown fires.

To answer your 2nd question: yes, Sempervirens, Save the Redwoods League, The Nature Conservancy have all partnered on projects to carry out ecological thinning to remove small diameter trees and promote a return to healthier forests that resemble the pre-1930s norm. It also happens that these practices maximize carbon sequestration.

No, fallen trees support healthy ecosystems. Allow regular prescribed burns, not out-of-control massive hot wildfires.

See Tallamy - "The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees"

Does that matter if they just burn?

If you try to prevent fires, fuel will build up so that the next fire will be so big and hot it kills everything. Then there is no ecosystem.

> Post-fire logging and associated activities (including roads) are unequivocally damaging to fire-rejuvenated forests and related aquatic ecosystems.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180831203747/https://forestleg...

> When a forest burns frequently and thus has less plant litter build-up, below-ground soil temperatures rise only slightly and will not be lethal to roots that lie deep in the soil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_ecology

As usual, human intervention in ecosystems results in a disruption of processes that every organism in that system specifically evolved to live in. There are second and third order effects of allowing endless deadwood accumulation, pretty much guaranteeing that fires will be catastrophic. Not only do they cause super hot fires when it finally happens, but deadwood cover doesn't allow the usual plant life to take hold, increasing erosion and water retention, speeding the drying out of the forest.

Deadwood around lakes and streams can really screw up fish and other wildlife, too.

Well, it is not like the Americas were in some kind of pristine state of nature when European colonists arrived. The indigenous people of the Americas made lots of changes to the landscape, including the use of fire.

But it was a fairly consistent state of nature; as far as I know, those were old practices, and the ecosystem had adapted to them.

Also see: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...

20 million trees, about 150 of these [1], no problem. Clearcutting today, for a better tomorrow! Why burn?

Cutting wide firebreaks every few miles would be a good start. Plus we need power line routes through the Sierras to the midwest wind belt.

[1] https://youtu.be/T6lammZihzg

I recall growing up in Santa Cruz mountains and when a neighbor had a tree fall and crash through half his house during a storm with his whole family there that night… afterwards he removed a few of the other dead trees around his house that could potentially fall on the house as well - cut down… many in the neighborhood flew black flags on the mailboxes and protested him having the dead trees removed… I always loved the nature living there and at time being young it felt like he was the evil rain forest tree cutter … now in my 40s I look back and would have done the same thing as him. The fires out there are very scary and I just hope we get it figured out.

Before Paradise burned to the ground it was the same way. The city stopped people from cutting down their own trees. Those same trees would fall and kill people. During the time I lived there at least 3 times. 2 in bed one in a truck.

Some people even had trees that were small but just leaning into someone's house, maybe ruining the siding a little.

We should basically cut a 1/2 mile of trees in the semi-urban areas. Leave the 5 or 10 acre properties alone, let them manage their own cruft, but for the "city" part in the WUI, that should be clear-cut with 1/2 mile and maintained yearly. It would create a lot of jobs too. Spend that money on weekly clearing jobs in many areas instead of insurance companies paying that money out to just replace the homes.

There's a movement growing to build effectively a 9' gravel road around Santa Rosa as a fire moat of last defense. It would be paid out of funds given from the recent fire there.

If you zoom in on tiny communities up in the foothills, occasionally you'll see roads marked on google maps as "Dozer Line" where the locals have built their own crude fire moats to protect the community as best they can. I don't know if these are maintained to any degree, but it's certainly not a new idea.

I understand that low masonry walls also prevent heavier wind blown embers from travelling. One on the periphery of your property, and one a few feet from the house. Defense in depth.

I would highlight that given current fire behavior being seen today. A 1/2 mile break might be an okay fire break. But we are regularly seeing crown fires(where the fire runs through the tops of the trees at 30+ mph) that are wind driven with spot fires that are being started 1-5 miles in front of the edge of the fire. These are extreme conditions can only be prevented by keeping the fire down on the ground, with minimal fuel so that the fire doesn’t build up the ground heat that causes the fire to be able to burn through the tops of the trees. Or prevent the fire completely.

