Fire for Water: A tribe in California is helping to reshape fire management | Hacker News Reader

Fire for Water: A tribe in California is helping to reshape fire management

biographic.com

47 pointstranslocator25 comments

It is worth mentioning that many states do significant amounts of controlled burns as a routine thing. Growing up in the Midwest, it was just a common thing, nothing out of the ordinary. I think in the southeast, it's even more common. It really helps limit the damage when an uncontrolled fire does start

For some reason out here in the West Coast, there's an aversion to doing enough controlled burns. I'm not sure why, though someone pointed out a federal vs state thing to me once.

Is the federal vs. state thing “the federal government controls most of the land at issue in the west and decides policies, not the states”.

Because that's actually the situation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands#/media/File%3A...

Yea I think that's it

Though I don't know the exact details on that w.r.t. controlled burns, because parts of the federal government are definitely very on board with controlled burns (like say the US Forest Service). I dunno what's going on there.

i believe one of the issues with controlled burns is that there are specific conditions necessary for them to be controllable - and with the current state of the california fire season, it's actually really difficult to set them up.

here's a study on how climate change is reducing the window for prescribed burns: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00993-1

Grew up in national forest, and my grandfather was a logger in the 70s. I remember him and the other old timers complaining the newer PhD's the forest service was bringing in were making dumb excuses for not doing control burn.

I'll never forget my thoughts at the time: "Those PhD's are so smart, surely they are right and these old-timers are just being curmudgeonly"... then years later the forest went up and over 450,000 acres burned, and then not many years later, another roughly 538,000 acres went up.

It was then when I realized how my putting of academia on a pedestal was a major mistake, and then I went and apologized to my grandfather for being dismissive.

My terse summary is that the forest service likes to ship people around, so they aren't in their local forest, so they end up in ecosystems they don't understand as well as the locals but because of their tendency to look down their nose at the locals, they would dismiss knowledge that was trying to be given to them.

I love the forest service, don't get me wrong (much rather have that than BLM!!!) but there are some major flaws in the forest management bureaucracy. To their credit, those fires basically forced change on them because it became too obvious their previous methods were so wrong.

For a while, the plan really was, as the article states, suppression. My grandfather (and great grandfather) worked for the FS and it was only later in his career that they started doing controlled burns again.

Where I live in Oregon, part of "why don't they do more?" is that there simply wasn't the money to do it, from what I understand, along with some of the other technical reasons mentioned in other comments.

well, there may be layers to this.. those PhDs are on the front line to make statements, but the driving force was policy. And that policy was in the original bargain of USA forest lands, and that is that forests are primarily for timber harvesting, and also bring other benefits.

You can see this for yourself by reading the laws and policy discussions that created the US National Forest system.

The obvious follow up to that is why don't the feds do controlled burns?

See my comment elsewhere: money.

Also, they need to be careful. There was a controlled burn in New Mexico that got out of control and caused a lot of damage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...

Local authorities can be very distrustful of government types. Here's a situation where a Forest Service employee was arrested and indicted after a prescribed burn went slightly awry:

https://wildfiretoday.com/2024/04/01/93539/

In California to do a controlled burn you needed(need?) to schedule it way in advance because of environmental review.

Sounds fine, except that CARB can declare that day a clean air day and ban burns on the same day.

Both of these things individually are fine but together it's a problem.

The difference is, of course, rain. The entire Southeast is wet, wet, wet, and most of the Midwest isn't much drier. The idea that you might go a whole year without suitable conditions for controlled burns is, well, essentially implausible. A summer, maybe once a decade. But starting around Thanksgiving and running into May or even early June, it rains and rains and rains. At some point during winter, you will be able to burn.

The federal-state coordination, the federal interagency coordination, the CARB hold over things... trying to do that stuff out West is far more difficult.

I used to be a wildland firefighter for the USFS and was stationed on a forest where two districts were split in half by a reservation where the land was managed by the BIA.

Driving from one district to the other you could see the health of the forest change almost immediately when you crossed a border.

