The perverse policies that fuel wildfires

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/05/the-perverse-policies-that-fuel-wildfires

by PaulHoule • 2 years ago

144 149 2 years ago

nazca• 2 years ago

I'm glad our century+ of gross mismanaging our forests is getting more press. But I think we're still fighting deeply entrenched mindsets that fire is always bad. Across the west, our forests are fire-adapted and need to burn to be healthy, but we're still suppressing most fire and not doing nearly enough prescribed burning.

We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.

Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.

A good read is "The Big Burn" by Timothy Egan. It details how at its founding, the Forest Service knew the fire suppression regime they were creating was unhealthy. But it was the only politically possible path for them at the time.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.

I'm thinking that mother nature generally plants trees at far higher than 2X density.

anon84873628• 2 years ago

Rather than piling on downvotes, I will respond to the valid question implied here.

Nature does plant trees densely. But most of them don't make it to maturity when the "natural" rhythm of wildfires is allowed to proceed.

Likewise the composition of species in the ecosystem also changes when the fire is suppressed.

amacneil• 2 years ago

With natural wildfire the Sierras would look a lot less dense than they do today:

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/08/09/how-wildfire-restored-a...

For nearly half a century, lightning-sparked blazes in Yosemite’s Illilouette Creek Basin have rippled across the landscape — closely monitored, but largely unchecked. Their flames might explode into plumes of heat that burn whole hillsides at once, or sit smoldering in the underbrush for months.
The result is approximately 60 square miles of forest that look remarkably different from other parts of the Sierra Nevada: Instead of dense, wall-to-wall tree cover — the outcome of more than a century of fire suppression — the landscape is broken up by patches of grassland, shrubland and wet meadows filled with wildflowers more abundant than in other parts of the forest. These gaps in the canopy are often punctuated by the blackened husks of burned trunks or the fresh green of young pines.

sesm• 2 years ago

It’s almost like we live in Elden Ring universe, where we didn’t let the tree burn when it should, and now we suffer dire consequences.

kurthr2• 2 years ago

Well, once you've allowed hundreds of thousands of people to build houses there, which ones are you going to burn? Seriously, do something and they won't burn today. Do nothing and they burn. All over the pacific northwest there are millions of people who live in forested areas, which will burn without fire control.

You can do burns when things are wetter, but how many $Bs are you going to be liable for? Or you can just make the insurance unattainable.

99_00• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve the forest managers of accountability.

Forest management has become politicized. Massive blazes, homes destroyed, fire fighters dead are just props for political theater to push a political agenda.

kayfox• 2 years ago

Paul Hessberg did a talk at TEDxBend a few years bask that helps sum it up visually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas

There are a lot of reasons fires are more and more common and more and more devastating, but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.

A lot more effort needs to be undertaken to build fire breaks and conduct controlled burns in the forests of North America to mitigate this problem and provide the fire the ecosystem evolved around and nutrients for new trees. It would also help beat back the various fungal and beetle pandemics in the western forests. We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.

graemep5• 2 years ago

The same around the world. Happening in Europe from Scotland to Greece.

The media attribute it to global warming which means noting gets done about it.

mjhay• 2 years ago

It isn't mutually exclusive. Warming is a major cause of increased wildfires, and poor land use and overgrowth due to fire suppression make it worse.

adrianN• 2 years ago

The forest ecosystems in Europe have not evolved in the presence of regular fires afaik. Large parts of Germany for example used to be an impassable swamp before they were clear cut and drained for agriculture a few hundred years ago.

polski-g• 2 years ago

Climate change is the skeleton key of doing nothing. "Climate change means there is a drought" Nothing we can do about it, not build desalination plants, or raise the cost of water, or eminent domain farmers' property who refuse to relinquish their century old "water rights". Literally just complain about climate change is all we can do.

jeffbee2• 2 years ago

What are we to make of the photographs taken from fire lookouts that are used as evidence in this talk? Consider the Thorp Mountain photo from the 1930s. Prior to that, loggers had come in and largely wrecked that forest. The USFS GIS indicates that the area around Thorp Mountain is between 20-30% old growth, is mostly mature replacement forest. So a photo from the 1930s showing patchy forests would have been a reflection of the fact that industrial era Americans had already come through and taken most of the trees.

davidw5• 2 years ago

What's your source on even high, rugged country like that being logged out by the 1930ies at an industrial scale?

mtnGoat2• 2 years ago

In addition to logging grazing was also happening throughout California, even in the high country for hundreds of years. This also decreased fire risk by eliminating fuel.

davidw5• 2 years ago

His research looks pretty interesting:

https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/about/people/phessburg

Izkata2• 2 years ago

but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.

