Prescribed fires—or the lack of them—are on everybody's lip these days. Most people are just parroting talking points for political purposes, but perhaps you'd actually like to be a little smarter about it? Sure you would. It's a weekend and you have some spare time.
So let's go through some history and then some current events. It's a little long but worth it.
For most of modern US history, deliberately setting fires was considered folly and public policy preached exactly the opposite. This wasn't due to ignorance; it was due to what people saw with their own eyes. Here's the history of intense wildfires in the western US:
During the long era of occupation by native Indian tribes, who had adopted a cultural practice of using fire to manage the land, big wildfires mostly followed the climate. During periods of drought or warmth, fire activity went up. During periods of rain and cool temps, it went down.
When American settlers came to the West in the 19th century, they happened to arrive at a time when wildfire outbreaks were rising steeply. They concluded—not unreasonably—that the indigenous practice of setting controlled fires was ineffective at best and probably actively harmful. So they replaced it with a strategy of fire suppression—i.e., the practice of putting out wildfires immediately. It first began as a deliberate policy in New York in 1885, and the Santiago fire in 1889 led California to follow along. In 1910 the "Big Blowup," a massive fire in Montana that burned 3 million acres in two days, caused the US Forest Service to make it official policy for the entire country:
The 1910 fires had a profound effect on national fire policy. Local and national Forest Service administrators emerged from the incident convinced that the devastation could have been prevented if only they had had enough men and equipment on hand. They also convinced themselves, and members of Congress and the public, that only total fire suppression could prevent such an event from occurring again.
It worked: as the timeline shows, fire activity dropped to nearly a record low in the 20th century. In 1935 the Forest Service adopted the "10 am rule," a mandate to put out every fire by 10 am. This continued through 1978, when the Forest Service started to allow some natural lightning fires to burn. But they still didn't allow prescribed burns as an active strategy.
And why would they? It was just bad luck that the history of white settlement in the West coincided with a big increase in fires, but nobody knew that. Likewise, the fire suppression strategy was sowing the seeds of its own destruction by letting fuel pile up, but no one knew that either. All the evidence seemed to suggest that fire suppression worked.
What's more, even when change did come, it came haltingly because loosening the rules had downsides as well as upsides. In 1988 the US Park Service allowed several lightning fires to burn in Yellowstone, eventually causing a conflagration that consumed over a million acres. Public fury was intense. In a post-mortem after the fire:
The team reaffirmed the fundamental importance of fire’s natural role but recommended that fire management plans be strengthened.... Until new fire management plans were prepared, the Secretaries suspended all prescribed natural fire programs in parks and wilderness areas.
Natural burns returned the next year, and in 1994 the South Canyon fire, which killed 14 firefighters, led to the first comprehensive review and update of federal wildland fire policy in decades. This was change at a snail's pace. But by the late '90s, as forest managers finally started to understand the danger of long-term fuel buildup in an era of drought and climate change, they began to use deliberate controlled burns as an active strategy for limiting the damage of forest fires. Once again, though, there were downsides:
A prescribed fire set by fire managers on the Bandelier National Monument in 2000 was declared a wildfire and escaped onto the adjacent Santa Fe National Forest. The fire burned into the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the town of Los Alamos. Over 48,000 acres were burned and 255 homes destroyed before it was extinguished. Public outcry was immediate and the National Park Service held an investigation that placed blame on improper implementation of the prescribed burn and on inadequate contingency resources to successfully suppress the fire.
In fact, the burn was most likely done correctly but fell victim to sudden winds that hadn't been in the weather forecasts. A review reaffirmed policy and led to gradually increased use of prescribed fires over next few years. Nationwide, prescribed burns have increased more than 150% since 1998:
It's worth noting that the vast majority of these burns take place in the South, where they've been a way of life for some time. The rest of the country combined, including the West, is responsible for only about 20% of controlled burns.
