Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them nearly impossible
boulderbeat.news
boulderbeat.news
Of course, the regular fires threaten and destroy these areas too. We've seen the destruction of Paradise, Berry Creek, Greenville, and Grizzly Flats in the last few years (just reading from Wikipedia).
Edit: Always need to mention that global-warming/climate-change makes this worse even if it was caused by local irresponsible behavior. Of course what climate hits first are areas where the local ecology already had problems (In before "It's not [Local bad behavior], it's climate change" or the opposite).
Forest fires of a historically typical magnitude would pose much less Danger to communities adjacent to wildlands. This is further complicated by the fact that any of these communities and dwellings were not designed for fire resistance because public policy at the time was no fires ever.
If that were the case, you would see at least some controlled Burns in undeveloped areas, but that is not the case. You might see more logging or a small low risk Burns near inhabitated areas.
The fact that we still see essentially no control burns is strong evidence that the barrier is Still what it has been for the last 100 years. Bad government policy informed by Environmental emotion instead of environmental science.
At the end of the day, the rationale is stupid but simple. People don't like the Aesthetics of a burn Forest for the smell of smoke in the air. Actual risk to life and property from controlled Burns can be effectively minimized. In some areas of the state they never existed in the first place and still don't exist
The solution isn't rocket science. You just start with small safe Burns adjacent to communities. Nobody wants to look at a burn scar for several years, so instead they roll the dice on their Community burning down
Controlled burns aren't just "light it up". You may need to create a firebreak. You may need to cull some trees as too many areas have lots of spindly, unhealthy trees that are going to make a controlled burn much harder to control. etc.
All of this costs manpower which translates to money.
My guess is there's no funding where there's no people and where there are people, there's funding but the people's arrangement prevents controlled burns.
Cal fire operates some small craft I think.
Perhaps very well funded for putting out an existing fire at a specific spot.
Controlled burns for prevention need to occur over VAST areas--it's an O(1) vs O(n^2) scaling problem.
At the time, the story told about the Cerro Grande fire was an inexperienced Forestry agent started a prescribed burn in the heart of the Spring wind season, leading to an inevitable wildfire that no local NM understanding local conditions would have approved. Probably the most expensive fire in NM history.
The story told of the Hermits Peak fire is another outsider Forestry agent tried to squeeze a prescribed burn into a very narrow “safe” time slot to stay “on schedule”. To no one’s surprise, the fire didn’t care much about the narrow slot of safety and the largest wildfire in NM history resulted.
I think giving a State powers to selective delay any specific prescribed fire within their borders (State, Fed, tribal) would have prevented both destructive NM fires. Local wisdom counts for something and at least the Feds don’t come off looking like idiots when things get out hand. Maybe the Feds and the State together would look like idiots, but not just those outsider Feds.
And logging doesn't fix things the way natural fires fix things. Logging companies only want big trees and a sustainable forest has big trees that survive fires and little tree that are removed by modest fires. Clear cut areas tend to burn quite intensely because they're all small tree.
When it comes to very large and very complicated problems we often get stuck arguing over which one piece is The problem or The cause or The singular thing. Over and over and over we get stuck arguing over which is the biggest or the only cause/solution.
A ton of the issues that we confront here are some of the most complicated issues that interweave technology, economy, ecology, humans, weird borders, power/influence, money, etc…
I know this is just semantics but I really do believe that for complex issues we’d get a lot further in discussions if we weren’t limiting ourselves to a silver bullet solution or the one cause.
I know it’s “just a casual internet forum” and i know we can’t (and shouldn’t) expect intense rigor on our comments, but i think the hn community has some good minds to discuss some of this and it pokes at me every time i see us (i do the same shit too) get bogged down with “well acksually the biggest cause” or “THE solution is…”
Sorry for the tangent poster and readers, but this minor quibble seems important.
A simple example is the two-factor, two-axis diminishing returns line graph. As cost goes up, returns decrease and we can point to a spot and discuss it.
I wish I could give you a good intuitive example of a far more complex (more factors), but if this were easy we'd all be doing it and we'd all be seeing such diagrams more frequently. So in the absence of simple and nuanced illustrations, we have lists and we necessarily fall back on language and our own biases like we do here. (Just humans being human, no judgement.)
One possibility I can imagine is a table with solutions on one axis and influencing dimensions on another. e.g., One axis is tech, funding, regulatory, etc. and the other is proposed solutions. In the table, the cross referenced cell might contain a number showing how much of some environmental dimension is needed for a given solution.
