The technology to prevent wildfires is controlled burns. The Ohlone indians would regularly do controlled burns, reducing the density of trees by 90%. A combination of anti-controlled burn mentality, building expensive homes in forested areas, and an antipathy to "greedy loggers" has turned California into a tinderbox waiting to go off.
The state needs to liquidate 90% of its forests ASAP, because reducing carbon emissions and blaming political enemies aint gonna turn California into a tropical climate. It's an arid state prone to hundred-year droughts, and it's not the place where you want to see lots of trees, not unless you also enjoy seeing the occasional massive wall of flame devouring the countryside.
> The technology to prevent wildfires is controlled burns. ... A combination of anti-controlled burn mentality, building expensive homes in forested areas, and an antipathy to "greedy loggers" has turned California into a tinderbox waiting to go off.
Agricultural and Prescribed Burn Notices are currently approved in the vast majority of the state [1]. and you can see from the historical data [2] that only Aug - Oct have significant restrictions.
Many CA communities make it hard to cut down trees ("conservationism"), and also don't religiously enforce clearance rules that they do have on the books. The combination means that there's a huge pileup of fuel even in suburban neighborhoods.
To those downvoting - this is a town-owned parcel in my neighborhood, just a few miles down the hill from the CZU complex evacuation zone.
https://i.imgur.com/PVUoUVg.jpg
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres[...] California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."
> Well, 4.4 million acres burned in 2020 and 1.7 million in 2018, so were a third of the way to that 20 million already.
Unfortunately this article was written in Sept 2020 so I think (but don't know) that those are baked in. But in the big picture, yes, nature will eventually burn what needs to be burned. However the hope is for controlled burns, not burns that destroy lives and property. The Camp Fire in 2018 alone killed 85 people. That's a steep price to pay for refusing to do controlled burns.
The article states:
"In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."
So the data the article is using is from before the 2020 fire season. Only 15.4 million acres to go.
The issue isn’t just the quantity but they type of burning. Historically, wildfires would burn out underbrush and younger trees, but would leave the older, larger trees alive. This would clear out the underbrush so that there was never too much at any given time.
But over the last century or so, well intentioned environmentalism has meant that these fires get put out before they get going. This has led to a very dense accumulation of this underbrush and young growth trees, which essentially have turned California forests into tinderboxes. Now when a fire starts and gets out of control, it gets so intense that it takes out old growth trees with it.
We’ve managed to turn natural forest fires from something that was a rejuvenative part of the ecosystem’s life cycle into an apocalyptic death blow.
old nature wanted ~5MM acres a year, we messed with it, then nature figures out a way to get what it wants (after some delay). I thought we'd learn our lesson with that firestorm in 1991 (my first big fire memory). silly me.
Who are these "academics"? The article you linked uses politically biased language and provides no sources.
Seems like you're talking out your ass about something you don't understand. To make the claim that "90% of California's forest shouldn't exist"(paraphrasing, correct me if I misinterpreted) as you did in one of your other comments is absolutely absurd. It illustrates a complete lack of understanding regarding the extremely varied and countless ecosystems present in California. California is not "a desert", California "has a lot of desert".
To be clear though: It definitely HAS been proven that the absurd amounts of fire suppression California has engaged in over the past several decades has indeed increased the severity of wildfires[1].
I live in SoCal and the park backing up my house has giant piles of dead wood everywhere. It basically looks like your picture but everything is brown and 1/3 of the fuel is dead trees. The Woolsey fire went right around our city - mountains on 3 sides of it, and all 3 of them were on fire at one point.
Been thinking of trying to organize something to clear out some of that crap. I know our neighbors take it upon themselves to cut park trees that encroach on their properties.
The area in that photo turns brown in the fall. It's a few hundred feet from my house. I moved into my place late in 2019. Spring 2020 was creating a defensible space around the house - trimming trees, removing ground cover ivy near the house, etc. This spring is more about clearing the brush and trying to disconnect the ground from the canopy on the whole parcel. Some folks walking through the neighborhood called the town to complain that I was removing native plants. Town came by and ultimately decided I was within my right to clean up, but it was a hassle I didn't need.
Given the close calls I'm really surprised that there isn't a strong rallying around removing fuel.
Local regulation for "conservation" seems to be a net negative for society in many places.
Can't build housing in cities with MASSIVE housing shortages because we need to "preserve historical character" of the laundromats that's currently there wasting space.
Can't cut down trees or do controlled burns to prevent turning much of California into a hellfire for months because "conservationism"
All of this is of course mainly tied to maintaining property values. And keeping the wrong people out of the community.
Or, you know, just build houses with them, preferably somewhere that isn't as water starved. When the houses get torn down, the wood ends up either recycled or in a landfill which is more or less the same thing.
not sure we have enough bogs to do that -- it might be an expensive proposition. It would be nice if we could find a way to mass produce petrified wood, though.
The technology to prevent wildfires is ... to remove the 90% of the trees. The state needs to liquidate 90% of its forests ASAP
(Rolling eyes).
Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. This tunnel vision is defeatening. Enough is enough.
