California will begin backing intentional burns to control wildfire
freethink.com
freethink.com
The author's digression into European's attitudes toward Native Americans doesn't seem to add much to the discussing except give them some cultural warrior brownie points.
[1]https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/california-needs-more-fire...
> In May 2018, then-governor Jerry Brown set a goal of burning 500,000 acres of wildlands each year by 2023—a start at treating the 20 million acres that California’s Forest Carbon Plan estimates would benefit from prescribed fire or manual thinning.
https://www.fdacs.gov/Forest-Wildfire/Wildland-Fire/Prescrib...
38% of California is desert, and much of the rest (much of that, too; 47% in total) is controlled by the federal government.
California is not like Florida in a lot of ways more significant to this discussion than being larger.
I would assume that forests on federal land are managed by the federal government, and forests owned by the state are managed by the state. California might not have a lot of say whether prescribed burns happen on federal land.
It has a lot do when you discuss California’s land use policy, which does not apply to nearly half of California, including an even larger share of the land to which controlled burns might sensibly apply, which are largely national parks or national forests.
Many of the controlled burns in Florida take place in Everglades National Park, which includes the largest federally protected wilderness in the Eastern US. I don't see how this objection changes anything. Is the federal government preventing controlled burns? Since when has that ever been a policy?
To directly answer "is the federal government preventing controlled burns?" They will definitely prevent controlled burns during the dry season. More, they have to fund doing the burns. Story I saw linked earlier was https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026137249/with-extreme-fires.... https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire is about as far as I got on my quick dive looking for details on how to run a controlled burn. I don't see an obvious link for seasons that they run these burns.
This story, ultimately, is about finding a way to insure private run large scale burns. The state built up an accredited set of associates, now they are leveraging them to try and make an insurance market for limiting liability.
(At least, that is my read of the situation. There is definitely a ton of talking past each other in this topic.)
I want to be clear, I'm not a climate change denialist -- climate change is real, and it's an imminent threat -- but forest fires are not exploding simply due to climate change. The reality is, once you've built up enough fuel, the only way out is by burning it. We no longer suppress wildfires to the same extent, and so they grow much larger.
Also, for what it's worth, the PNW had wildfire season prior to the implementation of the 10am policy. In 1895, in Tacoma, WA, Mark Twain joked about the wildfire smoke: "Really, your scenery is wonderful. It is quite out of sight."[0]
The reality is, our forests grew up alongside not only natural wildfires, but human-instigated wildfires for the purposes of ecosystem management by native tribes. We spent a couple hundred years trying to implement a "better" system, by ignoring the natural processes of the past 10,000 years. It shouldn't be a surprise that we're in a bad place now.
0. https://crosscut.com/2019/09/wildfires-are-burned-washington...
Corner someone at a trump rally, and they may never have set foot in California or a forest, but they'll be familiar with the concept of "intentional burns" because the daily wire or fox news or newsmax would have said it as they dismissed "liberal alarmism" over climate change.
It fits a convenient narrative which is that all of society's problems are just because of big government interceding in their lives.
Telling these people that "Actually California, BC, and North America, do intentional burns all the time" does nothing because it contradicts the propaganda they've heard. And they'll assume it's a lie.
Saying "Fine, we'll START doing intentional burns" may have a chance.
~2021, NPR.
Doesn’t seem like they did much between 2018 and 2021
All of the talk about whether or not successful controlled burns should be done are somewhat moot. Nobody is arguing against that. Pretty much they never have. The barriers seem to have always been in costs associated with containment and what happens when that goes wrong.
Edit: I should add that I stated the "never have" too strongly. It was never unanimous that it was a bad idea. I would be a wrong if I said absolutely nobody ever said it was a bad idea.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fight-fire-with-fire-if-epa-all...
> Under the Clean Air Act, wildfires are considered “exceptional events,” and the pollutants they emit are typically exempt from regulatory scrutiny. Prescribed burns generally receive no such exemption when the Environmental Protection Agency measures a state’s compliance with air quality standards. States may face penalties including loss of federal highway money if they exceed pollution standards while mitigating against more harmful smoke from wildfires.