This example is crude at best because clearly we can debate what the cross-reference values assigned are, and whether or not they're correct, and even whether or not a dimension should be broken down further, but this technique's shortcomings are a compromise–the price paid for attempting to communicate the holistic understanding of an issue. One hopes that price is worth paying for greater appreciation of the issue's systemic complexities, and enabling others to see and evaluate factors they might not otherwise consider.
I fully agree. It's not just important, it's actually the essence of the problem.
1. Forest fires are hard to solve because many of the loudest voices on the topic are people who see them as an opportunity to bring up their favorite issue.
2. The fact that root causes are intertwined also means that real progress will be slow and potentially limited, at least in the short to medium term.
Even though there is this WUI problem, there's also the problem of past poor forest management, where fuel coats the bottom layer of many forests in the West. The forests are denser than the natural equilibrium, and they are primed to become wildfires because so much fuel has built up. That's a serious problem even without encroaching the WUI.
It's a complex problem, though various jurisdictions could probably implement more controlled burns than happen today and make the entire ecosystem a bit stronger.
I worry about the places where poor management leads wildfires to be so hot that they essentially sterilize the soil, preventing quick regrowth. At scale, that makes climate change worse.
… not that hard.
Controlled burns happen regularly in NC on state and federal land.
Let me clear that up for you, no, it is not possible. Society is suffering willful ignorance in so many aspects of day-to-day life that this is not going to change in our lifetimes if ever.
The citizens of that state should step in and make the changes, not the federal government.
These sorts of issues usually wind up in court, in which the circuit court would then certainly have the ability to force CO into acting properly. WY would just need to show that there was indeed damage. States fighting happens all the time (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_water_dispute for example), but rarely does it need to become a federal issue.
As long as the states imposing the barriers are bearing their own costs, I don't see reason for federal intervention. The situation gets complicated in the West, because a lot of the forest is federal.
If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government), and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck. That's just an unlucky act of god.
Ultimately it's a trolley problem.
And that's assuming other methods even exist. Much of the fuel that needs to be removed is in places where there are no roads, so the only way to remove that fuel would be hundreds or thousands of individual helicopter trips. No government is going to pay for that.
EDIT: Methods like tree thinning are manual methods and they are done routinely and they help. But they cannot take the place of controlled burns for removing large amounts of fuel and creating big fire breaks.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...
IIRC they actually had to temporarily displace the radioactive glass from the original Trinity tests as it was in danger from the fire.
It also caused other fires in the area, which weren't announced since it would make them look bad.
If you look at the wildfire map, it doesn't seem to be noted: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/3ffcc2d0ef3e4e0999b0c...
AB governance is terrible right now.
It's still got a much higher expected value to do prescribed burns have some of them turn uncontrolled than do nothing, or do what is happening now (pretend we can control for every variable).
When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing.
We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause unintended damage and harm, there's a person to institution to blame, so no one wants to take on that liability. So instead, we let brush grow out of control and eventually a mega fire hits that creates orders of magnitude more destruction and health hazard than the sum of all prescribed burns ever would have.
Another example is medical treatment. If you develop cancer and die because you get no treatment, there's no person to blame and no one to sue. It's just an "act of god" so people accept the outcome and move on. But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention.
The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse.
I don't know how we solve this problem. To me, the root of the problem seems to be a weakness of the constitution of our society and/or leaders.
Collectively, we need to figure out how to balance diffuse statistical risk against acute, dramatic risk, or else we all risk being the frog slowly boiled alive.
Do you have any examples of Government Regulations that are applied efficiently and do not cause harm to any individuals?
This thread is about managing and reducing harm in places where having “no harm” (whatever that means) isn’t an option.
Your bar for a government regulation is really “not a single individual is harmed”? That’s insane, and almost exactly the problem anonporridge was describing.
Almost every government regulation harms someone, in that it almost always is limiting the actions available to someone.
To answer your question: no, there is no such regulation, but it’s not relevant, because I think your metric is atrocious.
You're moving the bar a little there. There will always be harm to individuals due to the law of unintended consequences. However, government regulation is really good at preventing a "Tragedy of the Commons."
For instance, regulations on CFC emissions hurt a lot of individuals. However, they prevented a much greater tragedy.
Removing lead from car exhaust marginally hurt an entire generation, while improving the lives of the next by orders of magnitude.
Other examples: Building codes, Car Safety, Fair Labor Standards Act, Food and Drug Regulations.
Food safety, leaded gas and paint, restricted chemicals lists (for safety reason, less of a fan of drug bans).
Bank deposit reserve requirements. Obamacare. Antitrust legislation.
Seat belts (extremely controversial at the time, people protested the loss of their freedoms etc etc).
Alaska’s Permanent Fund. Norway’s government pension fund.