This type of fire behavior is nothing new. I’ve been around wildland firefighting since the early 2000s and we were seeing wind driven crown fires during those times every summer. We just called them big fire days and sat back and watched cause there is nothing humans can do to stop a fire with that type of behavior. Other then work nights and hope you can keep it out of the tops of the trees the next day.

Logging for profit is not the panacea that people criticizing environmental groups thinks it is. Here in Australia, at least (where we do a lot more controlled burns and let fires burn out a lot more) commercial logging tends to leave a huge amount of combustible waste behind.

There's clearly a good middle ground, but there's a lot of simplistic theorizing about this from folks with ideological axes to grind.

I would have assumed that logging clears out the old dense wood which does not burn so readily while leaving the shrub which is the most of the problem.

The easiest solution IMO is to stop trying to control every single fire and designate some zones as essentially wild and focus all efforts at protecting a smaller city area with a buffer zone between buildings and the nature reserve.

Problem is people want to live right in the middle of a forest but also do not want to face the reality that fires happen and that they are at risk.

As Northern California is currently demonstrating, wait and see can be unpredictable in historic drought conditions.

Smoke travels pretty far and causes obvious health issues. The undergrowth due to suppressing previous fires and the additional fuel from dead trees due to droughts result in very hot fires that grow huge.

The Dixie fire that is ongoing is 762 sq miles and is 25% contained. It is the largest fire started from a single source and second largest overall in California history.

If we let a fire just burn, will it just get so large that it can’t be contained and will just burn till there is nothing left? I read about natural fires that would span states and would burn till the rainy season. The fires currently burning in Siberia cover 4000 sq miles. The Bay Area is about 7000 sq miles. Alameda County is about the same size as the Dixie fire.

The problem with letting fires just burn is they don't obey the demarcation of "zones". They generate super heated gases that can cause adjacent areas to spontaneously combust even if no embers land there. A fire break that works in no/low wind is completely ineffective in high winds which can be generated by the fire.

Managing fires is very complex and takes a lot of resources but importantly political will. There's groups that don't want to spend federal money on infrastructure even though the federal government is responsible for significant amounts of infrastructure.

Indeed, In Oregon, there's no real limits to logging and Oregon fires in the last two years has had horrible on par with California.

The reason is that the kind of logging that's economical is not good fire suppression. IE, clear cutting is going leave a thicken of young trees and undergrowth in ten year that's a huge fire hazard but not economical to log. The state would have to pay for sort of logging that could effectively cut fire and that's usually not not called but logging but ground clearing. And it's done a bit but not affordable around every little town in the Sierras.

Oregon has a significant amount of private forest land in the southwest. I would be interested to see the amount of fires that are on private forest land vs public forest land as the private land it clear cut and then planted, grown, thinned and then clear cut again. I would guess that based on growing up in that state and it’s extreme environmental political undercurrent(Oregon has spawned a few eco-terror groups in its time) that most public land doesn’t get properly logged in Oregon.

Maybe you should look this stuff up and figure it out, as opposed to guessing that it's based on "extreme environmental political undercurrents". It's not like the location of the fires is a state secret. Effectively you're promulgating a conspiracy theory.

As I've stated elsewhere, it's well understood that commercially viable logging on public land (here in Australia at least) is not particularly effective for fire suppression (due to what's left over and what's left on the ground) and it wouldn't surprise me if it's true elsewhere. Maybe it's different in Oregon but there seems to be a surfeit of people "guessing" that it's somehow all the Greenies' fault.

A single google search[1] turned this up. As I hypothizied Oregon's forest, like most western states are majority owned by the Federal Government. Which makes them susceptible to the issues I brought up. As for eco-terrorists. This is from 2002[2] but it highlights that eco-terrorism in Oregon has been a long standing issue.

[1] https://catalog.extension.oregonstate.edu/em9228/html

[2] https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-107hhrg77615/html/C...

So, the evidence you found is that "most of the forest in Oregon is owned by the Federal government" and "19 years ago someone had a hearing about ecoterrorism".

