Fire Slow, Fire Fast, Fire Deep (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Fire Slow, Fire Fast, Fire Deep (2016)

longnow.org

I used to live in Africa, and the park rangers would do controlled grassland burns, every year.

I now live on Long Island (New York). We have the Pine Barrens, out east. They are an important filter for our aquifer, and are (rightly) protected. I have family that was heavily involved in establishing said protection.

Scrub pines (what makes up the Pine Barrens) are supposed to burn, from time to time. It's actually something that is required, in order to ensure the trees continue reproducing.

A few years after I moved here, (early 1990s), we had a major Pine Barrens fire (accidental). We have not had one, since, and I don't think anyone has the political stomach to do a controlled burn.

Are small fires being actively put out in the Pine Barrens? Or have they just not had a natural fire yet?

I'm not sure. I suspect any fires that pop up, are doused by the local vollies.

I have family that work for the NJ forest fire service and they are always doing small controlled burns. Like, all the time. Ranger goes out with a small sprayer, spreads some accelerant, and watches.

There was a controlled burn in April, and the state recently published a 150 page "Central Pine Barrens Comprehensive Prescribed Fire Management Plan".

https://www.eastendbeacon.com/controlling-fire-in-long-islan...

https://pb.state.ny.us/our-work/prescribed-fire-management-p...

That's great news!

Thanks for sharing it!

I mention this talk whenever the subject of fire in California comes up. It’s an amazing explanation of how we wound up in this situation and some reasonable ways out. The role of the Native American’s practices being abandoned is seriously under understood.

Mike Davis (author of Late Victorian Holocausts) had a great interview on the podcast Trueanon about California fire policy. While the fire situation is definitely exacerbated by global warming, there are tons of state level land management policies that are making the situation worse.

I've never heard of this book before. It looks very interesting (albeit probably very depressing).

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

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/feb/11/historybooks.m...

for comparison -- below is current, public policy in California 2021

https://www.fire.ca.gov/media/ps4p2vck/californiawildfireand...

And here's an interesting article on the subject with lots of visuals:

https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/bb7fe74c1f9f4fec8910a1b...

They're definitely starting to pay lip service to the idea of prescribed fire, but the goal is 100,000 acres by 2025. Last year, just the August Complex fire was 1,000,000 acres.

That is public policy in California's state controlled lands. Many of our largest wildfires have burned on federal land. There is some cooperation between state and federal authorities but there are significant differences in forest management policies.

US Dept of Agriculture is the authority over the US Forest Service; one recent statement here:

https://www.usda.gov/sites/default/files/documents/climate-s...

Surely there is some way to sequester the carbon in those trees? Seems preferable to letting them burn and releasing it back into the atmosphere.

Maybe we could chop the trees down and build homes out of them? Could help w/ California's homelessness problem...

One problem is infrastructure- how does one cut, process, and transport enough lumber to meaningfully affect homelessness or fire risk, and not build up an equivalent carbon footprint? I suppose an idea would be to construct the homes where the lumber is, but then you run into a host of other problems: building a housing development miles away in the middle of brushland exposes the people in it to increased higher fire risk, and would still require a significant investment in infrastructure (and thus carbon output) to put in place. Lets not forget that California is still undergoing record draught each year and there's still plenty of other vegetation at risk here- fire risk can only be mitigated so much by this sort of deforestation.

I was going to suggest burying the wood, but my guess is this would just increase methane emission from microbes, which is far worse than the CO2 released by burning.

I think controlled burns are still the best option at the moment.

There are already cities in California surrounded by forest. We could expand them by adding new homes, building robust fire-fighting infrastructure (including fire breaks) in the process so the homes don't burn down.

My intuition is that a city will be easiest to defend from fire if its area-to-perimeter ratio is low, i.e. it is big. For example, there is no real risk of San Jose burning down in a fire, because its area (square of the radius) means it has lots of water mains and firefighters, while its perimeter (linear in the radius) is comparatively defendable. That suggests the strategy of expanding existing forest cities.

I see your point, though I'm still skeptical that it would be sustainable. At best, it would have a marginal effect on the overall fire risk, a significant effect in local fire risk, and some effect on the housing crisis (I admit having almost no understanding of the situation, but reasonably suspect it is a complicated and interwoven issue).

I appreciate that this ecologist advocating for controlled burns is named "Pyne."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com