So to go off on a bit of a tangent, in a fantasy book from 1998* there was a fire mage who had been preventing wildfires for decades. When green mage (plants/trees/etc) finds out about this she chews him out about the dangerous conditions he's creating by not letting the buildup on the ground burn away. By the end of the book the wildfires have reached the forest and the fire mage dies trying to stop the resulting firestorm.

Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.

* Circle of Magic #3, Daja's Book

throwup2382• 2 years ago

Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.

It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was officially part of US Forest Service management practices. The problem has always been the people who live in and around fire prone areas. They've used public pressure, bureaucracy, and litigation to prevent State and Federal agencies from properly managing the forests since the post-war boom.

In California, for example, permits are managed by 35 different "Air Districts" created in 1947 each with their own local leadership that are easily lobbied. Residents can trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled burns are practically impossible, given California's pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions from the state Air Resources Board.

It's coming up now because the situation is so dire we need a concerted effort to sway public opinion towards the realistic solution. Now that insurance companies are giving up on these fire prone markets, the residents have no choice but to get with the program.

Bjartr• 2 years ago

I loved that book series. It's about time I reread it I think.

pvaldes7• 2 years ago

More than 90% of forests are provoked by humans. Some are accidents. Other not. Starting in multiple locations at the same time; at night. The same pattern seen again and again and again In Chile, Canada, USA, Spain, Portugal, Greece... Coordinated and deliberated.

the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the forest floor

Yeah, sure man.

123 killed in Chile and everybody is avoiding to see the huge elephant in the middle of the room painted with the word terrorism in uppercase letters.

We could remove every single leaf in the soil of the forest, and gasoline cans would still grow in the trees.

pvaldes7• 2 years ago

More than 90% of forests

must say -> More than 90% of forest wildfires

zamfi5• 2 years ago

Isn’t the simple explanation the fact that non-human causes of wildfires are likely to start more than one in a given area?

- Lightning?

- Hot, dry winds + sparks from nearby power lines? (Debatably non-human, but usually not terrorists.)

At least in California we have forest ecosystems that practically require periodic fire for regeneration — seeds that require fire to germinate — suggesting forest fires have been common even on evolutionary timescales, long predating humans.

runarberg2• 2 years ago

I’m not an expert, so I could be wrong about this, but this sounds like a case of not addressing the elephant in the room. Isn’t the number one reason the changing climates as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?

Sure there are bad forest management, alien species, build up of vegetation on the forest floor etc. But are these actually the number one reason when the climate is a whole degree warmer on average, with prolonged droughts, with native species dying from said heat and droughts, etc.

This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.

unnamed76ri2• 2 years ago

What is the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and how much has that changed in the past 100 years? Something worth looking into.

prvc• 2 years ago

This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.

"Feels like" and "clear case" don't mix. Just say "I'm bluffing".

bcrosby95• 2 years ago

We probably need different solutions for the pacific northwest and the southwest. From everything I've read, Chaparral tends to turn into grasslands if it burns too often. And Chaparral is the wildfire problem in the LA region.

andrei_says_• 2 years ago

Going back in time and not clear cutting all old forest on a whole continent would be a big improvement, too.

The new growth is much more likely to be devastated by fires. Trees are smaller, branches are lower, brush is thicker etc.

plorg• 2 years ago

And in many places the trees that grow back are not the same species that were cut to begin with, and don't necessarily function in the same fire ecology, either because they have evolutionary advantages in clean cut environments or because they were planted for their supposely greater economic value.

sbohacek• 2 years ago

The 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico was caused by controlled burns that got out of control. One part of the fire was from a controlled burn that was completed in January and then "reignited" in April!

In any case, some regions might have frequent episodes that are hot, dry, and/or windy so that techniques that easily worked a hundred years ago are no longer useful.

gadders3• 2 years ago

Lot another dollar in the Trump was right jar.

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

tasty_freeze2• 2 years ago

Trump was being Trump: simplify complex issues and claim there is an easy answer, blame everyone else and boost yourself.

It has long been recognized that overreaching burn prevention has led to the situation we are in. There are often "controlled" burns that get out of control. There are inhabited/developed areas within and next to the forests that don't want to deal with the smoke of the burn and the chance that it gets out of control. The total area is immense and so the costs of burning 30% of the state which is forest would also be immense. The point is: it is complicated and there are practical considerations why it isn't an easy fix.

The next thing is Trump said they should "rake" the forests, which is asinine. Finally, much of California's forests are federal land ... which Trump was responsible for. How many people did he send out to rake the forest?

JacobThreeThree2• 2 years ago

fires are more and more common and more and more devastating

Maybe some individual fires are more devastating, but the statistics don't really bear out the "more and more common" narrative.

According to the US forest service, the 5 year average for both number of fires and acreage burned is lower than the 10 and 15 year averages.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/fire/wofambrief/firest...

