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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused. I first read an article along these lines over 20 years ago and it seemed a fairly intuitively solid argument with lots of evidential support.

Has it still not become official policy?

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The difficulty, as I understand it, is largely that doing these actions are not themselves risk free. And the risk is not at all easy to insure against, such that people do what they can to avoid taking on any actions that could lead to liability on them. Which leads to nobody having the courage to do it.

In the US, different agencies are responsible for different tracts of land. At a federal level, the BLM has understood the value of prescribed burns for many years now, although they're still wrestling with the result of decades of prior fire-suppression policies. Meanwhile, state agencies in fire-prone states are beholden to the voters of fire-prone states who don't want to be told that they can't have their cake (a year-round smoke-free residence in the lovely arboreal countryside) and eat it too (not having their house burn down in an unstoppable manmade maelstrom), so you can imagine how that's going.

> More prescribed burning, more metal roofs, better zoning—these are all steps that could make a significant difference at a local level.

We basically are, except for the zoning thing. Keeping people from living near forests is hard politically.

They have to live somewhere. In much of the PNW, you basically have three landscapes: established cities, clear-cut farmland, and dense coniferous forests. City expansion starts with rural residences in the woods. If you want to get to the "paved over and non-flammable" stage, you gotta let the rural homesteads happen first.

You can educate or coerce homeowners to maintain defensible spaces, and they often comply. But in these regions, roughly 50% of the land is owned by the federal government, and another good chunk belongs to the state. Almost none of it is proactively logged, burned, or maintained in any other meaningful way. These big fires don't start in people's backyards, they start in the government-owned wilderness - and by the time they reach residences, they are so intense that a metal roof and some cleared vegetation around your home make little difference.

I suspect the pendulum had swung too far away from exploiting natural resources to conserving them at any cost. The solution probably isn't to tell people in the PNW "too bad, move to Iowa, Oregon is closed" - it's to decide where to maintain healthy forests and where to make room for safe development.

It is never that simple. Some geographies naturally trap smoke in ways that make controlled burns disruptive to nearby communities. There must also be resources available in case controlled burns get out of control. All of this takes coordination and costs money. Going from a general agreement to a specific implementation is turning out to be difficult in many areas.

Depends where you go. I remember seeing controlled burns in the Gila Wilderness circa 1993.

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