There are a few things to take away from all this. First, the longstanding opposition to prescribed burns has never been about California. It's nationwide and was due primarily to US Forest Service policies that set a standard for the whole country.
Second, prescribed burns have both upsides and downsides. The upside is that they help prevent wildfires from spreading, especially to populated areas. The downside is that sometimes they get out of control and produce understandable public opposition. They also generate large amounts of smoke, which is both annoying and a genuine health hazard.
Third, prescribed burns are expensive and underfunded. In 2022, the Biden administration announced a plan to reduce the fire risk on 50 million acres of land, an effort it figured would cost around $50 billion. But it was only partially funded with $3 billion from the 2021 infrastructure act.
Finally, prescribed burns can only be done on certain days: not too hot and not too cold (or rainy). Forest managers declare specific days, mostly in spring and fall, as "burn days," but climate change has steadily eroded that window. Fewer and fewer days, especially in the West, are safe for prescribed burns.
This is a particular problem for California, which is naturally hot, frequently windy, and has lousy air quality to begin with. This means that the window for controlled burns—not too hot, not too cold, not too windy, air quality not too bad—is especially short. Partly as a result of this, prescribed burns in California have increased recently, but not as much as in the rest of the country:
Another thing that's a particular problem for Southern California is that most of the chaparral and brush is in hilly and mountainous areas:
Managing the grasses, bushes and shrubs on these hillsides is “physically impossible” [Zeke] Lunder said “You would have to send someone down on rope with a chainsaw like an African honey collector to cut the brush.”
And even if you do manage to clear out the vegetation—either with fire or chainsaws—it will grow back quickly because these are native plants adapted to the climate. And in the meantime you've turned the hillsides into massive mudslide machines the next time it rains. This is not a great tradeoff.
So California has been late to the prescribed burn revolution, but it's recently gotten on the bandwagon. In 2018 Gov. Jerry Brown set a goal of burning 500,000 acres per year by 2023—though this was cut back a couple of years later by Gov. Gavin Newsom to 400,000 acres by 2025. In 2021 Newsom signed a bill that protected private landowners who want to do prescribed burns, and later in the year approved $1.5 billion for wildfire management. In 2023 California Democrats urged the EPA not to restrict burns via new environmental rules. Later in the year Newsom signed a law that ramped up the effort to meet the 2025 goal. But it's a tough goal to reach largely because of resource constraints. There just aren't enough trained burn bosses to meet demand:
Federal and state fire agencies alone can’t meet the growing need for prescribed fire. Local burn associations, Native American tribes, fire safe councils and programs like Firewise USA—a guide for residents on how to reduce wildfire risks in their own neighborhoods—can help bridge the gap. In California, between 10 million and 30 million acres could benefit from restoration thinning or prescribed fire.
So is that it? By no means. There's also regulation, and prescribed burns can take a while to clear federal NEPA permitting:
There are three levels of NEPA permitting, and the vast majority of prescribed burn plans qualify for light NEPA treatment. For these, permitting takes between zero and 20 months (blue bars). But that's not everything. Forest managers don't just wake up in the morning and decide to light a match in a likely looking bit of forest. As you can see in the chart (orange bars), there's a ton of planning that goes into these projects, and the planning takes longer than the permitting. Approximately the same thing is true of "mechanical treatment," an alternative (and costlier) way of reducing fuel load by cutting back trees and clearing underbrush.
And note that "permitting" is just the process of writing a plan. Contrary to popular opinion, lawsuits aren't a big part of it. Environmental groups do frequently sue over forest management projects, are related to burns or mechanical treatments—and almost all of them lose. It's not really a thing in the big picture.
In California, CEQA adds to the delay in project approvals, but the biggest regulatory hurdle comes from air quality managers who restrict the number of burn days available. This is a bone of contention, however, and the air quality folks say that burn bosses don't even use all the days available to them.