Mandating that the US postal service deliver to every address at a single price. This results in an efficient single price, efficiencies of scale that private carriers don't even have, and does not harm anyone outside of the externalities that would already exist for mail delivery regardless of who was doing the delivering.
There's a reason by China is having no problem rolling out high speed rail across the entire country on the order of a decade while California can't even roll out a single line in the same time.
China can just bulldoze entire villages while the little people have no recourse to resist. That power is incredibly useful for getting things done, but the big problem of succession makes that level of power incredibly dangerous, fickle, and fragile.
2) succession/plan B is always the problem with dictators/dictatorships.
If you’re lucky, the interests of those in power are genuinely aligned with your best interests and they’re competent - (Singapore/PAP, at least historically), but nothing lasts forever.
Doing the same in California would be 10-100x more expensive though, people are just cheaper there.
It isn’t even about 10-100x cost, if it was straightforward cash. It would be resolved in weeks if that was the case. In many of these equivalent situations, it drags out for decades. At that point, it’s a toss up if the project even makes sense anymore, since everyone who needed it when it was voted in/started has moved on (by necessity) to something else.
In China, the courts basically just say ‘which way does the CCP want this to go?’ and voila, that happens. For better or worse.
You’re correct on the impact to those folks, but there are also a LOT of other folks who benefit from the new rail (or should, anyway!).
At the end of the day, their strategy works for the majority better.
We’re deadlocked trying to not offend anyone (and get scammed by the contractors in the process). They say ‘fuck it’ and pave it over, and then tuck the little people in a closet and tell them to shut up or else.
But if they didn’t, they’d have no rail where they need to go, like…. us.
Eventually, without some compromise or balance, either system reaches a breaking point. Ours, we’ll eventually be so mired in shit not working that people will leave to somewhere different (if they can) wherever it’s really bad. Think NYC/Detroit/LA/etc. in the 70’s and 80’s.
In China, they crack down too hard (or stay too focused on ‘the plan’) that they destroy what they are trying to preserve/create. Either Violently (Russia), or by going broke/financial crisis (Japan).
By the time California HSR runs from LA to SF electric short-haul airliners will make the environmental benefits moot.
Autocrats often exist because ‘no one else can do what needs to be done’. They do this by being willing to be unphased by the threat of being ‘the bad guy’, or even reveling in it. They know as long as the folks in the background get what they need, they’ll actually be fine.
Narcissistic manipulation is when someone tells a story placing the blame for damage on someone or an institution while ignoring the actual context of that person or institutions actions so as to displace the blame/damage for their own actions (or lack thereof) and their own lack of ownership for the outcome. We’re awash in it right now.
It’s super toxic for everyone, and fighting it is extremely difficult to nearly impossible in the legal system because of rules designed to STOP this kind of manipulation (which is typical), and steady reduction in the consequences for ‘minor’ issues like Perjury and Contempt of Court which make failed attempts at this manipulation ‘free’.
Rules of evidence, standing, the way court ‘happens’, procedural things that cost time and money, etc. all play into it.
And the system inevitably ends up favoring bullshit, because anything but bullshit requires individuals take a stand and say ‘the rules say x, but in totality that’s bullshit and produces an unjust outcome so we’re doing something else’ is, well, not favored in the way the law works. Sometimes for good reasons, but it usually gets perverted in the day to day reality.
Of course a consequence of democracy is as you way - there are political consequences to unpopular (but necessary) actions, making such measures unpalatable for any but a second term president.
But we surely have navigated politically unpopular initiatives before, for the greater good of the nation. See: Civil Rights Movement.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-kin...
Basically, the "benevolent" half of the "benevolent dictatorship" is a long-shot at best and a total fantasy at worst. I think this is well-understood by reasonable people, but I'd also argue that "dictatorship" in this context is even more of a fantasy.
>An autocracy could make these trade-offs without political consequence
See, I don't think this is true at all.
Nobody rules alone, every dictator needs enforcers, those enforcers need enforcers, all the way down, and suddenly the well-oiled autocracy that can cut through red tape like butter looks more and more like it requires an endless hierarchy of "benevolent" (i.e. compliant) dictators or a bureaucracy overburdened by rules that was supposed to be democracy's great weakness.
Every decision you make as an autocrat is a gamble that your enforcers will carry out your vision faithfully, with a bunch of details you haven't even thought of also accounted for, while maintaining the facade that you are actually all-powerful.
All it takes is a few slip-ups for your underlings to have flexible loyalties, where "of course" you're in charge but maybe next time leave some wiggle-room for an alternative path of implementing your omnipotent decrees.
I completely agree with the parent poster. This is not a democracy vs autocracy question. This is entirely an individualism[1] versus a collectivism[2] question.