I'm particularly enjoying the fact that the mild-mannered folks at OSU (maybe they are part of the Ecoterrorism Conspiracy?) suggest bizarre ideas like "maybe having lots of people mucking about on public land increases the risks of discarded cigarettes and campfire accidents" and "perhaps having hot and dry conditions from climate change might lead to more fires" as opposed to your much more elegant explanation that all forest management in Oregon labors under some sort of Ecoterrorist Reign of Ecoterror.

My point never was that eco-terrorism is leading to more fires. It was that a state that can and has harbored extreme environmental organizations is more likely to have environmental groups sue the federal government to stop logging that the groups openly discuss as being distasteful and negative. I'm not claiming that eco-terror groups are going out and starting fires, but that a state that regularly spawns eco terror groups has a large environmental undercurrent in it's politics that lead to more organizations that will sue to prevent practices such as logging from happening.

I'm not going to spend hours researching proof for a topic that I've lived and experienced for more then 20 years of my life in that state. My lived experiences in Oregon are one of extreme environmentalism being a regular occurrence, including camping in trees to prevent logging, lighting privately held businesses on fire, justifying wolves killing farmers livestock, and actively working to take away access rights of public lands in the name of environmentalism. I'm not going to spend a day sourcing all of these claims as they are easily discoverable via simple google searches.

I don't doubt your word that fringe environmentalist groups are pretty well established in Oregon.

That said, the idea that these groups (or prevailing attitudes behind them) are preventing some form of logging that would actually help with wildfires (and yet is commercially viable) is something that you're more or less just making up from your hunches and anecdotes.

At least here in Australia they just pull mature trees out and leave scrub as well as highly flammable waste behind.

A lot of people need their asses kicked over this sort of issue: higher on the list are people who build right into the bush then yell bloody murder about controlled burns. CA definitely has a lot of these people, and there's probably a fake "greenie" undercurrent in the attitude (a sentimentalization of the bush). But the "greenies messed it all up" is a simplistic morality tale usually promulgated by people who know nothing about fire management and are looking to find something other than climate change to blame for our recent dire years.

Yup. I've seen pictures of what's left behind after logging in some of the fire-affected areas in Australia. Not only did they do exactly what you said they left mounds of flammable waste in stacks to "rot" (or burn, as it did).

I wonder if it becomes economic if you factor in insurance payouts for destroyed houses as well as carbon and other pollution from the fires. It feels like something could still be done.

I know Americans hate the whole idea of taxes being used for useful things and would generally rather die a horrible death. But California usually seems a bit more European in its government style.

Has anyone done the maths on some kind of giant lawnmower that bags up the forest floor to create a fire break? Seems like it could be at a minimum burnt for electricity or anaerobically decomposed to hydrogen and be carbon neutral as a bonus.

The world would be better if there were an honest, non-manipulable, consensus way of including externalities in cost calculations.

> I know Americans hate the whole idea of taxes being used for useful things and would generally rather die a horrible death.

Your information is wrong.

<no real limits to logging

I am not sure what fantasy world you live in but it’s obviously not Oregon. The same type of groups that decimated the logging industry via the Spotted Owl are now going after dams via the fish. First they create this enormous fire hazard and now they want the water that fights it to wastefully run unimpeded into the ocean.

Regulated logging is.

Establish regulations to allow logging if a healthy forest is left behind, and the free market will fix everything else.

The term free market seems oddly incompatible with what you propose. Is a regulated market with oversight and checks and balances?ls "free market"? It seems the opposite to me.

Free markets are always regulated. I can't have slaves. In California, I can't have non-competes. I'm not allowed to dump toxic waste in the water supply. I need to take care of injured employees. I can't sell toxic food. Etc.

Free market capitalism is really good algorithm at approximating an optimal solution to the problem posed to it. Regulation is needed to define the problem.

Regulation is really poor at coming up with solutions to problems, and free market capitalism is really poor at defining problems.

I'd recommend a quick re-read of Adam Smith.

Building codes are an example of a bad regulations. They require e.g. a specific spacing of wooden beams, and specific materials used. That's regulation defining a solution. When people come up with better ways to achieve the same level of safety, it's banned.

In contrast, for example, a lot of codes around EMI and consumer electronics are good regulations. They require bounds on how much EMI is emitted, but leave the free market to solve the problem. That works well.