Bottom line: regulatory hurdles are real for both prescribed burns and mechanical treatments, but they aren't the biggest obstacles by any means. The biggest impediments are public opposition, rising insurance costs, resource constraints, and the risk-averse views of forest managers, many of whom are still wary of prescribed burns. This is partly for technical reasons and partly out of fear. Only one out of a thousand prescribed burns gets out of control, but that's enough. Here is Michael Wara, a lawyer and the director of Stanford’s Climate and Energy Policy Program:
“If there’s a prescribed fire and it goes wrong, someone’s in trouble,” Wara said. In this case, it’s the federal government, which is on the hook for billions in recovery costs.
“But no one in the Forest Service gets in trouble when there’s a wildfire that destroys communities and destroys a landscape, and the fire really occurs because of the lack of management over decades,” Wara said.
The end result of these obstacles is that fewer acres are burned than burners would like:
However, California legislators have introduced a slow but steady stream of legislation to deregulate burns. The chart above (on right) is dated but provides an idea of how much legislative activity there is and how it goes up and down depending on current wildfire activity.
So that's about it. The main takeaway here is that to understand why prescribed burns are still underutilized you need to take a longer view. For example, it's worth knowing that wildfires began to increase dramatically only in the late '90s:
It's human nature that it takes time to react to something like this. Maybe the surge in the early 2000s was temporary? We'll see. Can it really be reined in with prescribed burns? We should investigate. It wasn't until around 2010 when it became clear that massive wildfire growth was here to stay and that both burning and brush clearing were necessary parts of fire management. And it took even longer for opposition to slowly erode and regulators to become more sympathetic. Those things have happened, and we're now making progress.
But it's slow. Only in the last few years has it become conventional wisdom that prescribed burns and mechanical treatments are obviously good things, so why the hell aren't we doing more of them? The answer comes only if you know some of the history behind the reluctance to change forest management practices. And keep in mind that the new conventional wisdom still comes with billions of dollars of cost and dangers of its own.
In other words, if you learned about prescribed burns and forest management just in the past few days—or even the past few years—rein in your outrage. You weren't there for the decades of conversation about it that led so tortuously to the current enlightened state you take for granted.
Extremely informative, Kevin. Thanks. You're really doing quality journalism on this story.
Agreed. You're remaking a long form (longer) reader of me.
yup, this is highly informative, excellent ground to start from (so to speak)
Kudos, Kevin!
Goats. Not an 100% solution, but not used enough. Very good on steep hillsides and narrow canyons.
"Hey! Who's going to clean up all the goat shit around here?"
I agree with you but I guarantee you the number of goats you need to clear up the amount of brush that's out there would send some busybody into aploxey about the fecal waste on the hills
"fecal waste"
A few of us call it fertilizer.
Yes, probably so, and even goats can't navigate the nearly vertical walls of some canyons. We need ALL the remediation.
I have seen "goat deployments" in WA to help remove vegetation along some highways. They really are well built for clearing slopes.
We use goats to keep the levee's in the Delta clean.
Goats are great.
But sometimes the brush-clearing goats are stolen and slaughtered for food, which makes the locals mad, and can spark anti-immigrant backlash.
There's the mudslide tradeoff mentioned. I was in Will Rogers State Park just last year, and the vegetation was all scruffy trees and brush. I gather that goats can eat this, but having them do so could lead to erosion problems. I live near Olympic National Park, and the mountain goats were destroying vegetation on steep hillsides before the park service removed them. It was particularly bad on the steep Klahane Ridge Trail. Domestic goats can cause just as much erosion. It's the eat anything, eats everything problem. You wouldn't want feral populations, so you'd need goatherds to manage them. They use goats in Seattle, for example, to neaten up under freeways and prevent fires there, but the Pacific northwest is a lot cooler and drier than Los Angeles.
...But they are super useful to keep fire breaks open, like around freeways and neighborhoods...
However, they'e just one part of the solution.