[1] Which prioritizes 'do not actively harm any individual.' [3]
[2] Which prioritizes 'do what is best for the group as a whole.' [3]
[3] While some societies are pretty clearly democratic, and some are pretty clearly autocratic (and some are a mix of both), every society is, to a mixture of degrees, individualistic, and to a mixture of degrees, collectivist. Where they differ is in where the line gets drawn, and on which questions.
We could point to death statistics and say "hey, that's provable harm".
But quantifying the loss of quality of life from spending a year indoors, screwing the labour market and supply chain, messing up kids' socialization etc was harder, so we mostly just kind of ignored it.
The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.
You can do challenge trials. Especially if you're going to let the virus spread through the population anyway.
Whether you let it run through the population anyway really doesn't matter though. If you push the untested vaccine out to the population, you might turn a manageable problem into an unmanageable problem.
Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks), distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices edit to add, because I forgot - for two months, and a few with immune compromises spending some more months isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped this single one from spreading.
But it's not going to happen because a significant fraction of the population: 1) don't care (either from the get go or after a period of time), 2) think spreading the disease is a positive ('builds immunity'), or 3) make 'statistical decisions' that fail at points.
Edit to add: I hope the downvotes are because I forgot to add the "for two months" to paragraph two. This could all have been over and done with between April and June of 2020 (or maybe a few months later to give time to ramp up mask production). Oh well, at least big Pharma made big bucks.
This is delusional. China did far more than this and still was not able to control Covid. And even in a fantasy world where you could actually stop all human-to-human contagion, many respiratory viruses have animal reservoirs, making the entire exercise pointless.
It's comforting to think that it's all just a collective action problem and if people could be a little more self-sacrificing, we could make it go away, but it's simply not the case.
> And even in a fantasy world where you could actually stop all human-to-human contagion, many respiratory viruses have animal reservoirs, making the entire exercise pointless.
None of this contradicts GPs claim that it would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses. Quite a few (common) respiratory diseases don't have animal reservoirs and would be effectively eliminated.
And sure, SARS-CoV-2 did end up in animal reservoirs, but nipped early enough in the bud this either wouldn't have happened, or would have been controllable (with respect to animal-to-human transmission).
It's not about preventing the spread, but about controlling the rate so that hospitals don't / didn't get overwhelmed.
One of the early countries to get hit was Italy, and the army had to be called in to help with the logistics of taking away the body bags / coffins. A year after the pandemic started there were still refrigeration trucks outside of some morgues because of capacity issues:
* https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/us/new-york-coronavirus-victi...
Everyone on the planet will eventually probably get COVID, but as long as it's not at the same time, there are chances for treatment for those more heavily effected (some folks are fortunate enough that it's no worse than the flu; others suffer for months (e.g., Physics Girl)).
When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms.
I think, as the other poster noted it really comes down to the individualistic nature in which we try and address some of these collective action problems. We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.
I don't think this is true, or at least it is nonobvious. Are prescribed-burns-gone-wrong more likely to harm the most vulnerable, as compared to unprescribed burns? If not, then this objection doesn't really apply.
At the same time this is happening, there are countless people working outdoors or in other sorts of conditions where they don't have such luxuries. And the cost is masked because, somewhat like smoking, many of the consequences happen over many years if not decades. And even when you do hit a climax, it may be argued that the bad air contributed, but did not provably cause, e.g. some cardiovascular event.
Of course, if you don't burn - then a lightning strike, or a firebug, means you're going to really burn. Clearly we need an army of sheep. Gah, then people would complain about the methane and massive marbled mutton fests. Cripes things are tricky.
Texas capped medical malpractice damages, because surely, all the frivilous lawsuits were the reason for driving up medical costs. This resulted in gems like this guy maiming dozens of people[1].
You couldn't sue him, because lawyers aren't going to front their own money to take on a case like this, when the likely awards will exceed legal costs. Hospitals wouldn't fire him, because he'd sue them, and because they get a share of the business he brings in. Other surgeons couldn't pooh-pooh him, because he'd sue them.
Presumably, if he maimed someone who had enough out-of-pocket money to pay a lawyer, and then vindictively pursue litigation against him, this could have been resolved earlier. That's a lot of 'if's. In practice, he just... Kept on maiming people, shielded by protection from financial liability.
[1] https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2016/novem...
Yes. Because those planning the controlled burns will take more care in ensuring the politically powerful are not as likely to be harmed by the burns. If a controlled burn goes wrong it's more likely to fall on those who have less power.
Also, if the politically powerful are negatively impacted by the burns, their losses are more likely to be adequately socialized, while those that lack political power are more likely to bear the costs directly and individually.