Fines and mandatory insurance are another example of good regulation, whereas bans are usually bad regulation. If there is an externality, a fine places a cost on it, and a free market can optimize to it. A ban distorts a free market. Mandatory insurance too allows us to price in the cost of externalities with market mechanisms.

In this case, if you allow logging where:

- Underbush has to be removed to within some level

- Trees ought to be left to a specific spacing

... and so on, things will work out okay.

If you require loggers to have insurance, such that if a fire breaks out where they logged within some time window, insurance covers the damage, very smart finance people will figure out which things are high ROI and which are low ROI, and things will work out even better.

  > I'd recommend a quick re-read of Adam Smith.

on that note, didnt "free markets" originally mean "free of rents", not "free of any intervention", correct?

I don't know history, but the Wikipedia definition is good: "In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market. In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority, and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities."

The "free" is on the forces of supply-and-demand, not a lack of regulations altogether (which is laissez-faire / anarchist). Wikipedia continues -- although with a bit of a non-sequitur in between, to explain that:

"All of these fields emphasize the importance in currently existing market systems of rule-making institutions external to the simple forces of supply and demand which create space for those forces to operate to control productive output and distribution."

Note that regulation is _external_ to supply-and-demand. It shouldn't interfere with the core concepts:

- Economic equilibrium

- Low barriers to entry

- Competition

- Spontaneous order

- Supply and demand

Overly simplistic assumptions.

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002...

https://www.sciencealert.com/logging-forests-to-halt-wildfir...

https://www.opb.org/article/2020/10/31/logging-wildfire-fore...

What evidence is there that logging reduces fires or fire severity?

A far bigger problem than environmental groups are those opposed to building regulations requiring homes be made out of non-combustible materials. Across mountain communities we continue to see materials that are more combustible than dead trees being used to build new homes. You can see the effect of this in fires: homes burned to ash, surrounding by scorched but not incinerated trees. The house burned hotter because of the materials it was made out of.

Homeowners, and local governments, consistently oppose retasking forest service fire fighting budgets, and making home insurance cover the true cost of the risk homeowners should assume for their voluntary decision to live in fire prone areas. Yes, they should pay the necessarily high premiums to live in these areas and protect their property. Why should everyone else subsidize this? It's not like living in fire prone areas has any national economic benefit, unlike living in certain flood prone areas: agriculture, and port cities.

Where we shouldn't be federally insuring homes from floods is on the goddamn beaches with not a farm or port for 100 miles. Those houses should only be able to get private, for-profit, hazard insurance - to help discourage people from building in risky areas, or suck it up and bear the true cost of managing the risk.

> making home insurance cover the true cost of the risk homeowners should assume for their voluntary decision to live in fire prone areas. Yes, they should pay the necessarily high premiums to live in these areas and protect their property. Why should everyone else subsidize this?

Thank you. It's the clearest solution to this problem and likely the only financially viable one. The years where exurban sprawl into every corner of the redwoods made economic sense are long passed.

But what if you are unable to move, e.g. for financial reasons?

It seems unfair that people who live in the woods and who live technologically simple lives would have to pay for the climate change induced by our modern lifestyles.

Living in fire prone areas is part of the modern lifestyle. People only started to build communities there once aggressive fire suppression policies were instituted. Before then, the builder/owner assumed all the risk.

The fires aren't caused by climate change, even if it's making them worse. Building a community out of combustible materials in fire prone areas, while suppressing natural fuel removal via fire suppression policies, is a much more direct cause for loss of property.

Are homes in these areas in the US built with rooftop sprinkler systems, compulsory rain water storage and so on to address the threat of fire?

People who move to these places will continue to vote for this crap… better for us as individuals not supportive of moral hazards at play here (these are not the only examples of some taking excessive risk, only to realize the costs of doing so onto others when it falls apart) to figure out a ways to not contribute financially to the racket so they can burn/flood themselves on their own dime.

No fuel, no fire.

A lot of work has been done on this in Australia, though the mostly eucalypt Australian situation might not apply to the US. It seems that at best logging has little effect on bushfires, and at worst logging makes them worse.

https://theconversation.com/native-forest-logging-makes-bush...

https://theconversation.com/new-research-finds-native-forest...