Goats are a good way to prevent most vegetation from coming back, in other words for creating semi-deserts, not forests. They would probably have to be moved in and out to allow recovery. Goat management is a problem in itself.
Basically you roll out fencing and use the goats in an area like a work crew, and move them from section to section each day.
It's not as labor intensive as doing it by hand and slower than a brush-hog but is better around saplings and weird shaped spaces than machines.
However, gotta put those fences out and gotta keep eye on those goats!
Goats help, but this kind of fire wouldn't have been impacted.
The brush eating goats were evacuated a few days ago in Brentwood, and definitely useful in a multi-prong strategy.
I know a fair bit about this topic and this is an excellent overview. One thing to keep in mind is that prescribed fire is one tool of many as the goal is really managing vegetation. This can also be achieved with herbicide, grazing (goats!), or mechanical harvesting / mastication. Though these are rarely less expensive than prescribed fire, except when a burn gets out of hand.
Do you know much about vegetation management in Canada? Is it similar to what we do (or don't do) in the US? I'm asking because they've had some really terrible fires in Western Canada in the last few years.
Canada is too big to really stop fires with mechanical means, and traditionally, these forests did not have frequent low intensity fires that are easy to replicate with prescribed fire. Rather, they burn(ed) about ~100 years and the fires were typically intense. Now there have been efforts to protect communities with mechanical means. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ad1hlTOr-8s
It can be done. Just takes $.
Thanks
Thanks for the run-down, as it is helpful and informative.
Many of the dominant California fir tree species produce seed that, unless scarified by fire, will not sprout. They can remain dormant, in their hard little shells, in the ground for many years until they are scarified by fire. Wild fires are a part of the ecosystem, and have been for far longer than any American city or firefighter showed up in California.
A wild fires are an essential component of the ecosystem.
Bingo!
Unfortunately, another part of the ecosystem there is landslides.
And I should add that I learned this writing about a prescribed burn done here in Maine in the White Mountain National Forest.
The foresters and wildlife biologists working for the National Forest System are extraordinary people and a valuable resource to all Americans.
Curious about the insurance requirements for "private" prescribed burns.
Local deer population can only do so much, and their are only so many goat herds to be deployed. These munch on current growth, but will not help so much with build up on the forest floor. Burns are needed.
We're having braised goat leg tonight. More goats!
roasted goat tacos....mmmm....
Yeah, goats don't deal with fallen branches. And they won't help with poison ivy, either.
Goats eat both poison ivy and oak without ill effect. In fact, they love it. Most browsers do not have the protein that makes them sensitive to these species. It's a weird mystery.
I’m outraged that we haven’t used more prescribed burning.
The only thing I don't see well-covered is 'Bambi.' The wildfire scenes in that movie set prescribed burns back 50 years. There were some Smokey Bear PSAs that did the same thing. Impressionable young minds saw those scenes and came away with a rote subconcious conviction of "All Forest Fires BAD!!" Prescribed burning has had an uphill battle for public acceptance ever since. And it's become political too, being an attempt to duplicate (in a more controlled way) a natural process, which is automatically liberal yogurt-eating tree-hugging environmenalist BS in some quarters.
Along with grazing and other methods, fire is crucial to one of an environment's immune systems., and often crucial to individual species within it. We can inoculate, or we can let it run wild. Certainly rings a bell, doesn't it?
Prescribed burns aren't the kind of fire that was in bambi.
Prescribed fires only burn lower fuels, not entire trees.
Yes, I know.
There is an ancient, primal, kneejerk reaction to any wildfire, for most people. Bambi gave it additional life for some, both with vivid imagery and subconscious fear. Prescribed burning has had to work against that for decades, because a lot of people can't/won't/don't make the distinction between accidental and intentional, purposeful fire, nor the connection between fire and wildland health.
I worked the front desk in several national parks in the '90s (right after Yellowstone's fires), and it was a recognized thing, to staff. The vitriol from some people was astonishing.