A few months back I was visiting family in New Mexico and chatting with some locals. I asked offhandedly about if they did controlled burns out where we were… and boy did I immediately realize it was a sore subject. Last year, the US Forest Service set off the biggest wildfires in the state’s history doing controlled burns, by irresponsibly starting them in the windy season and not monitoring appropriately.
“Only” a hundred or so homes were destroyed, but imagine if the federal government were to burn down your home, livestock, and property only to abdicate any responsibility and fail to have any modicum of transparency or accountability. The nominal monetary damages do not nearly capture the social harm caused by the incident, and there’s been little trace of accountability when it comes to the policy makers who approved the burn, living thousands of miles away and suffering none of the impact.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-mexico-wildfire-prescribed-...
https://www.fs.usda.gov/news/releases/statement-chief-randy-...
I am disenchanted with our current system for executing them in the US, however. Like you say, we need a system for accountability to deal with the externalities.
Wherein you've created the same problem in the opposite direction. Who's going to volunteer to do controlled burns if they can be held personally liable for failures?
Starting from "prove you didn't cause the problem" with such a dynamic and hard to control activity is setting up the same issue.
Professional engineers ARE held personally liable for failures. That’s why there aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be extremely conservative and most things they sign off on are very limited in scope.
No sane PE would ever sign off on a realistic prescribed burn plan, because they couldn’t control the variables enough to not get ruined. Any plan a PE would sign off wouldn’t be implementable because, surprise, conditions change rapidly and it’s not economic to do detailed real-time surveying of overgrown areas that need prescribed burns all the time.
You're not contradicting anything, that's literally the topic of this subthread. From the GGP:
> We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.
However, even in a world without such countermeasures, if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing, it stands to reason that simply paying the price for the negative externalities would still be logical and it would have the advantage that those negatively impacted by those externalities would not feel like they are disproportionately bearing the burden of the action.
> But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention.
Doctors still have a lot of cover, even if they make a mistake, for exactly that reason. The real challenge for doctors is the difficulty preventing the litigation itself. Even if they win in court, the consequences of being subject to so many lawsuits are dramatic.
> The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse.
I think the bigger problem is that mitigating climate change will necessarily change the winners and losers, and the current winners have more power than the current losers.
Actuaries should be able to figure out reasonable values for the probability of some costly outcome (e.g., a massive, uncontrollable wild fire) given specific behaviors or conditions (e.g., letting property grow into being a wildfire risk, vs reducing that risk by clearing overgrowth), and for risks with costs that a person/company can't ever cover (e.g., a massive wildfire), those responsible entities should have to carry insurance, who can incentivize or implement cost-reducing preventative actions in the places with greatest risk.
In the climate change context, the price of dumping GHGs into the atmosphere is nowhere near the cost. If we priced that in, economics would rapidly make renewable | nuclear power projects, public transit projects, shifts away from concrete in construction, etc economically obvious choices. But we've messed up the prices, and these messed up prices incentivize people to ignore problems or worse, spend societal quantities of money and labor on growing the problems.
We need the EPA's emissions/particulate rules to be adjusted to give priority to prescribed burns by certified firefighters and foresters. They don't do burns often enough that the EPA should be limiting their power to manage fire susceptibility. We also need watchdogs to make sure that regular polluters don't increase output during prescribed burns in order to hide their actual emissions.
But you don't get to use your perception of inevitability to cause harm and financial damage for someone else.
I feel that this better illustrates the downsides of centralized power: centralized decision making won’t be as efficient as decision making done at the nodes, closer to the actual problem because of missing context and data; and maybe even indifference
For the record, I am not saying that there are no benefits to centralized planning and control. This is just one of its weaknesses besides corruption
It's nice to have a handy phrase for this effect.
In some places, proscribed burns are routine. Just not in the place that the article is about.
Heck, the Chicago Parks District does proscribed burns in Lincoln Park, which is a very urban location.
Or, to put that another way: instead of controlled burns where you're actively setting the fire, why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out?
Per my understanding, part of performing a controlled burn is mustering more resources near the burn (spatially and temporally) than you could reasonably maintain near every possible burn site all the time.
If conditions aren't appropriate, then you're back to status quo of containing a wildfire; but maybe the firebreaks help somewhat?
(Would need the opinion of someone knowledgable in wildfire fighting rather than random internet peeps to know if this approaches a reasonable idea at all though; I'd wonder if it's reasonable to build and maintain general purpose firebreaks in large forests at all; and what effect that would have on the habitability of the forest for its flora and fauna)
A fire of any reasonable intensity can easily jump a firebreak with a decent wind. And then there's spot-fires, which are like voodoo, you can be fighting a fire in front of you and have fires suddenly 300m behind you.