...
> Obtaining an exemption for a prescribed fire under the Clean Air Act is already so arduous that states are reluctant to implement or expand burn programs. The Government Accountability Office recently reported that the approval process is so burdensome that only one state has submitted and been granted an exemption from the EPA, a project in Kansas in 2012.
If you do prescribed burns early in the season, the fires will be small, and not out of control (generally). That prevents worse air pollution later.
In general this differentiation between "acts of God" and "acts of Man" is a real problem. You neglect a forest until it burns down a community, and you're innocent. It was an act of God. You try to prevent that from happening by doing controlled burns, something goes wrong, and it burns down some houses; busted.
I can't recall exactly how far behind they are, but if they're permitted to put aside those constraints (unlikely) it'll still take decades at this point.
Here's a paper published in 2020.
https://www.mdpi.com/2571-6255/3/3/44 Prescribed Burns in California: A Historical Case Study of the Integration of Scientific Research and Policy
It's a complex issue so there's lots of reasons why prescribed burns aren't done more, but they have been done for years, and there are new laws to make it easier. The challenges include: Air Quality Laws, Insurance Liability, Federal control of National Forest, and the high population in the Wildland Urban Interface and large number of houses near areas that need fire control. People do build houses in areas called Devil's Canyon and Black Hill, but at the same time large areas of grass and scrub have burned annually each year in Lake County so burns there obviously don't help.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-07/newsom-s...
Every article seems like a chance to spread misinformation with lazy analysis and conspiracy theories about Jewish Space Lasers, Climate Change Denial, or that controlled burns haven't been part of California fire control for all of living memory.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/10/28/fac...
That is the total acreage that burned. Mostly wildfires. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfires
Apparently, prescribed burns are about 125,000 acres/year: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/prescribed-burning/....
You either have a controlled burn that burns up trees and brush.
Or you have an uncontrolled burn that burns up trees and brush and cars and homes and cities and people and every other harmful thing that you really shouldn't burn.
Yes, this is extremely common in the south east.
Literally, the point is they are building a fund so that prescribed burning can be insured.
Edit: I should say that I'm playing loose here, as this is a conversation, not a debate. That said, I did include the "against your fence" on purpose. I'm well aware of rules on how you can burn, for example: https://www.cobbcounty.org/fire/fire-marshal/outdoor-burning.
This is a hard area to regulate. Any attempt to minimize that is reductive and unlikely to be helpful. Is why I picked something i know is allowed, burning in your yard, but with a condition I know is basically never allowed, against my fence.
They are a factor, in that you have to do it in a way that addresses pollution concerns. At large, that is probably going to include what accelerants and controls are allowed, as they will have a unique impact on the pollution generated.
Or are you suggesting that the pollution can, in fact, not be controlled and impacted in ways that may need special mitigations?
Under current regulations, people are often prevented from controlled burns due to air quality concerns under CEQA. This leads to fuel buildup.
When the eventual real wildfire happens, the risk to property and lives is much worse, and so is the pollution; places experiencing wildfire experience AQIs of 300,400+ when the WHO considers 150+ to be unhealthy. Mother Nature doesn’t have much concern for laws and regulations, and we have trouble controlling these large fires.
There is no way to control and thin fuel that does not result in pollution. Manual excavation is impractical and arguably worse since we’d be certainly trampling ecosystems in the process; these ecosystems are often expecting some baseline level of fire.
The entire discussion thread is about California, the CEQA in my parent comment is the California Environmental Quality Act, and here is an article describing the differences between the South and the West on burning policy: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1029821831/to-stop-extreme-wi...
> Florida has done prescribed burns on more than 1.6 million acres so far this year. California has only burned around 35,000 acres. The state is 2.5 times larger than Florida.