BIA land had lots of healthy and appropriately spaced trees, wildlife, tall grasses. USFS land had dead grass and trees packed together, 10 snags for every healthy one.

the recent Handbook for California firefighting with tribal involvement is one thousand five hundred pages .. with Hollywood-caliber graphics and more than a hundred authors.

some google scholar links https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=good...

If we're going to burn the dead standing wood and other organic matter, why not produce biochar and syngas from it? Companies such as All Power Labs (allpowerlabs.com) produce pallet size devices that can be taken to the source of the wood and convert them there. The biochar produced can be introduced back into the ground, or used on farmland, and is essentially carbon negative. The syngas can be used to produce electricity in a generator, or for heating purposes (boiling/distilling water, heating homes, drying foods, etc.). It seems wasteful to just inefficiently burn it and dump large amounts of smoke into the air when we can use it for energy purposes or to improve the soil. Allowing it to compost produces methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas, so that's not a great option, sadly.

Much of Northern California and Oregon are fire adapted ecosystems, meaning that fire is a natural part of the landscape. There are plants that require smoke and fire for their seeds to germinate, for example. Converting wood to biochar doesn’t address that.

The bigger issue is that prescribed fire is comparatively much easier and cheaper. I’ve been on burns where we had a biochar kiln going, and were also burning piles. We easily burned dozens of piles in-place, and loaded maybe 6 into the kiln. We also had to set it up near a road, because it was heavy and needed a water truck nearby to extinguish the coals and make char.

I’ve been doing prescribed fire for a couple years now and people OFTEN bring up biochar. My feeling is that sure, go for it. If you have the resources and time, awesome. But don’t stand in the way of people doing good work because you think there’s a better way to do it. There’s plenty of work for all of us.

The pictures in the article make the scale of this endeavor look inconsequential (although still culturally significant to them I'm sure.) Is there any information on how much they're actually getting done?

I largely agree with the thrust of the article, but wow is it one-sided. Which is fine, I'd just like to read another article that discusses some of the issues as well. Like air quality—the mention of smoke being thick enough to drop stream temperatures by 2.5°F didn't seem quite as wonderful to me as the article implied. (Then again, that seems like an extreme case, and one where you're burning a lot of wet stuff. Well, or oily stuff like scotch broom; that smoke can be black.) Obviously it's still a lot better than an out of control wildfire, but still not something to just ignore.

The one thing they did mention is fires that escape. It's a risk when doing traditional burns in highly non-traditional settings: lots more dead vegetation in the surrounding area, invasives (like scotch broom or eucalyptus) that burn hotter and can shoot out streams of fire, drier conditions overall, etc.

That said, continuing the trend of constructing buildings in the midst of forests where you're allowing fuel to just pile up over time, in drought conditions no less, is stupid. I'd rather try to manage and mitigate the risk over time with controlled burns than keep allowing it to build up while we're all busy wringing our hands over it.

this is a "feel good" article for public outreach (and votes) in California. In the last ten years, forest bureaucracies here had to do a 180 degree turnaround from the Federal arrogance and helpless wishful thinking on the ground that ruled previously.

A combination of forest stress via drought and a hundred years of ignorant executive management resulted in multiple catastrophic fires and ruined lives, with more on the way.

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/built-to-burn/

This episode is great for anyone interested in the problem. At the end of the day most places in the US have been 'designed' over the last 50,000 to 100,000 years to burn, and to burn at pretty regular intervals. We've interrupted that burn cycle, and we've increased temperatures so we're well into megafire territory now. Even worse is we're building houses in places that must burn at a regular basis with houses themselves that are built-to-burn.

These areas are going to burn - whether we like it or not. You can either do it routinely in a controlled manor, or stick your head in the sand and the suffer catastrophe when they do eventually go up.

"Trump blames California for wildfires, tells state ‘you gotta clean your floors’"

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/...

Weird

Anyone in forestry has known for decades 'smoky the bear' is killin our forests.

though each forest it different and California forests need very different treatment from most.

I think the point of Smoky Bear is to prevent accidental fires through carelessness, from somebody not extinguishing their campfire or a discarded lit cigarette, by the general public. Managing wildfire risk with intentional, controlled burns is something else entirely.

Two problems, first everyone went too far and put out all fires. Second if we let those careless fires burn they would stay small as nature was already doing the job.

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