All they really do is give you a point to fight a fire.
The goal is to enable the use of controlled burns as a valuable tool for land management and wildfire prevention while adequately addressing concerns related to potential negative externalities.
> Heather Heward is a senior instructor at the University of Idaho who teaches about forests and fires. She said it’s not just federal land we need to be thinning and burning, it’s private land, too.
> “We have a real lack of (prescribed burn) practitioners, specifically on the private land side, that are able to do this work because – we're scared, honestly. We are scared that something will go wrong and that someone will sue us. I'm scared of that,” she said.
kids grow up without taking enough risks and it affects their brain development
we've sacrificed healthy risks for unhealthy fear
It’s common to the main deontological ethical frameworks including the Judeo-Christian models that underpin “western values.
The “solution” is to take a Consequentialist approach, though most people fail the trolley problem and find consequentialism repugnant, so I don’t think we will solve this problem any time soon.
(Most people are familiar with Mills’ hedonic utilitarianism, but it’s quite simplistic; I’m a big fan of Eudaimonia as your value function, and richer systems like two-level utilitarianism as a way of getting round the “calculate everything all the time” problem with some utilitarian systems.)
You can improve the retention basin by adding a pump to actively manage the basin's capacity. When there is rain in the forecast, you pump water out of the basin, reducing its water level. When the rain arrives, you turn off the pump and let the basin refill. This increases the amount of water that the basin is able to divert during the storm.
I worked with a company that designed such a system and we even installed a demonstration unit for a municipality. It worked as intended and the city engineer advocated for expanding the project to all suitable basins. However, when the municipality's lawyers looked at the project, they argued that if the system failed to activate prior to a storm, the city might be liable any flooding that occurred afterward. Of course, the scenario where the system failed to function was identical to one in which it had never been built in the first place*, but that was not a convincing argument and the project was killed.
* I like escalators because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. - Mitch Hedberg
I don't know how to fight that.
In other words, these are situations where the incentives for individuals are not aligned with incentives for the group.
I got to work on a helicopter used for fire. It was a 1980s French something or another. It took an RPG in Afganistan and was refurbed to live in the pacific northwest.
The crew makes an insane amount of money. They are tickled with how many fires there are a year and how they "have" to be put out. I'm talking areas so far away from houses that it takes an hour to get there by helo, dump a few buckets, then an hour back. MAYBE in a 9 hour shift you get 12 buckets dumped.
This vehicle has only one turbine engine and goes through about 300 gallons an hour. There were two blackhawks in the same area that burn twice that, two engines.
Think of the money to make it not only profitable, but exceptionally so, to run vehicles that burn 300 gallons an hour for 8-12 hours a day, per helo, per engine, with crew, and the millions it costs to upkeep, cert, logistics, insurance, etc.
This is business now. And that's just one annecdote about helos. When you see people and machinery it takes to run firecrews, it's a wonder there aren't even more firecrew arsonists than there already are.
Luckily, we had a heavy monsoon season last year and a brutal winter. So much water that roads/levees have broken and lakes that are normally dry beds were overflowing. This has abated the normally horrible winds of April/May. This wet and abnormally calm weather has allowed for some action and I'm beyond pleased to have seen numerous prescribed burns in the forests around town this year. I really hope they can keep it up and treat a few thousand more acres before conditions turn.
The forest service seems like it does a good job here with fuel and flood management. There are still pockets of land that are wayyyy overladen/undertreated but much of the area, especially near town has been treated with thinning and slash and burn piles.
Unfortunately, the logging industry here is deteriorating and one of the longest-running operators closed shop. A few factors contributed to this, including the failure to open an OSB plant in Winslow, and the closure of a local mill just before the turn of the millenium. A damn shame, as logging ops really bolster the ability of the FS to manage fires.
In more northern areas, a lot of snow and water means a lot of grass, and that grass will dry out by August.
It's not kindling, but it's the paper.
Unfortunately, we've got a bunch of events coming up that are going to draw big numbers of off-roaders and 'overlanders' who are, imo, some of the worst and least responsible recreators. Some of us are bracing for fires being started by them.
This is why we now have to deal with a ton of regulations. Some wildfires will always happen when controlled burns get out of control and it's nobody's fault, but we need to decrease the number of them that are the direct result of somebody doing something very stupid.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calf_Canyon/Hermits_Peak_Fire
Risk aversion isn't prudent, ethical, or professional either. It's a source of false conflict whose purpose is to centralize the objector so that they can direct and manage a proposed change. This is from someone who has been working in security for longer than most. It's something I find repulsive about some of the people who have joined the field, where once it was hackers who used elevated competence to judiciously take risks, and now it's authoritarian personalities who use affected fear and appeals to uncertainty under the guise of safety to position themselves as gatekeepers.