> About half of California is privately owned, and landowners have had little support from public agencies to conduct burns on their property. Permits from firefighting agencies and air quality regulators can be cumbersome to secure.
> In May [2021], Quinn-Davidson helped lead the first burn manager certification course in California. Fourteen local groups, known as prescribed burn associations, recently formed to help private landowners with burns across the state.
More, none of this actually shows that it is "air quality regulators" that is specifically preventing prescribed burns. That actually reads more as a dog whistle to get people riled up over the idea.
And indeed, the linked article presents a better explanation. Liability concerns on decontainment and other impacts goes a long way to stopping people from doing anything. Straight forwardly, if they do a controlled burn and it impacts others, they are liable to make the others whole. If a wildfire happens, they are both victims.
That is, this article is a direct downstream event from the "prescribed burn associates" effort of the NPR story. If you have a certified associate, you can get insurance to limit your liability. And this is largely because the certified associate will be following necessary rules and regulations to limit the impact. Any reason to think the associates will not be looking to pollution and safety concerns.
If you are strawmanning that I'm somehow saying you can't cause any pollution, I can only say that is not what I said. I said pollution should be a factor, but that is not the same as "you cannot cause pollution." And to insist that that is all it can be is again reductive and not helpful.
The world burning down in a roaring conflagration, or have you missed the entire chain of this conversation?
The pollution is going to happen. You get to chose what the scope of it is with controlled burns. Or you can give up that choice and enjoy the smoke of burning homes and cars.
There are some places where it will be unlikely that we can do controlled burns, pollution only being one of the factors. We should try to burn as much around those areas to reduce the likelihood a fire spreads to that area. But note, those controlled burns will create their own pollution.
We (humans) moved in to fire country, now we need to learn how to live with those poor choices.
More, it has not been established that it is too far into the "no pollution side at all." Do you have evidence that it is pollution regulation that has caused no controlled burns? Noting that I can bring up plenty of easy evidence of folks literally doing small scale controlled burns.
I don't think you all are doing it on purpose, but this is a dog whistle tactic to pull in a lot of anti regulation folks to yell about things.
I'm joyed when my neighbor does it, because we do it to keep dried leaves off each other's property precisely to prevent fires in summer and make the same job easier next year. I'd rather burn my leaves to save my house.
That is, i picked that example not because you can't burn in your yard, but because there are rules you have to follow. Doing it "at large" in a full state will clearly have more difficulties than doing it in your small yard.
I recommend the Good Fire podcast for anyone confused by this headline.[0]
Instead of $20M, the budget should be whatever the total damages were on average per year for the past ten years.
You have to make an informed guess the first time.
In any case, I meant that the budget should be aligned with the normal amount of damage from uncontrolled wildfires.
How does a fund demonstrate that? The linked legislation (https://wildfiretaskforce.org/prescribed-fire-liability-clai...) claims "rates of escape and loss are very low" already. Insurance companies' actuaries are experts at quantifying loss, so if it is low already...?
I wish they'd elaborate on how this is done. Focuses on what needs to be burned? Meaning a type of tree? Just the undergrowth? Curious how fire can be controlled to just specific elements in the landscape.
To make a healthy tree burnable. You first need tons of heat source to prepare the wood itself so it is dry enough that actually burnable. But a healthy forest shouldn't have that level of heat source to make it doable (otherwise it will burn itself away someday, just like current situation of CA)
Prescribed burn here exists to remove the fuel, so it never pile up to the level that "Once it ignited, everything burns regardless of it is a healthy tree or what. And it burns forever because everything is burnable at this level of temperature".
I don't remember the specifics anymore, but basically there were far fewer trees per acre in the area that did not have fire suppression, but the trees were far healthier / bigger as they did not have to compete for resources. While the trees in the fire suppressed area were smaller and made for a less healthy ecosystem.
Headline seems like it was written badly on purpose just to clickbait people unfamiliar with the subject.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/03/wildfires-dr...
No idea what you're on about.