Actually one of our problems near the coast in California is that invasive eucalyptus trees are much more flammable than native trees.

There's no way to hold environmental organizations to task. They're just using the law advocate for their position, as is their right. If we want to improve the situation then we need to change the law.

There are social ways, such as what OP is doing by calling them out as at best well intentioned but actually disastrous .

OP is misrepresenting the facts, but OK, I guess it's their right to do that.

Edit: He said, "I was being hyperbolic to make a point,"

How so?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28137115

Rotting trees are great for the forest. They also don't burn. Honestly, try using a rotting log for firewood sometime. It's impossible. They suck up a lot of water, and release it slowly, as well as releasing a lot of nutrients into the environment. Most new trees start in fallen logs.

not if they re dry

Not really rotting then are they.

things can get dry and wet again

On the east coast, or the rainy northern California coast, this might be true. Not so sure its true in the relatively dry forests of the Sierra Nevada.

Rotting trees are good everywhere. If it's dry though, they don't really rot.

Well, that's certainly an opinion...

The lumber industries in the 90's were dead set on aggressively clearcutting old growth forest. Once environmentalists started having successes slowing them down, the lumber industry started using salvage logging exemptions to bypass environmental regulations and log protected areas. If a small fire ran through an old-growth area (a good and healthy event!), you could bet that it would soon be followed by an effort to cut down the 'damaged' surviving trees.

The Timber Wars podcast is a pretty great recent look at the forest politics of the 80's and 90's. I think it does a great job of presenting many sides of the issues. At the end, it demonstrates a much closer relationship between current working environmentalists and lumber operations, with environmentalists even working to keep a mill open at one point. (Because they, too, support selective logging and healthy forests.)

https://www.npr.org/podcasts/906829608/timber-wars

One flaw with blaming California liberals is that we've been seeing historic fires globally, up the northwest into Canada, Australia, Turkey, Greece, and truly planetary sized burns in Siberia.

I'm not convinced that dead trees in burnt areas are a major fire risk. Most of the fuel is already spent.

I'm okay with some logging. But it also increase the risk surface for invasive species infestations because you create disturbed areas with traffic.

The solution is more frequent, smaller fires.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...

Here is a US Forest Service expert from Oregon talking about why forest fires have become bad. The summary is that we have forests that are younger, denser, trees with inadequate forest management. We need more effort in clearing dead dry fuel, managing pests (that cause more dead dry fuel), limiting forest density, and introducing breaks between wide swaths of forest.

https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...

In Australia, one of the problems that we face (and we have much more of a culture of "let it burn" and doing controlled burns than CA) is that chaotic weather (almost certainly the result of climate change) has reduced the number of days available for controlled burns. You need pretty calibrated conditions to do safe controlled burns - not too wet, not too dry, and not too windy.

Last round of big fires in Australia, the scale of the fires were contributed to by fewer available days in the previous years to do the burning. Plenty of dipshits with axes to grind blamed it on the "Greenies" as per usual, but the people who manage the controlled burns had another story to tell.

Yeah, California desperately needs a plan to thin vegetation in it's forested areas. But it's disappointing people trying to leverage this aspect to "don't worry about global warming" or "see, it's really the environmentalists' fault".

It's similar in California. In the years leading up to the big Santa Cruz mountain fire in 2020, the scientists and forest rangers were aware of the increasing amount of fuel building up in the forest there. They simply weren't able to do the controlled burns they wanted because of a lack of weather windows for controlled burns. That area is also close to silicon valley so there are extra air quality requirements for the burns.

More articles like this please! Very well sourced, clearly stating the major nuances of the issue, and offering numerous actionable suggestions for fixes at multiple levels of individual and societal capacity. And (possibly most importantly) it carries itself with a positive and affirmative tone! I’m Disappointed at how negative the comments and nits here are.

I think the liability side of things is maybe one of the largest roadblocks to this. Any time one of these prescribed burns gets out of hand and burns down people houses or god forbid kills someone there's going to be a lot of backlash to these programs. It's the kind of pain as a preventative measure we in the US have been very bad at accepting.