Lemme do the shorter, more accurate version:
White people invaded and colonized a place they didn’t really understand, and dismissed native practices as barbarism in favor of trying to create a copy of the places they came from. This has gone increasingly badly, but they continue to resist doing the right thing because they’d have to admit that the universe does not bow before the white man.
That’s like 30% of Western history right there. The other 70% is racism.
Tell it to the air in India.
Touche.
But I'm sure people can blame it on the Brits.
It's also worth pointing out that when Republicans talk about "forestry management" they often mean allowing clear cutting of national forests. This doesn't really solve the problem but it is profitable.
This, and the forest that grows back consiste of spindly, crowded twigs forming a mono-culture useful only for the production of plywood.
...and is more prone to wildfire
Hard to see fire getting out of control if you get rid of all the trees. Barren landscapes don’t tend to burn. And the rich and powerful can afford to fly somewhere else, locust style, if they miss the trees they got rid of. Problems are only for the little people who can’t afford to move from country to country in search of new lands to plunder.
It's EASY to see fire getting out of control if you get rid of all the trees. Clear cut land doesn't remain bare for very long; grass and brush grow back quickly. The present fires in LA mostly don't involve trees. The great Australian brush fires of a couple of years ago didn't involve trees. There are lots more examples.
Clearcuts aren't barren. They become tangles of grasses, brush, and saplings fighting for the sun.
Good lord. It was a joke. I’m not a forestry expert.
If we can’t laugh at all the ridiculous things Republicans suggest, we deserve to be not well liked by the general public as Democrats.
Austin, oddly enough, one of the reasons Republicans laugh at liberals is because they don't know stuff like this. As a liberal living in Maine's 2nd district, I see this all the time. Liberals have notions of best management, but they lack experience and understanding of land-use management and say the darnedest things. They buy land next to a cow farm, and then get dismayed when the farmer fertilizes his fields, demanding an end to it. Or complain about gravel mining and don't know what how roads and foundations are built. Or think much about frost/freeze, rain/drought cycles and stuff like drainage and snow removal.
So there are lots of reasons conservatives disdain liberals who do seem to be looking down their noses, right up until their toilets don't work or their house floods.
Because liberals don't think that knowledge is important, they often make fools of themselves, in the eyes of conservatives.
That's all well and good and very likely true.
But on the flip side, willful conservative ignorance about basic cycles - the water cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the carbon cycle - makes fools of them, right in front of mother nature.
And to go a step further, I'd bet that for every liberal you could find who tried to deny that understanding how roads are built matters (even after being challenged and explained to), you could find 3 conservatives who insist that understand Tyndall gas function in the atmosphere is no concern of theirs.
well put
This is oversimplifying, and also goes both ways, depending on knowledge domain.
Why all the worry? CF-DJT will remove the shackles holding the Forest Service back. More burns will be authorized.
And paid for by tax cuts on the wealthy. And program cuts for the poor.
Problem solved.
Note: The Forest Service is in the Agriculture Department and manages 154 National Forests and 20 grasslands, totalling 193 million acres. The National Park Service is in the Interior Department and manages 433 units with over 85 million acres.
The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area is NPS.
In other words, if you learned about prescribed burns and forest management just in the past few days—or even the past few years—rein in your outrage. You weren't there for the decades of conversation about it that led so tortuously to the current enlightened state you take for granted.
This can apply to almost every querulous complaint about government regulation of anything.
Nature to the American West: if you're not going to do anything allow me to prescribe some burns.
I’ve lived in New Mexico for years and was just outside the evacuation zone during the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Fire mentioned in one of Kevin’s links. It was massive (~340,000 acres)—the fire and smoke blotting out the sky were stressful to say the least. The fire started because prescribed burns got out of control, and people lost everything. Later, flash floods in the burn scar caused fatalities. It’s no surprise there was strong opposition to any future controlled burns, but instead of giving up on them, the government learned from the mistakes they made and improved safety measures to help prevent it from happening again.