Or do both. Thin out the substantial trees with selective logging, which reduces the fuel load, then burn the undergrowth.
However, they would not normally log all the trees within the burn area. The goal is to preserve the trees and clear out the fuel that has built up at the underbrush level. After the burn, mature trees help suppress further underbrush development.
When trees are removed, it leads to a lot of secondary growth, which both promotes fire and is heavily susceptible to being killed by fire. This is fine if the goal is to maintain the area as a more open field-like space via frequent controlled burns (which we honestly should be doing more of; meadows are highly ecologically valuable), but if the goal is to maintain it as forest, then you don't want to remove mature trees.
There is no joy on this topic - its a brutal mess, with more to come. Popular media is going to produce contents like this, again.. and yes there is collective anger under the surface. Somehow, rational thinking must stay alive, while the venting and posturing continues in the open.. It is worth considering Australia, Greece, the far-North scrub forests.. are all facing this, without the budgets and science of California.
President Donald Trump Old Forge PA, 2020
> In Finland, after clear-cutting a forest area, crews use heavy machinery (similar to what is used in this video) to “rake” or gather tree harvesting residues, tree roots and other material into huge piles. The biomass is then chipped onsite after it has dried up sufficiently, and chips are hauled to local heat-producing plants to generate warmth for local residents.
What you linked is weird propaganda about Finnish forestry companies trying to utilize clear cut areas more effectively.
Even the method he mentioned is used (as opposed to what the juvenile mockings suggest) but for a slightly different but related purpose.
Enjoy this and the instance where the German was laughing at Trump when he warned against over reliance on Russia.
> purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
When talking about the reason for overgrowth, the article talks about how it's the fault of Europeans who said controlled burns are primitive. The person they reference is not someone in the forest service, or someone who is an expert in this. They reference the "UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning".
Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
They didn't talk to anyone, they just used an article with more depth to support their little, less deep article.
>Is this article supposed to be about controlled burns being put in California? Or is it supposed to be how the europeans were so stupid, native americans were so smart, and wildfires are the fault of westward expansion? Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
What does this mean? You can't talk about wildfires in the west without talking about how westward expansion brought terrible forest management practices and suppressed traditional management practices that kept forests healthy. How are you involving racism in this topic?
It's not that I don't think that discussion has a place. It's that I don't think saying "natives did it" is a justification for bringing it back. There are plenty of great justifications for bringing it back, and I'm glad they are, but "native americans used to do this" is not a reason.
That sort of reasoning is how you get people claiming that "alternative medicine" is better than the medical miracles we produce today. You need actual data and reasons to support things, not just "native americans did it and racist europeans rejected it".
That's not the justification. The author is bringing up traditional burning practices because suppression of those practices is a cause of our current mega fires.
"Thanks to centuries of overzealous fire protection and the suppression of Indigenous cultural burns — which Europeans found “primitive” — forests have become overgrown, accumulating piles of underbrush and fallen trees. In trying to prevent wildfires altogether, we’ve been essentially storing up bigger and bigger piles of fuel. And with that extra fuel comes fires that burn more ferociously, exacerbated by drought and drier conditions from climate change.
“When you talk to different native people from the Yosemite area, they talk about how it used to look when fire was used as a management tool,” UC Davis professor of Native American Studies Beth Rose Middleton Manning said in a University of California article. Areas that were once open valleys are now choked with conifers and other fuel sources that were not there when cultural burns helped groom the land."
The justification for controlled burns is written here
"Setting fires intentionally may sound like a paradoxical approach to fire control, but if they are done correctly, controlled burns reduce the fuel available for wildfires, helping to prevent the catastrophically large, hot fires that overwhelm firefighting resources. They also are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem."
It sounds like you'd like to know more about wildfire and how indigenous burning practices suppress mega fires. I encourage you to read the linked materials, as this little article isn't going to go deep enough to answer your questions.
tl;dr Yes, we should do more controlled burns. No, our current situation has very little to do with "traditional burning practices".