I think in addition there's a lot of protection that can by had by ensuring when we do build back we build resilient building that can withstand fires. If there's going to be building in these areas they should be designed and landscaped to not burn down immediately; non-flammable roofs, flammable landscaping set back (I think) 5 feet from the house itself, etc.

Liability. Sounds like the same kind of mindset that has resulted in the US having an huge overabundance of C-sections over natural births.

Allegedly it's because the doctor can't be sued in the event of something going wrong, as they had done "everything possible" - even when it's not in the best interests of the mother and baby.

I've read there's maybe other even less defendable factors at play; namely convenience. It's much easier for the whole staff compared to a normal natural labor which can go on an indeterminate amount of time. At least if it's liability you could argue doctors were being excessively cautious, the apparent reasons here are pure convenience for the doctors over patients.

https://www.tipsonlifeandlove.com/health-and-wellness/c-sect...

Yes, easier to schedule a C-section than deal with natural birth arriving less predictably.

Seems like the liability problem could possibly be worked out if you had some entity that pays for the damages either way, and then they have an incentive to do the thing that has probabilistically the least cost. For instance, if the government agency responsible for forest management were to take out a fire damage insurance policy, and the insurance company were free to set different rates depending on how the forest is managed.

I think non-flammable buildings are a reasonable suggestion in general, but in a lot of cases the amount of heat involved in a serious forest fire just isn't survivable by any ordinary structure, even if the roof is steel and the walls are made of cinder blocks.

Landscaping restrictions might help, but it would have to be a lot more than 5 feet. And I think a lot of people would be justifiably resistant to restrictions such as requiring people to cut down all the large trees within a hundred yards of their house. Trees make the built environment much more pleasant to live in.

This isn't the original place I saw it but [0 p 49] specifically mentions the 0-5ft zone for protecting the home. It keeps flames from directly touching the house when combined with the larger exclusion zone so trees don't fall onto the house. Maybe if we combine the exclusion zone with a flammability metric for the house because as the house gets more resilient you can bring trees back in closer.

Just making sure insurance pays for everything only solves one part of the problem though there's still going to be a lot of pain from people having to go through rebuilding even if the insurance problem was completely smoothed out.

[0] https://headwaterseconomics.org/wp-content/uploads/building-...

The article sort of mentions it, but then doesn't fully conclude, the majority of the fires in north eastern CA are on federal land. CA policy, outside of law suits, doesn't impact Federal Landuse policy. Nearly all of the public land of the Camp, Beckwourth, and Dixie fires are BLM or USFS land. California can only do so much there.

There needs to be a comprehensive policy of the feds working with state and private interests.

Worthy research on this topic include Prof. Scott L. Stephens and Jon E. Keeley, PhD. The California Governors Task Force published a comprehensive document in January 2021 "California’s Wildfire and Forest Resilience Action Plan."

The Megafires call to arms here is contemporaneous and parallel to established channels and I say this bodes very well for it. The California fires problem is not a new problem but has become dramatically more threatening. The old guard that led the parade cannot be the ones to rise to this occasion, simply because old generals always fight the last war.

This succinct and fact-based presentation deserves our attention and support.

The liability for prescribed burns is a big issue. If the government agreed to co-insure landowners against escaped burns, it would make prescribed burning significantly easier. But right now, landowners have less liability if they just let fuel accumulate and it burns "accidentally" but dangerously than if they undertake controlled prescribed burning operations to reduce fuel loads (the right answer).

> … I continue to see eye-popping misinformation in prominent outlets like The New York Times. A widely shared article written by Jill Cowan (“California Fires: Why This Year Is Different”) made no mention of fire suppression as a major contributing factor, and bizarrely and falsely claimed that “burning Redwoods and coniferous forests” was “alarming” (neither Ms. Cowan nor her editors seem to realize that Redwoods cannot reproduce without fire).

They're probably unaware because it's not true. The source he cited (https://www.pbs.org/video/nature-why-giant-sequoia-needs-fir...) is about Giant Sequoias, not Redwoods.