Where I live, forested mountains surround small towns and ski villages. The forest is overgrown and dry, and with constant drought, it doesn’t take much—a car spark, a cigarette—to start a wildfire. Thankfully, controlled burns, mastication, and other efforts are helping reduce the risk and limit the damage when fires happen (and they do).
It’s a huge, ongoing effort, and sure, there are risks, but they’re way smaller than relying only on fire suppression, which is the equivalent of sticking our heads in the sand. Same is true in California and anywhere else where wildland and humans co-exist in a dry climate.
“It was just bad luck that the history of white settlement in the West coincided with a big increase in fires, but nobody knew that. Likewise, the fire suppression strategy was sowing the seeds of its own destruction by letting fuel pile up, but no one knew that either.”
Seems like the Native Americans did know this, which was why they were doing “a cultural practice of using fire to manage the land” before white people arrived. But kudos for correctly labeling them as “nobody” and “no one,” Kevin. 100% accurate that, in America, until The White Daddies In Charge know something, nobody (who matters) knows anything about any topic.
I look forward to when we take Greenland - either by force or because the Danes just cave in to Dear Leader, like all people in power seem to do, and accept giving it to us as part of some grand “deal.” And then we decide to stop doing some foolish “cultural practice” that the native Inuit do to manage the land, especially all those glaciers. And then a disaster happens and we can look back and say “well of course nobody (white) knew that would happen!”
donnie will have established in increase in the size of the present base, brand it with his name and say he owns all of Greenland. (Don't forget that donnie only knows "cheap".
The natives didn't know why there was more wildfire, either.
They didn't burn a large portion of the forest, after all, just little patches for the deer to follow.
What? This comment is inaccurate and oversimplifies Indigenous fire practices and knowledge of forest ecosystems. Their controlled burning practices were far more extensive and sophisticated than “just little patches for the deer to follow.” They burned to clear undergrowth to reduce buildup of dry fuels that would have otherwise resulted in massive wildfires.
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/fire/indigenous-fire-practices-shape-our-land.htm
The idea that they didn’t understand why wildfires increased after fire suppression policies is not based in fact.
My sister lives on an island between Victoria and Vancouver. She does the books for the fire department, all volunteers and limited water supply. They live on a rock covered with trees.
The fire department had someone come in to show her and trim back her beautiful bushes around her house and clear away tall trees that would be a fire issue. It's too bad everyone doesn't do this. She does feel safer but what about her neighbours.....
We use perennial bushes around the house that can be cut back during fire season.
And keep the big trees but stagger their lower limbs so fire won't reach them.
A point about very high winds is they complicate the trimming strategy, walking around Westwood the first couple mornings after the big winds on Tuesday and Wednesday, there was brush everywhere, on the streets, on the sidewalks, on lawns, from trees being ripped apart, so in these conditions fires don't necessarily need to jump from tree to tree or bush to bush or tree to bush or tree to structure and so on, there's brush strewn all over the place (and that's not even considering ember cast from the winds).
A recent The Atlantic article pointed out something interesting--suburbia, and houses at the human-forest interface, tend to be stick built, i.e. wood frame structures. Maybe a nice bungalow with cedar shingles. Ready to burn.
I noticed in some of the pictures of the devastated areas, masonry walls still standing, but the insides gutted. Fire proof roofs, sealed windows, etc. also needed to keep house safe.
There have been stories about someone saving his house and some neighbors using his garden hose. There were also stories about someone found dead with their hose in their hand (or what's left of it). Any one who survives a wild fire using a garden hose is very, very lucky.
Masonry walls are still standing, but exposed to 600F (let alone the 2400F of a house wildfire blaze) they lose their structural ability.
The fire mostly gets into the houses through windows and soffits and vents.
And while tile roofs - super common in that area - resist fire, they're bad at resisting wind.
There's just no simple answer here.
Contemporary CA building codes (and those used in many other urban/forest interfaces) do not allow the sort of construction you're describing.