Racism against First Peoples isn't the biggest or near one of the biggest reason we haven't been doing controlled burns in California -- leftwing greenies have opposed burns because they oppose man's intervention with nature.
_Was_ racism a reason? Sure, but the past is not the present. The present situation with fires is mostly driven by leftwing politics.
The greenies didn't just oppose "traditional burning practices" but also _modern_ burning practices that are used in other US states, and they have much more control over California's policy (and even Fed Interior policy) than racist bogeymen.
Even this correction is being driven by those politics, as a return to "traditional burning practices" after (real and imagined) historical injustice.
That's the truth that this article attempts to dodge.
so still the people who colonized north america? you've turned this entire thing into a left wing vs right wing culture war issue when the article is just providing historical context. nobody is attacking the right wing in this article - not sure why you're perceiving it as one.
I'm sorry, this is just incredibly incorrect. Forest management on the federal level is owned by logging companies. The drive to put out fires, even in remote areas, is driven by a desire to not lose acres that could be logged. It's taken activist decades to convince the Forest Service and the BLM to do controlled burns and we *still* put out naturally-ignited fires in remote areas.
I won’t say you’re incredibly incorrect myself, but maybe just simply incorrect?
Most of the forested land in California is owned by the federal government, who has historically managed the land based on the priorities of natural resource extractors like logging companies.
This article is about the PNW, but it functioned the same way in California
https://wou.edu/history/files/2015/08/Ron-Vorderstrasse.pdf
>I won’t say you’re incredibly incorrect myself, but maybe just simply incorrect?
You're complete lack of knowledge on this subject doesn't make me incorrect. Please go do some reading and come back with an intelligent argument.
The majority of the articles focus is on insurance liability.
Do any of you people actually read before you comment?
What's bizarre is that in spite of that non-sequitur, fire suppression was mandated by the very first session of the California Legislature in 1850. This isn't some ancient technique we're only just now rediscovering. It's been well-established practice for over a century, only recently eschewed in favor of assuaging irrational environmentalists.
> In a 1918 letter, a district ranger at Klamath National Forest wrote to his supervisor that the US Forest Service’s most important duty was to keep fires to a minimum, but “renegade whites and Indians” were setting fires “for pure cussedness”, not caring whether the fires harmed others.
> He suggested that the solution was “to kill them off, every time you catch one sneaking around in the brush like a coyote, take a shot at him”. He also suggested hiring a female missionary who had “gained the confidence” of Indigenous people to convince them to adopt settler theories about fire.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-...
Controlled burning has been used in the South by white people since the early 1800s: https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/treesearch/19091, where "it was quickly adopted from the Indians by early European settlers".
One ranger in California in 1918 does not speak for an entire race for God's sake. That should be obvious.
/s
Is there any evidence of this? I mean, I know that the indigenous people did so to try to contain fires, because wildfires have been an issue for millions of years. But is there any evidence it was "more successful" historically? I'm not a huge believer that ancient cultures had these things figured out.
I'll let you go into the further reading section for more information.
Please explain the type of evidence you could gather that would tell you American Indians thought intentional burning was a good idea and part of their planned forest management.
From what I'm reading on your link the evidence is evidence of fires burning things down, thus the Indians had an advanced forest management system in place.
It turns out that people that lived in fire country for hundreds/thousands of years built up practices of burning when fires would remain calm rather than explode into conflagrations. "Advanced" is relative in this sense.
Between this and natural fires the landscape had a patchwork quality that acted as natural fire breaks.
UC Davis didn’t empower ancient indigenous community practices uncovering mystical oral history, they went to people that just googled it like everyone else because there has been perpetual cross drift in how to do controlled burns in even more optimal ways. Gullible af wow. This is like the Blazing Saddles of fire control.
The only reason California wasn't doing controlled burns, according to the article, is because they didnt have hush money for when they inevitably burn your house down and lose the lawsuit, and now they topped it up with a paltry $20 million.
The rest of this article is quite a bit of deflection.