Despite liking this article and wanting more burns, that last parenthetical is misleading/incorrect. Giant sequoia need fire to reproduce. Coast redwood, which is more common, taller, and what most mean by just "redwood" very much do not need fire and reproduce mostly by stump sprouting. Which they do an awful lot of (source: live in redwood forest, have to cut sprouts back constantly).

Coast redwoods are designed for periodic fire and fire suppression does cause problems, like build up of ladder fuel allowing fires to reach the canopy, but reproduction is not an issue.

Seems like a shame we can't just sequester all that unwanted surplus carbon somehow, but I can't think of a practical way to do it.

I suppose you could have some sort of program where the forest service designates areas that need thinning, and then people go out there with their pickup trucks and collect loads of organic matter, and no branches over, say, 6" in diameter. Loads get dropped off at a collection site, and the people are paid per mass. The organic matter either gets turned into products or converted to biochar and buried in a big hole somewhere.

That might work, but you'd probably need to pay quite a bit per ton to make it worthwhile to do mostly manually.

Maybe there's brush-clearing machinery that could make this economical to do on a massive scale?

Old fashioned logging can sequester whole forests quite effectively.

Would also produce blue collar rural jobs.

True, and in some cases it would be best to remove many of the full-grown trees. However, often times people would rather the large trees remain and just the combustible brush and debris removed (i.e. the organic material that would be removed by a prescribed burn done in ideal conditions). In this case you have plant matter that few people would object to being gone, but it doesn't have enough economic value to be profitable to remove without artificial incentives.

Controlled burns sequester carbon too, in the form of charcoal/ash.

Trying to reduce fuel load by pulling it out and buying it in a hole isn't a good idea, as it ends up removing important nutrients that forests need.

> Here are the facts ... California is naturally combustible.

One thing that bothers me about many write ups about nature is there often is this fallacy that returning to what was is the most ethical course of action. Why not take more radical action and aim to make California less dry?

Projects like Greening the Desert[1], Allan Savory on reversing desertification etc. suggest we could actually just create a non dry tinder California that wouldn't need either controlled burns nor megafires. In short the game is making the land retain far more water and allowing it accumulate until the region is entirely revitalized.

[1]: https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/

[2]: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_fight_desertif...

Every time I hear these types of comments, I think that someone read the first Dune book, but not the rest of the series. In this case, it’s a bit too on the nose.

I have been meaning to read those books. I have not read the first one either though.

It's just the logic doesn't work out for me. Just because something was doesn't mean something ought. So why is that seemingly always the presumed right path to pursue. Why do we always look to just make nature static to what it was 100s or 1000s of years ago?

I don't think you understand the link you're sharing or the article.

Undoing desertification restores a pre-existing ecology. All we have in California is a fire-based ecology, there's nothing else to restore. Some part of California are desert but these aren't the parts that are burning, what's burning is poorly managed woodlands that actually need more open space.

Allan Savory is at best a very stubborn misleading self-deluded crackpot. His ideas simply don't pan out. He shows his fancy power point slides over and over and sells his snakeoil.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Savory#Praise_and_critic...

Huh, i read what you linked and it's mixed. I'm not trying to imply he's right about climate change, but more about ecosystem change (rebuild soil, retain water)

The important part is that he claims that holistic grazing helps to make land (and thus the whole regional ecosystem) amazingly productive, but this simply fails to replicate. It's bad science, but it unsurprisingly refuses to die, because people like steak, a lot of people had enough of them damn' treehuggers, some people just see the nice pictures cow dung on the African grasslands, and intuitively feel that it "makes sense". (I felt too years ago.) And it does, but the attached grandiose claims don't.

I was in a bit of a hurry, but now with one more search I found one of my older comments about the same topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19797102

Skimming through the linked action plan [1], it largely resembles Australia's bushfire management strategy.

Unfortunately, what we've seen the past few years here in Australia, is that even prescribed burns and defensible properties aren't enough to stop massively damaging bushfires.

[1] https://fmtf.fire.ca.gov/media/cjwfpckz/californiawildfirean...

Places like Houston, Texas are also in an area of unfavorable nature -- namely huge amounts of flooding. Houston solved this as best they could with levees and dams and the like to steer that water away from people. It usually works. Sometimes not (Harvey), but every failure is a learning experience.