Same story in Canada where the number of fires and total burned acreage has been decreasing slightly over the past four decades.

https://cwfis.cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/ha/nfdb

mistrial93• 2 years ago

this is amazingly wrong. Fires occurred in California since 2017 of voracious nature. It made world headlines.

nortonham• 2 years ago

We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the forest was healthy.

Correct. But we can blame PG&E for whatever negligence lead played its part in a forest fire, and enact legislation to make combat it.

Along with that, we can use controlled burns to mitigate the problem as well. It's well known that different indigenous tribes in North America did controlled burns for the positive effect it had.

andybak• 2 years ago

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?

PaulHoule• 2 years ago

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

m0llusk• 2 years ago

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.

legitster6• 2 years ago

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.

quatrefoil• 2 years ago

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.

taeric• 2 years ago

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.

kibwen• 2 years ago

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.

vondur• 2 years ago

I saw a section of Forest in Yosemite that is being managed according to modern forestry practices. The section has far fewer trees in it compared to the non managed section. Apparenlty there are too many trees in the Western US Forests, which also makes fires worse.

tadfisher3• 2 years ago

This is true. My region (Oregon's Willamette Valley) consisted of oak savanna and grassland prairies which were maintained by controlled fires set by the native tribes. Since European settlement, this ecosystem is 99.5% gone, having been lost to thick woodlands consisting mostly of Douglas fir and maple.

Visiting the region, you'd think that dense evergreen forests are the "natural" state of the ecosystem, but this is largely an artifact of 150+ years of fire suppression.

njarboe• 2 years ago

The oak savanna was a highly constructed world managed by humans for acorn production and other reasons. What is "natural" and why do we desire it?

hector_vasquez• 2 years ago

Why would tribal land management be "natural" but not more recent land management? It seems more like we just need to decide how we want the land to be and burn or not burn to achieve our goals.

PedroBatista2• 2 years ago

I get what you're saying, but "native tribes" were just part of the ecosystem as much as we are. The is nothing magical or pure about them.

The "true" natural state of a region is one without any management or intervention from anyone.

We are not "invasive" species and contrary to what the rocket man says, Earth is our home and we will not be anywhere else, so the only solution is to use our brains and judgment.

legitster6• 2 years ago

Or you know, we could actually log the lands like these agencies were supposed to enable in the first place.

There's a lot of healthy logging that can exist on the spectrum between clear cutting and total preservation. So for conservationists to advocate literally letting the forests burn before considering even a bit of actual forest management is insanity. We're sitting on one of the largest reserves of renewable resources in the world, and we would literally rather let it burn to the ground.

Most of these forests in question (USFS and related agencies) shut down logging on these lands decades ago, mostly as an act of conservation hubris. And the irony is they are now spending more money on replanting and thinning than they ever did when they were getting paid to do it by logging companies.

Managed logging not only thins out the forests so that burns are less damaging. And trees being logged instead of burned not only reduce the carbon, they act as a store of it!

WheatMillington• 2 years ago

This comment is being downvoted, however it seems sensible to me? Can someone who is downvoting offer a counter argument instead?

kurthr2• 2 years ago

Much of the land is not commercially profitable to log due to competition with much larger, less steep, and more uniform forests. Also, there would be significant externalities to those living there (you can argue with them, but there are millions), including wildlife disruption/movement, surface water contamination/flooding/landslide, road obstruction/damage.

Once you allow a significant number of people to live there, the easiest political thing is just to make the costs of insurance/rebuilding/maintenance so high that people move out.

dbrueck• 2 years ago

Yeah, it is in fact very sensible.

The following is an uncharitable take but here goes: the stereotypical social media conservationist will be 100% anti-logging because there's no room for nuance - you either love the planet or you're a corporate money grubber - while people who recognize that complex problems typically aren't black and white and who genuinely care enough about the environment to become informed on the topic generally agree that some amount of controlled logging is a very good thing.

doikor• 2 years ago

Problem is that you would have to do the logging in a very uneconomic way.

Basically you would want to leave the most profitable trees (big/old ones) and cut down all the small ones. This is because big trees don't really burn down and survive the fires for the most part. After a fire they provide a canopy stopping the forest from growing to be as dense in the future. With the less dense forest the fires after that won't be as intense.

PedroBatista2• 2 years ago

True but let's not pretend the logging industry has a long and rich history of good conservationism.

They are there ( obviously ) for the money, and clear cutting everything and "investing" by planting huge areas of mono cultures is anything but "less damaging"

Also, most of the timber doesn't actually burn during these fires, most get cut and sold as it's perfectly good wood if you don't let them rot in 1-2 years.

As always and anything, the virtue is in the middle. A good system where these companies can cut tree and be economical viable but also rules that keep the biodiversity alive and well. A long and not-corrupt department.. That's why these things are so difficult.

legitster6• 2 years ago

Sure, but it's the whole reason this model was set up in the first place! It's like we built a school for the kids and banned them from it for being uneducated.