* There used to be a number of old growth trees spread out intermittently which don’t exist anymore.
* Decades of mismanagement and clear cutting have resulted in forests being a lot denser today then they were a couple of centuries ago, a monolithic area where all the trees are close together, similar in age, and of the same species, is a new environment, in California (the Redwood forest in the North Coast has tightly compacted trees of the same species, but of varying age; also note that Redwood has evolved to withstand fires, probably because of this growing pattern).
* There are number of invasive species, including Eucalyptus and the California Silver, which disrupt native species access and compete with access to water and sunlight
* And worst of all there are a number of pathogens including the invasive bark beetle which is killing old growth giant sequoias in and around Yosamite.
* And to top it all off, California is getting hotter and dryer with the climate catastrophe, which amplifies all these problems.
Controlled fires and better forest management in general is definitely a good thing, and California is doing the right thing by re-establishing it, and including indigenous communities is for sure for the better. However, what worked in the past is only gonna have limited (though positive) effects. Expect California to keep burning at accelerated rate. Even if these efforts work perfectly—which they will—the state will still keep burning. The damage is simply too great.
> California is getting hotter and dryer with the climate catastrophe
California in the 20th century was very abnormally wet and mild. Using scientific data and looking back 2000+ years one gets a picture of centuries long droughts, and of extreme weather as very normal. This is the status quo and the past 100 years of mild and wet climate is the weird abnormality(which people think it always should be like).
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/science/californias-histo...
Also California does not exist in a vacuum. The earth is getting significantly warmer. West Coast USA will become dryer as a result, if this is the “natural state” of California (whatever that means for a dynamic climate system) than California will become hotter and dryer still.
but read the article again. there is no procedural mystery on how to do a controlled burn. California expects to burn your house down and didn't allocate money for it and now they allocated a little bit.
"the fear of liability for unintentionally starting a wildfire is one key reason holding back more prescribed burns."
the rest of the article, read it again, the rest of the article is a grift specifically done by CAL FIRE to convince allocating money to the fund at all.
they wrapped it in an indigenous veneer to make it sound like they know what they're doing.
"so private insurance companies will enter the market."
it has kind of nothing to do with the arguments happening in this comment section. the approach is amusing. the problem is hilarious. California wasn't doing controlled "or cultural" burns because they're going to lose all the lawsuits when they burn your house down, and now they're still going to lose all lawsuits but they allocated money to that, but only $20 million and they're hoping the private insurers are like "ooooo" "aaaah" "cultural fire practitioner fire bends for special California flora" and insures with waaaaay more money than $20 million, because so far its a pathetic amount.
At what point does the Fed Gov say, "wait a minute, if you want disaster funding you've got to clean up your act." And certainly the insurance industry has lobbying power, and nothing from them either?
This has a foul smell. I'm rarely pro-litigation but CA residents should start a class action suit again the state for what looks like negligence.
the narrative "we bad , they good" always sells
You can see this from ignoring food forests and insisting on farming when the soil was just throwing up rocks year on year in north east U.S.
The fact that you're trying so hard to explain that away says a tonne about you. I recommend that you take a long, hard look at yourself and try figure out why you feel the need to justify bigotry.
It wasn’t out of stupidity, it was out of malice and bigotry.
It’s also a culture of domination that has stuck with us to this day.
I’m of European descent, too. It’s ok. Our ancestors were imperfect. It’s perfectly fine to acknowledge that and to learn from this example where the so-called primitives had better practices than the self-described civilized people.
It’s not a personal attack if you don’t take it personally.
Where I live (Santa Cruz Mountains) the vast old growth redwood trees were extensively logged (via clear cutting) into the early-to-mid 20th Century.
Then widespread logging just stopped. And for at least the past 50-60 years there has been intense hostility to logging. Everywhere, doesn't matter if public or private land.
The redwood groves that have grown back are all extremely densely packed, relatively small diameter trees mixed in with tan and coast live oaks and lots of smaller shrubbery. Lots of low branches on all trees. Lots of redwood needles and dead tan oak and coast live oak leaves laying thick on the forest floor.