This is like claiming that the solution to remove computer bugs is to smash the computer against the floor. See?. No bugs survived.
And now the myth of the good savage.
I don't think that what (maybe) worked for a population of, lets say, 20.000 Ohlone Indians with bronze age tools will be scalable to solve the problems of the entire LA population. Do you think that we have the same complexity of problems, same longevity, or that we use the land in the same way that indians did?
We have better tools now. Ecology, science, knowledge based in facts, satellites without turtles added, scientific police. Maybe we just could try to use it instead?
I don't live in CA, and I have no real knowledge of logging, could you explain more about the "greedy loggers" comment? I get that controlled burns are good, but is CA usually known for forests used for lumber? I thought most lumber was grown in the northern parts of America.
Much of California’s forest was clear cut by the logging industry in the 1800s. The “old growth forests” are preserved and form a tiny fraction of what once was.
California is no longer as big a source of lumber as it once was.
California is no longer a big source of lumber because it's near impossible to get lumber out of the forests. Not sure what 1800 has to do with anything -- 90% of the trees need to go, and they need to go now. If someone is willing to cut them down and haul them away, then we should let them do that. Hell, we should pay them to do it.
"According to the California Forestry Association, tree density in the Sierra Nevada is too high when compared with the region’s historical rates, creating an elevated fire hazard. It estimates there was an average of 40 trees per acre in the Sierras roughly 150 years ago but puts that number today at hundreds of trees per acre [...]
The U.S. Forest Service estimates that California has 129 million dead trees, most in the central and southern Sierras. Insects and drought are to blame for the high numbers."
But California makes this incredibly costly and difficult to do, even on private land. You need to submit 500 pages of paperwork for each cut, and the state has been notorious in dragging its heels to approve these harvesting plans.
In terms of the fascination with "old growth", an old growth tree is just a tree of a certain diameter, and these tend to survive forest fires.
Really the problem in California is that a lot of people from the East Coast have moved here and decided that forests were some precious resource that needs to be preserved as in Maine, rather than the dangerous pest that trees are in arid climates.
They just never got the memo that California is not New England and the role played by trees in our ecosystem is very different. California needs trees like Australia needs rabbits.
And so now we have 130 million dead trees, ready to kill hundreds of people, cause billions in property damage, and destroy air quality in the state, just so people can preserve these unscientific romantic notions of "preserving forests", when our top public policy priority should be to reduce the amount of land covered by forests back to safe levels.
You’re not wrong (though I’m not sure what 1800 has to do with anything...I was just pointing out, as you also do, that by 1900 the state’s forests were gone), but:
> Really the problem in California is that a lot of people from the East Coast have moved here and decided that forests were some precious resource that needs to be preserved
That seems pretty speculative. Doesn’t it seem more likely that people just don’t want the forests near them to burn, so that their houses don’t burn down either? And now, most of the state is “near” someone?
In 1974 (when the eco movement was ascendant), California passed a series of laws regulating the cutting of trees - even on private land. You now need to file these 500 page "timber harvesting plans" (THPs), pay expensive fees, and wait a few years for approval. Although legally the state is obligated to approve all compliant THPs, practically speaking they can find flaws in the THPs, drag their feet on approval, and you may need to take the state to court. So yes, it's incredibly hard to harvest trees in California compared to other states, which is why the amount of trees harvested in California is much lower than in other states.
The wounded souls crying about greedy timber companies clear cutting forests in the 17th Century or whatnot are strangely silent about the Ohlone regularly burning down 10 million acres a year. Because the Ohlone realized that in the arid western U.S. (what used to be called "the great American desert"), trees were dangerous elements that needed to be suppressed.
> Although legally the state is obligated to approve all compliant THPs, practically speaking they can find flaws in the THPs, drag their feet on approval, and you may need to take the state to court.
this is for large-scale harvesting. I'm seeing <2 months from public comment close to THP approval, usually 2 weeks [1]. how long do you think is reasonable?
individual lot tree removal is a pretty straightforward form [2]. provide reason, site plan, maybe arborist report, etc.
to be fair, its only "to conduct any development activity or remove one or more protected trees, where such development activity or removal is not associated with a discretionary project, shall make application to the Planning Division for a Minor Tree Permit". so county approval needed if you are building a house or if you want to remove protected tree species (mostly oak, heritage, and riparian). so if you want to cut down that grey pine that drops all its needles every year, no permit needed.
That's pretty onerous, and permit fees often cost more than the work. I came from Kentucky and found it mind-blowing that there is so much red tape involved in basic land management in California. No wonder it doesn't get done.
When we create red tape, we often assuage our guilty consciences with the thought that "it's just an annoyance, and I'm happy to annoy other people if it means they'll do what I want them to do". On the contrary, the red tape that restricts tree cutting in California has killed hundreds of people and cost billions of dollars. Placer County is home to two national forests with "checkerboard" mixed private and public ownership and extensive public recreational use. There is no more important job for Placer County officials than removing these impediments to fire safety, and there's not a chance in hell they'll even consider the issue this year.