Kevin gives the story as it is mostly accepted now. Fifty years ago the story was very different. Do we really have it right now, or will it be different again in a few decades?
Could native Americans really do "controlled" burns? This seems dubious if we have difficulty controlling them now. Most North American natives were nomadic and could always move somewhere else if too much was burned, then come back when the hunting was better. The way that people have moved into forested areas makes the situation very different from what it was when the native population was comparatively sparse and not tied so much to permanent (combustible) dwellings.
There are no easy solutions when people keep moving into potential burn areas and climatic conditions make burns more likely.
They did. They created what the white people called 'long meadows' or 'plains' - in Vancouver, Washington, the major streets are called Mill Plain, Fourth Plain, etc in honor of these geographical features. In Santa Cruz we have a bunch of 'long meadows' based on these.
By doing a fire during the spring, after storm season, the fire can be kept at a creeping mode, and chew up leaves and perennial seeds and only shorter grasses will remain. A single person can care for a few hundred square meters of forest per day. You can harvest tubers and bugs stirred up by the fires.
This gave them sight lines around villages and camps, places to grow crops and encourage plants and deer to gather so they could be hunter later.
Around Tacoma the natives did burns to ensure the lowlands remained oakland meadows instead of becoming coniferous forests. The result was much more small game and eatable plants. Camus root was a staple.
I saw this myself. I used to walk my dog in a field covered in Scotch-broom, an invasive bush. Then some teenagers smoking accidentally set it on fire. The Scotch-broom was largely eradicated, not only where it was burned but also where it was just exposed to heat. The next year the field bloomed with blue fescue and Camus and wildlife exploded, including rabbits galore and a resident pair of sparrow hawks. I still wonder how long those fescue and Camus seeds laid dormant in the soil just waiting for their opportunity.
May I recommend reading a key, influential book at the point in time just before prescribed burns made a return to North America?
Playing God in Yellowstone.
I'm 99% sure KD has read it, but maybe not many others have.
I'd like to point out that carrying out a prescribed burn in what one might term as an urban forest, will likely turn out badly. And t'was just 30 years ago when the southern section of the San Gabriel range adjacent to Altadena burned.
For whatever it may be worth:
In 2020, Trump began yapping about "raking the forests like Finland does" and blaming California's Democratic officials for having failed to do so. At that time, this was one of the standard rebuttals, in this case from the BBC:
"In California state, the federal government owns nearly 58% of the 33 million acres of forest, according to the state governor's office. The state itself owns just three per cent, with the rest owned by private individuals or companies or Native American groups.
"Federal agencies like the US Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Parks Service are responsible for the upkeep of federally-owned land, and as far as private forest land is concerned, it's up to the owners to manage these areas."
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46183690
Here's a report in the WP making the same point at that time:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/16/fires-climate-change/
That's for whatever it may be worth. Coming in, I don't know anything about this overall topic.
We can reasonably expect increasingly dry conditions and more wildfires, so critical to come up with a sound strategy reflecting that:
https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/water/articles/2016/01/25/qa-with-lynn-ingram-drought-lessons-from-history
https://youtu.be/WEnBeoVCZ90?feature=shared
Why are 80% of prescribed burns done in the South? Are different decisions being made by fire managers or is the forrest environment different in a meaningful way?
"Likewise, the fire suppression strategy was sowing the seeds of its own destruction by letting fuel pile up, but no one knew that either. All the evidence seemed to suggest that fire suppression worked."
I find this hard to believe, and this whole story feels an awful lot like frantic backpedaling. I have family who were farmers in a climate very similar to California and it was totally standard in their community, just common sense (and this was in the 1970s and 1980s) that you burned firebreaks every year to suppress fires. It also seems to have worked.
The same is common practice in Australia (again similar climate).