Perfect tinder.
About 3 years ago a lightening storm sparked a fire that burned hundreds of thousands of acres.
Controlled burns would have helped remove the forest duff. But the trees themselves are perfectly set up to respond to fire, unlike in an old growth forest.
Writing is not just producing a bag of atomic propositions. What is written must be justified and relevant. When something forced occurs within some piece of writing, it betrays a bias, or even an ulterior motive. In this case, controlled burns (or letting natural wildfires play out) aren't a new thing. They're older than agriculture, and they are and have been used across the world in modern times for some time. Look at a live map of forest fires and you'll notice how many are controlled burns. It's not as if we're considering the use of controlled burns for the first time and discovering some long-forgotten wisdom of the natives here. Frankly, what's weird is that California is just now doing this.
But I also wouldn't make a big deal out of this article either. I think learning about precolonial practices like this is interesting, regardless of the bias or motives of the article's author.
#1 - To the best of our knowledge, the forests of the region were actively managed via fire for thousands of years. This changed a few hundred years ago, and the result is the unprecedented fires we have been experiencing. The government is reacting by greatly increasing funding for prescribed burns which, to the best of our knowledge, is the best solution at this time.
#2 - The state is bound by federal treaties with the sovereign nations that reside within its borders. The bounds of these treaties are hotly contested. The sovereign nations believe that the treaties grant them the right to the lifestyle they historically had. The federal government wants to curtail activities they believe, if unchecked, might cause lasting negative effects. One of the rights these sovereign nations had restricted were controlled burns, which they call cultural burns. These rights are being slowly returned now that the state and feds view controlled burns in a more positive light.
There is a 3rd indirect element to this article, which is that it is trying to address an audience that has been affected by years of the Smokey the Bear 'all fire is bad' mentality.
You should reread the article. I'm pretty sure you brought along the baggage you are complaining about.
You will not persuade hardcore preservationists in California by listing out the economic/quality of life benefits of controlled burns. They (and I am generalizing) have a deep passion for returning nature to its natural state.
The key to changing preservationists minds is not to say "there are many benefits to controlled burns (for humans)" but rather, "the state we are creating in forests without burns is not natural."
...just because it is interesting.
"Natural state" is a term with a debatable definition. Is it:
* how it was when the Native Americans lived on it and did whatever they did
* how it was when there are no humans around at all
And these aren't even necessarily the only definitions, or a binary choice (it could be a spectrum/tunable).
When the Bering Strait ice bridge formed and the descendants of native peoples migrated down through the American continent, California was not a dry desert. It was probably covered by lush forests and wetlands with a much lower sea level than today so there's literally no way to return it to that "natural state"
With the Kelp highway hypothesis [1], humans were here for most of that transition so really there's a whole list of "natural states" to pick from (that we largely can't return to)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coastal_migration_(Americas)#K...
To convince them to take action you have to validate their self-imposed guilt with images of reverting to noble savages clapping hands and playing pan-flutes around a fire while the animals sway in time to the music.
There was a time I would have said these people need education, now I'll settle for using their guilt to herd them in the correct direction.
Which is what's happening.
Its natural state includes devastating wildfires every so often when lightning touches off dry undergrowth that hasn't been cleared away for years.
The first time the controlled burn goes out of control the initiative will be back to square one.
"Native Americans" arrived here about 30,000 years ago. For all the time prior to that forests were actively managed by controlled burns conducted by nature.
The idea that they somehow had some advanced knowledge that Europeans lacked has no scientific basis, they simply didn't have the modern technology to stop a fire started by lightning.
Or as much fixed and immobile infrastructure that would be endangered by fire-- if there is nothing you care about nearby, why not set a fire to aid in hunting or to clear out plants you can't eat in favor of ones you can?