The same is true for government policy on controlled burns. Nobody ever gets fired over mega wildfires, even though their gatekeeping is the direct cause of them.
If you handle small issues, it’s similar to handling small fires and not letting the small fires eat away at a certain portion of the forest.
I don't want my {critical infrastructure} to "fix things quickly and break things" at a critical moment, where I would have really needed that system.
Those things can be scheduled and announced, so I can plan ahead and expect outages at that time.
Sure.
But the problem is that there are incentives to keep pushing the middle ground closer towards eventual system collapse.
It's never the right time to see if the backup generators can take the building load. But during real emergencies, it's amazing how common it is for the backup generators to not work for one reason or another.
How about a test outside normal working hours?
It is possible, to meassure the power output before and then plug in enough stuff, that draws roughly the same.
But yes, it is more convenient to not do it and continue buisness as usual and hope for the best.
My point is, that in most cases, you can test and fix critical stuff and also fix problems created by your fixes, if you make it an important issue and plan accordingly. However, I did not say it is necessarily easy.
> not letting the small fires eat away at a certain portion of the forest
Funny enough, small fires are very healthy for many forests and even _necessary_ for some. For example, Some trees do not drop seeds until there are fires. EG: "Giant sequoias are the largest trees on Earth. They can grow for more than 3,000 years. But without fire, they cannot reproduce." [1]
Further, the clearing of underbrush can be good for animals as they can move around more easily, hunt, gather, etc.. [2] Though, what is really not good for them are the mega-fires that burn so hot that it burns trees & everything 100% up to the top of the tree (killing it) and also several feet underground.
So, perhaps another analogy is that every year is like adding gunpowder into the forests. Setting this alight every now and then is good, but let it build up too long and it becomes a bomb. Areas that have burned in the PNW tend to look really healthy 1 to 3 years later. On the other hand, areas that have "over" burned in California with mega fires are drastically impacted, as if a nuclear bomb had went off and killed everything.
At the end of the day, prescribed burns is an amazing tool to create a defensive patch work of lower-combustion areas that help prevent fires from becoming mega-fires that are super-impactful to everyone and everything.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/giant-sequoia-needs-fire-gro... [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/explainer-how-wildfires...
Example: An Oregon sheriff arrested a USFS employee supervising a burn that got out of hand and torched private property. The FS was crying foul and saying it was an act of god, but there were warnings for burning that day because they conditions were so unfavorable (the county may have had an outright burn ban). The only reason the FS employee decided to burn is because that's what he was supposed to do that day. And he was legally okay, since it was federal property, but then it got onto private property next door...
For some reason the FS in particular has this problem. Most of them are alright people but the institution and culture needs serious reform.
https://www.sfgate.com/california-wildfires/article/Estrada-...
These two groups need to sit down and compare notes.
Stitches suck, but they’re better than dying of cancer, or gangrene.
> "Also included in the prescription are optimal weather conditions, including a minimum temperature for burns in grass and brush of 30 degrees and a maximum of 80 degrees; relative humidity between 5% and 40%; and wind speed between 2 mph and 15 mph. Such conditions are becoming rarer."
If you broaden the acceptable range of conditions, you risk more prescribed burns going out of control, and you generate more air quality issues - and Colorado, like the California Central Valley, has some pretty bad air quality already:
https://www.cpr.org/2022/04/12/front-range-air-quality-ozone...
Note that prescribed fires aren't the only way of removing excess vegetation, there's mechanized mowing and goat herds for example.
Which works fine for the areas east of the Flatirons (that is, the plains), but that's only half the county. A real problem for wildfire management is that they often happen in areas that we consider undevelopable, which is to say, difficult to get into and out of.
I recall going climbing in Boulder Canyon some decades ago, looking up at some burn scars and thinking "it would be several hundred feet of technical climbing to even reach where that fire occurred". Fighting it would be simply out of the question, and prevention without controlled burns would be just as difficult.
Other changes include that around 1900 settlers of the western US introduced livestock that ate grass, which in turn removed potential fuel for smaller fires, and enabled smaller trees to grow.
After a hundred years of fire prevention, you end up with very different forest density. As the fire manager of Santa Fe National Forest noted: “On this forest, it’s averaging about 900 trees per acre. Historically it was probably about 40.” The result is a much bigger fire risk than previously. https://unintendedconsequenc.es/morals-of-the-moment/
http://nationnews.ca/community/fire-keepers-bring-back-cultu...