There's enough forests in the US west for loggers to log bits and pieces of it and not return for a hundred years. Perfect for biodiversity. They have been forced onto dense monoculture lots out of necessity.

Unless we want to want to go back to the 80s and pretend plastic is more environmentally friendly than paper products (which was a real argument of the time), we shouldn't be so hostile to forestry concerns.

ysofunny• 2 years ago

whenever I feel frustrated I think to some of the people involved in this debacle for over 30 years

30 years of the idiocy of public bureaucracy and government politics getting in the way of a better world. the people on that fight are my personal heroes in withstanding frustration

neonate• 2 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20240203231919/https://www.newyor...

hasty_pudding• 2 years ago

I'm from the government I'm here to help!

kspacewalk2• 2 years ago

Is this one of Trump's unlikely broken clock moments[0]? (Ignore his, ahem, 'unsophisticated' wording for a second)

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

austin-cheney• 2 years ago

Where I live wild fires are almost certainly the collision of two ingredients: drought and alcohol consumption.

paulorlando• 2 years ago

The wildfire problem is also a case of the long reach of short-term interests. We would be able to put up with short-term inconvenience in the form of smoke from smaller fires otherwise. Instead we produced a perverse result the opposite of what was desired. Attempts to reduce small problems lead to bigger problems.

Short post about the morals of that type of problem: https://unintendedconsequenc.es/morals-of-the-moment/

bparsons• 2 years ago

One thing that is hard for people to conceptualize is the difference between old growth forests (which are exceedingly rare) and secondary growth forests.

Replanted, secondary forests are what most people are familiar with. They tend to have one or two types of tree, maybe some scrub brush on the ground, and whatever fell over in previous seasons. These forests tend to be very vulnerable to wildfire. The ground gets dried out really quickly, the stuff on the ground is pretty minimal, and under summer conditions, it is a tinder box.

Most people have never actually been into a true old growth forest. The ground can have a few feet of wet moss, plants, and fungi that overtakes the fallen trees and breaks it down. The ground is usually soft, even in the dead of summer. Under really extreme conditions these forests can still be vulnerable, but they have far more robust defenses against fire than the secondary growth.

Water management is also a big piece of this puzzle. Rivers, creeks and lakes are supposed to spill their banks every spring and soak everything around it. When you divert, contain and withdraw trillions of liters of water, you are creating a lot of unintended consequences down the road. The soil can hold onto a lot of water over long periods of time --- especially if there is significant vegetation on top of the soil to protect it.

The discussion about controlled burning is important, but it pales in comparison to the broader conditions that are driving the trend.

bmartin13• 2 years ago

https://www.newsweek.com/how-bad-2023-wildfires-chart-dramat...

catherinecodes2• 2 years ago

Native Americans routinely burned the landscape—to foster the growth of useful plants, to clear space for farming, and to improve the conditions for hunting. ... In addition to maintaining parklike conditions, these managed blazes prevented fuel from building up, and so staved off larger, potentially unmanageable conflagrations.

Much of the world still operates like this. Check out the Chiang Mai, Thailand burning season[1].

The US and Canada are some of the only countries where wood is the primary building material. In the rest of the world, stone is used which doesn't catch fire so easily. That might help explain the fear of fires in the US.

1: https://thaifreu.de/chiang-mai/burning-season/

punnerud• 2 years ago

And the Nordic countries (places where they have a lot of forest)

catherinecodes2• 2 years ago

The government of Russia, home to the world's largest forest reserves, is trying to subsidize wood-frame buildings. Most modern buildings are made from stone, though, because of fire regulations[1].

1: https://nordregioprojects.org/blog/2021/02/02/wood-in-constr...

ilzmastr• 2 years ago

Is there a correlation between recently (last 10 years?) logged areas and wildfires? I watched Wasted Wood by Harvey Richards lately and was surprised to see how much waste is left on the forrest floor, 15-30% of the tree. Seems like it could be an unnatural dense source of flammable material.

The US is the world's biggest lumber producer and Canada is often #2 as far as I can tell.

I'm a woodworker and this movie from 1964 was fascinating. At one point it said 'one day the 16" board will be a museum piece' and I just laughed because it is too true! The only non-composite boards I have seen that wide are $100s of dollars per foot and have such funky grain, checking, cracking, or splitting that I'm sure would have been ripped down by traditional pre-industrial revolution carpenters.

dredmorbius2• 2 years ago

Wasted Wood is available at the Internet Archive:

<https://archive.org/details/csfsc_000011>

gotoeleven• 2 years ago

Could this problem be solved by giant tree condoms?

The perverse policies that fuel wildfires

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