Just because they intentionally set fires that doesn't itself make it environmentally good-- it's an extraordinarily racist view that the indigenous people weren't capable of environmental destruction just because they were less effective at it than industrial civilizations. The noble savage protector of the land is a racist fantasy of people raised on a diet of Disney movies, not reality.
This is, by definition, not a controlled burn.
Paul Hessburg of the Forest Service and University of Washington has a good TEDx talk on this that helps explain it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas
This is about a major expansion of the concept, and includes (1) an insurance scheme so that private landowners can do a burn without fear of bankruptcy and (2) restoring cultural burns that Indians performed to manage land before they were banned by people who didn't understand them.
Interestingly, a right-leaning college “friend” on Facebook uses (and links to articles that use) the same “Indians have been doing it for thousands of years” argument to complain about Democrats, California, and conservationists.
> Why burn on purpose? It admittedly seems counterintuitive — or even dangerous — but purposeful burns have been used by Indigenous people to keep forests and wildland healthy for millenia.
This is what you’re getting hung up on when you should really be focusing on the highlighted (and enlarged) quote:
“Setting fires intentionally may sound unusual, but if done correctly they reduce the fuel available for wildfires and are beneficial for a healthy ecosystem.”
The logic is sound in my opinion. Group X of people were doing things a “better” way, have continued to want to do things the “better” way but were prevented by Group Y, and it’s been _proven_ that their “way” was and is indeed “better”.
I will acknowledge that the article is lacking in the _proven_ sense. But it’s still there.
The reason why this article even mentions Native Americans though is because the new program that is being sponsored specifically targets cultural (i.e. Native American) burns.
It is being done already, and has been for over a century. It's just facebook boomers got it in their heads that it wasn't.
Burning is allowed, has been allowed, and has been an active part of California forest management for decades.
Bans on small off-road engines and new indoor gas burning appliances are generally driven by health concerns (smog, indoor air quality, and noise pollution), and backed by pretty solid science. Not that global warming isn't also a damn good reason to ban these things.
I'm perfectly fine with politicians who ban convenience devices that cause extreme externalities to other people like smog, excess noise, and childhood asthma. That doesn't seem like a radical left position.
What's more shocking is why it wasn't being done.
> Why not talk about more concrete reasons that controlled burns are good without appealing to it being opposite of racists?
We are talking concrete reasons. We have to first understand the concrete reasons why it wasn't being done already first. You yourself said it is shocking. Don't you want to know why? What were the reasons against controlled burn? Then we can figure out if we should do it. Just because the concrete reasons upset you doesn't mean they aren't worthy of being discussed.
There are many things to be upset about. I don't think controlled burns are it.
it's not being upset about controlled burns, but the "you're racist yet again and you didn't even know it!"
If it happens naturally, it's nobody's fault. If it happens because the state is doing a controlled burn, the state foots the bill.
Take a look at how many of the wildfires are due to unmaintained power lines if you REALLY want to blow a gasket.
Unfortunately, we didn't just stop prescribed burns, we stopped natural burns as well.
> In 1935, the Forest Service established the so-called 10 a.m. policy, which decreed that every fire should be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day following its initial report. Other federal land management agencies quickly followed suit and joined the campaign to eliminate fire from the landscape.
https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...
So we have forests laden with nearly a hundred years worth of unburned fuel.
Don't be shocked. Part of the reason they're couching it this way is to avoid acknowldeging yet another Sacramento Policy Failure
"In California, two different approvals are needed for a burn — an air permit and a smoke management plan from the California Air Resources Board or a regional air-pollution district. In some cases, Cal Fire has to sign off, too."
https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24934569...
This article is weird because forest management became an extremely partisan issue recently. Do you remember the whole "rake the forests" thing?
Specifically, no of course we don't rake the forests. But generally, yes, accumulated fuel and forest management is at fault. Great pains are taken to redefine policies in progressive terms to avoid the appearance of agreeing with one's political opponents.
Both sides do this btw.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Now if the bureaucrats would only allow the power companies to clear underbrush from beneath transmission lines...