USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating

Yes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41920127 ("HN: The Forest Service Is Losing 2,400 Jobs–Including Most of Its Trail Workers")

Relevant comment by S201: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41922195

"The overall Forest Service budget has indeed been increasing, but it's nearly all going to wildfire fighting. I recently wrote about the state of forest road funding and went in depth on this here: https://ephemeral.cx/2024/09/losing-access-to-the-cascades

> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs."

If the only goal is to prevent forest fires, then in theory you could just send a hoard of people in to gather up all the dead wood at the end of each season, pile it up and have some nice fall bonfires, which might be fun. The main issue is the terrain harsh and would be very time-consuming.

And work they did .. subsequent years included massive fires that broke records, mostly 2018 and 2020. All the new money and agreements and on-call resources did ameliorate but did not prevent or even lessen, the massive catastrophic fire destruction.

Now, in an election year, someone is definitely jockying for new agreements somehow, but who knows the details... maybe someone here?

[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S2-C1-...

This is a "US Federal Government" thing. The funding for this department is decided fairly short term, so it is a political thing dependent on the current government, especially how it feels about California, climate change, etc.

However idiotic it may be - people are far more willing to pay $$$$$ to have a broken leg treated than they are willing to pay $ for salt or sand to put on their icy sidewalk.

Yes, because Newsom and Trump don’t get along.

[1] https://www.fire.ca.gov/dspace

If I remember right about how these ecosystems work, you need the controlled burns so that the underbrush goes up but the trees don’t. Without the controlled burns, the trees also go up, and then “next year” all you have is the new underbrush… and the problem repeats.

It's a think tank. They generate good policy and good ways for politicians to explain that policy.

> How do they actually make money?

I've given them money. They've been around for a long time. I'm a big Dean Baker fan.

> All they seem to do is just spend year and year pumping out various "studies" and articles.

You say this as if it were a bad thing.

Propublica's nonprofit explorer[1], and specifically the Form 990 filings[2], may be useful.

[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/522... [2]: from 2022 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/522...

charitable foundations and donors. basically the same groups as "Sesame Street was brought to you by..."

> Are there unknown backers paying them

There should never be any unknown backers. If you ever see an article like this that doesn't have a big "Our Funders" link in the page footer or somewhere else, you should be suspicious.

There's a number of plants that have actually evolved to take advantage of the fires.

West coast trees evolved to drop their lower branches. They naturally won't have branches for 20 to 40 feet off the ground. They need to grow old enough to do that. Most forests have already been chopped down a few times over though in the last 150 years.

The huge old trees cut out the light reaching the forest floor, so there was less underbrush to burn. It absolutely did burn, regularly, but did little damage because the fire never got hot enough to burn the trees.

But with the secondary growth, it's vulnerable to fire. So we have to burn it often to clear the fuel load before it gets too much. But there's a lot of opposition to this kind of preventative burning, and then the fuel load builds up until we get a monster bush fire, everything burns down, and it all has to start again.

We need about 100 years with no major bush fires, and no logging, to regenerate the first-growth forest that evolved here. But that's a major economic asset and the chances of it not being logged are tiny.

Trees also play a roll, but it doesn’t take much vegetation to destroy a subdivision etc.

It strikes me as implausible and unrelated: - fire fighting costs is now exponentially more AFAIK

- that revenue from the 90s might not have gone back to forests

- while billions of log feet sounds a lot, it might not be

- young forests burn, old forests are fire resistant. That logging creates young forests

- logging requires access. Places inaccessible will still burn and still be a problem

- fire breaks from logging only helps so much with santa anna style winds that blow embers very, very far

- logging does not remove undergrowth, per the article it creates a ladder situation where tree tops will combust

- old growth west coast forests are fire adapted and burns are necessary. Logging and suppression do not seem like the right solutions

- conditions have changed since the 90s. Different rainfall patterns, different cycle of draughts, 30 more years of fire suppression and combustible materials, and 30 more years of (hyper fast) climate change (significant changes have occurred in that minuscule amount of time)

There's not much evidence that indigenous Californians were doing any kind of fire management in the California coniferous forests - which is largely what the US Forest Service manages and have been in the news for megafires.

Indigenous Californians lived, overwhelmingly, in chaparral and grasslands near coastal areas and foothills rather far away. There is evidence that burns happened there (mostly burn scars in nearby coastal redwood forests, but also various written accounts by the Spanish).

That said, an estimated 4.5-12% of California land burned annually prior to the Spanish getting here - so whatever wildfire management practices happened still resulted in far more land burning than today and months of smoke filled skies - which matches up with early written accounts.

If we are not doing prescribed burns or, say, schools need to hold bake sales, it is because Congress just isn't choosing to spend money on those priorities, not that the massive military budget is making this impossible.

What is this?

>NPS/NFS

Is this National Forest Service? What does NPS stand for?

Edit: Im not American, sorry for not knowing your acronyms.

4. Collect their paycheck as everything goes to shit

Unless you think they should just let the fires burn, which would be catastrophic.

And even if it were true, lets pretend we give all of the forests to timber barons--then we get to 1) still fight the fires anyway, and 2) we'd end up having to bail the timber barons out after the fires. The end state is more burned forests that we now dont own, or get to use, or have any say over, yet, we still pay for it all and the billionaires walk away with everything.

At this point we know they wouldn't care for the forests any more than the forest service.

[0] https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/osu-research-suggests-fore...

> OSU research suggests Forest Service lands not the main source of wildfires affecting communities

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[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/despite-what-the-logging-...

> For decades, Oregon’s timber industry has promoted the idea that private, logged lands are less prone to wildfires. The problem? Science doesn’t support that.

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[2] https://missoulacurrent.com/study-wildfires-land/

> Study: Most destructive wildfires have started on private land

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[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-06002-3

> Human ignitions on private lands drive USFS cross-boundary wildfire transmission and community impacts in the western US

We did just read the article about California spending money on fire mitigation while the federal government--the US part of the US Forest Service--skimps, right?

This is about the US Forest Service which manages Federal land. The Federal government owns and is responsible for rather large swaths of California forests.

What are or what could they do? The latter is basically the same as what would be done to you and me running out and torching federal forest. Jail.