It especially makes sense in the context of BC where pretty much the whole province is actually unceded first nations territory; the indigenous groups there never signed it away to the Crown like they did here in Upper Canada.
The US economy needed more controlled burns and small "fires" - eg restricting spending back a long time ago when that could've been done without major consequences, unlike now.
Similarly, as a parent, allowing your child to experience small failures so that they are less at risk of big failures.
Small failures that don't cause ruin = increased strength. Reminds me of the antifragility concepts.
Research has also shown its net carbon negative.
Not only that but they store water better, too. They’re less likely to burn as they stay wetter later in the dry season and hold onto rain and atmospheric moisture far better.
Cutting down old forests was a much worse idea than anyone would have guessed.
It's species dependent.. Cutting down trees that take 250 years to mature probably isn't sustainable for example.
However, logging can be a carbon negative practice if done with correct practices and the correct species. You're literally taking the mass of the air and turning it into a useful building material.
I'll try to find a source
California should have regular wildfires. It's part of the ecosystem. Government regulations that prevent fires have created the tinder box we have now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok&pp=ygUjbG91aXMgc...
The system is broken.
It sounds like you're trying to scapegoat environmentalists when the recent tragedies were obviously the fault of PG&E mis-managing their assets and refusing to allocate more budget or personnel to manage what are obviously tinderbox scenarios.
The litigation is primarily from environmental groups.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/features/shortleaf-pine-future-requi...
And if you're into delicious mushrooms, Morels.
A prescribed burn should burn out annual plant growth and leaf litter not perennial plant trunks.
I wonder if we stopped killing wildlife wholesale if we would see reductions in this overgrowth. Although I wonder if any native species would be able to handle the insane numbers of Russian Thistle/Tumbleweeds.
Honestly, the fools that prevent these end up suffering when fires and deer accidents jump up.
What about surveil forests with drones. I'm sure that will help people hold their sh*t together and be responsible of their actions. I'm sure wildfires will drop drastically.
If we do, then it seems to make sense to try to maintain the same frequency - that, I assume, would be best for the plants and animals which have adapted to that.
This is just one of many reasons why controlled burns are difficult, even if they are a net life saver.
Expected value and all that.
"Selective logging" I'm afraid is not remotely an effective way to control fire. The fuel loads are often not the trees, but the leaf litter, shrubs, bushes and so on.
That is equivalent to saying sulphuric acid kills cancer.
While true, it does other things too like kill normal cells.
Likewise, broadly scoped regulation can hamper freedom and prevent people from doing otherwise harmless activities. Worse, it paves the way for selective enforcement. Think about federally mandated drugs regulation and how that is abused by biased authorities.
Terrorists like Gary Maynard, Alexandra Souverneva, Viola Liu...
800 wildfires in California in 2022 were arsons.
100 people killed or still missing. Many killed only in one wildfire by the mud floods that came later. Helicopter pilots and firefighters killed. More than 13500 homes and human structures destroyed only in 2020 and 2021.
Not all fires were deliberated, but too much wildfires were deliberated to be statistically random. We'll never know how much of them were attacks. A few people managed to spread chaos in entire villages, forced the authorities to evacuate tens of thousands of people, nuked the local budgets, and introduced a lot of tension in the economy and society. And it cost them practically nothing.
And I'm not talking about the people killed and injured, or the natural resources lost (like millions of liters of freshwater stored in the area that were lost and have some, non negligible, economical value).
"Maynard's fires were placed in the perfect position to increase the risk of firefighters being trapped between fires" [1]
If this is not terrorism, nothing is. Don't fool yourself. The only difference between a "non cleaned" and a "cleaned" forest (whatever it means), is that the terrorist will carry its own can of gas.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026700103/former-college-pro...
Or we could try something different and jail the arsonists. Respect the soil and let the forest accumulate water and include thousands of new species.
Many, many ecosystems require fire for their life-cycles. Without reasonably regular fires, some species can go extinct.
The soil fertility, for example, in Australia is so poor, and there's not enough moisture for fungi etc to break down the leaf-litter, that unless there is a fire valuable nutrients remain unavailable and it impedes growth.
No offense, but it's fairly clear you have never stepped in the forests that this is a problem. It's not yearly grass. It's 50 years of buildup. You make a 12ft high and 30ft wide pile of this stuff then please tell me about goats.
From experience, had a bone fire that lasted three days before it was out.... Goats...
Along the same lines, you have an excellent wolf feeding solution, now to find the problem it solves!
I think what you're describing is a total fantasy.
Thousands of puppets ear-whispered to break the laws. Then there came the consequences, the dry, the mud flood, the people killed and the houses burnt. The best joke is to blame the green and the hippies.