No-one is claiming that fire breaks can suppress every fire. But they are part of a total strategy. To claim that "no-one knew the consequences" of not allowing this sort of thing seems to me very much actually saying "a certain group of people, determined to ignore everything from the past because that was inconvenient to their worldview, claimed that ..."
We see the same thing in so many other elements of this fire handling.
Why no fire ships? We knew all about them and their value in 1906, and FDNY still has fire ships that work well. But "we" in CA chose to ignore them. And fire ships are valuable NOT because they can spray water to the mountains, don't be stupid, but because they are massive floating pumps that can boost the pressure of the mains system by pumping high pressure water into it.
Why reservoirs that were dry? Sure, yes, some needed repairs, but again why not smarter scheduling of those repairs?
Why has water infrastructure that was voted for 10 years ago still not been built? This is much the same as the high speed rail to nowhere. Astonishing incompetence that Kevin would be mocking mercilessly if it happened in Florida or Texas, but when it happens in CA we're supposed to just accept that "these things take time and planning". Why? Why are we so willing to just shrug and accept that ten years to make close to zero progress on a building project is just fine?
And while I don't much care about the whole trans firefighters nonsense, I do think there's a serious issue embedded in there. I want civil servants who think about their primary job 24/7. I don't care if the fire chief is male or female, black or white, straight or gay. I DO care if they see their primary job as "equity" and "community relations" and social justice" as opposed to "following best fire practices" and "learning from history and the rest of the world". And all evidence is that we have the former rather than the latter.
Insurance (generally understood, so including not just financial insurance but fire protection, the military, etc) is one of the pillars of society where it's easiest for grifters to hollow out the machinery while keeping the outside looking shiny -- right up until the moment of catastrophe. California has hit that collision of reality with facade, both in the fire itself and in how it simultaneously gutted insurance support because forcing people to face reality about the risks they had voted into places was just to unpleasant.
One more fun fact. I've suggested before that it's likely the case that at least one blue state (CA, WA, IL, maybe NY though rather less likely) would probably hit insolvency during Trump's second term. It's quite likely this may already be lined up. The combination of scaring almost every insurance company from the state, then providing a pathetic band-aid in the form of state-provided insurance (FAIR) which is drastically underfunded (because it was all a sham that refused to charge adequate rates, and which provides inadequate reimbursement for anything but mid-range LA homes, is going to be a big big problem...
At some point CA is going to go to Trump's government to be for funds. And even if they get those funds, they will come with massive conditions. Already think tanks are gearing up to consider everything they might make conditional on those funds. The three top candidates so far include federal takeovers of
- wildfire control
- water control
- public employees (not directly fire related, but a huge part of CA costs, eg via pensions)
However I expect other conditions will be added as people can figure out a way to do so (eg zoning and NEPA). The politics of this will be very very interesting over the next year. And honestly I expect they will be positive for pretty much everyone except specifically
- Newsom's chances of ever becoming president -- kiss that dream goodbye!
- CA Democrats in general -- the most sensible and ambitious dems outside CA will do a (Bill, the smart one) Clinton and aggressively repudiate the CA D party along with its reputation and agenda, in their preparation for 2028 and 2032.
Can some lab genetically engineer chaparral with fire-retardant sap? Holds the hillsides in place, reduces the fire risk. I’m sort of joking here, and GMOs do come with some risk, but could there be some biological mitigation?
Aha: Colorado State University has information on the flammability of plantings, and advice about proximity to structures: https://extension.colostate.edu/low-flammability-landscape-plants/#:~:text=Common%20flammable%20plants%20have%20flammability,space%20zones%201%20and%202.
The simpler "biological mitigation" might be to allow/aggressively import+encourage alternative species into the relevant areas -- goats and suchlike that eat dense brush, and alternative plants (like cactuses?) that are more wet/fleshy rather than dry woody.
But of course this all boils down to: what do you prioritize...
It is hard to say if "Chesterton's Fence" wariness favors burning or not burning. Talk about a muddle! What a fascinating post. Thanks.