California needs to think this way. Fires are natural. We need to focus on steering them away from people. You wouldn't try to stop the rains that create the Texas floods, would you?

The frustrating thing about this argument is that you can't even begin to have it because it challenges climate change as the cause of the forest fires. This is completely stupid because climate change just makes it more important that we do prescribed burns for a couple reasons. First it makes the fires more likely, so decreasing the fuel to burn is that much more important. Second, fires themselves create more CO2, much more than prescribed burns.

Are we reading the same article? Here's the text from article mentioning climate change

# 4. Climate change hasn’t helped. “Increasing heat, changing rain and snow patterns, shifts in plant communities, and other climate-related changes have vastly increased the likelihood that fires will start more often and burn more intensely and widely than they have in the past,”

This article does a good job of acknowledging global-warming as a cause. Which I do too. I'm agreeing with it that the best way to respond is to do prescribed burns. They ameliorate the short-term and long-term ill effects of the megafires. Which ultimately contribute more to climate change. The frustrating thing is that no-burns is typically seen as the pro-climate change response, which makes a certain amount of sense because doing a burn puts smoke into the air. It's also naturally controversial because it affects the air quality around where you do the burn. No one wants to have smokey air. With a prescribed burn they blame the government. So it carries a lot of political liability.

Here's a train of thought, leading to an idea to reforest with highly endothermic plants. Am I crazy, or is this a positive action we could do?

Hacker News -> Siberia wildfires 28135792 -> comments -> Someone says Arctic lightning tripled in the last decade -> wind and waves cause clouds, cause lightning, cause fires -> Earth struggling against imbalance of air, fire, water -> Need a bigger earth -> go to Mars, or increase efficiency.

Forest fire destroys trees -> matter into energy -> too much energy, must capture and turn back into matter -> plant more trees, grow things that can use all this energy -> endothermic reactions -> google "endothermic plants" -> poststar.com -> lotus, water lilies, magnolias, Dutchman's pipes -> Royal Dutch Shell should grow Dutchman's pipes and seashells.

As tech people, could we invent something to harness human greed (like finance or Bitcoin) yet use it to create growth and help the environment? More political power in UN correlated with number of trees? If the performance metrics are right, everything is possible. A good community grows from metrics of upvotes/likes/"thank you"s.

All the same "You should have done XXX ten or twenty years ago" arguments. We know prescribed burns reduce the intensity of natural fires. For an article entitled "California Megafires are solvable" I wanted to see more "here's how to solve the current problems". And I'm not worried about California being the source of so much of my grown food. I think the central valley aquifer will be unusable within 18 years. I have no proof .... just a hunch.

How much is enough, when is enough enough, what is my purpose for existing, how can I be of service while not being taken advantaged of, and without unreasonable demands?

There being an energy imbalance in the world comes from somewhere. It could not have come, at least not so fast, without an imbalance in the human psyche for the last couple of hundred years.

This crisis may be of a more spiritual nature than is evident on the surface.

There is a need for reckoning, though it needs to start from within.

There is an organized crime component in the recent fires in Europe and US that nobody wants to see or much less deal with it.

Is all old history repeated again and again with decens of fires starting mysteriously at the same time and all the typical stuff. Only one of each three wildfires currently active in some parts of Europe are caused by lightning. This means that the majority are caused by man. Either by negligence or are -just- a crime. A boycott.

Blaming environmentalists where somebody is serially trying to burn people alive in their own homes, is just the extra laugh and cherry on top of this system.

We need better laws, harshest punishment, more resources and more political desire to investigate wildfires. And we need to stop assuming and repeating again and again that fires have a nice side, a good side, and are good management of nature. Period. We are not in the same situation as before. To release purposely much more carbon in the atmosphere when what we need is more time is a suicide.

"College lecturer charged with starting blaze near Dixie Fire"

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Dixie-Fire-Gary-Mayna...

Good job, and interesting also how they traced him remotely.

In Russia, in some regions there were mandatory 500m-1000m firebreaks in between forests, and residential areas.

I guess it will be very hard to force people to alienate 500m of their private land in USA.

I believe though, it will be a very sensible regulation everywhere with dense, fire prone forests.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...