11 ms·

America in flames

128 points by Futurebot 11y ago

ejcx 11y ago
Anyone else notice the date on this article is wrong ? I first expected this to be something about 9/11. I read the date to see when it was published, and it is from tomorrow!
- notwhereyouare 11y ago
  it is apparently for the print edition, so it may be for tomorrows print?
  - ihsw 11y ago
    That is correct. http://www.economist.com/printedition/covers/2015-09-10/ap-e-eu-la-me-na-uk http://www.economist.com/printedition/covers/2015-09-10/ap-e... Contrary to the URL, this 'America in Flames' article is for next week's issue (Sept 12-18).
Zmetta 11y ago
Too many environmentally minded people are under the impression that environmental preservation means holding an ecological system in stasis to prevent change. I think this is a decent article showing a few of the reasons that those ideas need a little rethinking on what it means to help the environment.
- ghouse 11y ago
  Disagree: Environmentalists (at least here in California) understand that fire has a role in forest management. Parties opposed to that course of action are the homeowners in the forests and portions of the timber industry who would prefer to log the unnaturally dense forests (caused by fire suppression).
  - sp332 11y ago
    From the other side of the country, I'm glad to know there are some sane environmentalists in CA. We only hear about the stupid ones over here.
    - XorNot 11y ago
      It's worth considering that this angle is frequently and aggressively pushed by parties which want to discredit all environmentalists for various reasons.
      - sp332 11y ago
        Or all Californians :)
        sageikosa 11y ago
        One decent underwater rock-slide in Hawaii will end the need to debate conservation in California. Likewise in the Azores for New Jersey. Nature doesn't judge nor plan, it just happens.
skrebbel 11y ago
Offtopic, but I thought it was funny: I got a "YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR ARTICLE LIMIT" banner after the first paragraph, but the banner looked so much like all the other crap on the site that I had looked over it. I spent 2 entire minutes figuring out where the hell the rest of the article was. I think paywalls are a pretty good idea so no comment there, but if you want people to sign up, at least make sure the place is otherwise void of mess so people can find the "buy" button.
- jshap70 11y ago
  Yeah their ad's don't look very professional, so I think most people never even give them the first glance. I had the same thing happen with a pop up.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  I simply read the article behind the banner, it scrolled just fine and was quite readable. I have no problem not using an ad blocker to read articles however I do expect sites to present such requests neatly.
- bainsfather 11y ago
  In firefox, you can 'open link in new private window' - as long as you only have one article open at a time, you can read as many articles as you want. btw - The Economist has had poor business execution for at least the last 2 decades - a nice irony given how they like to lecture others on how to run things.
  - hackuser 11y ago
    > The Economist has had poor business execution for at least the last 2 decades IIRC, they are one of the most successful magazines in the world, with rapidly growing readership and revenue.
    - bainsfather 11y ago
      Their publication/journalism is rather good. My experience (and others' I know) of buying subscriptions has been a pain - mail sent to totally incorrect address, also time between signing up and delivery being many weeks. Their on-line subscription used to allow many tens of people to use 1 account, simultaneously (I cannot be sure whether this was a clever way to increase readership&advertising revenue, or whether their systems didn't detect multiple simultaneous logins from different countries on 1 account). It is possible to have a fine product, but poor execution on the business/commercial side. e.g. many UK football clubs have historically had a fine product (rights to view football matches etc) but have failed to make the most of it in a business sense. Some have been commercially successful, despite squandering income opportunities.
textingplan 11y ago
As a Coloradan, this is something that we have been especially hard hit by. More and more people are living in/around our national forests in the mountains. Naturally, they don't want to deal with fires, nor the remnants left behind (charred landscape for a decade or more.) But as this article alludes to, it has to burn. It does naturally. We have to let go - we are wasting valuable resources to fight these fires. People have _died_ fighting these fires. And for what? So your house doesn't burn down? I'm sorry, but a fire is typically a slow-moving natural disaster. It rarely strikes without a fair warning. I've been saying for years now that if you live in a potential burn area, know where your irreplaceables are, carry fire insurance, evacuate and LET IT BURN. We can't keep fighting nature and winning.
- ghouse 11y ago
  "Carry Fire Insurance" -- That raises the fundamental economic issue, which surprisingly the Economist was silent; a policy of fire suppression is a subsidy for the people who choose to live int he forest. If there wasn't a policy of fire suppression, a home owner wouldn't be able to get fire insurance, and without it, they wouldn't be able to get a mortgage so fewer homes would be built in the forest.
  - kjs3 11y ago
    See also: flood insurance
    - eastbayjake 11y ago
      Yes! The far bigger cost is subsidizing people who live near hurricane-prone coasts rather than sparsely-populated Western forests.
      - learnstats2 11y ago
        Where are people supposed to live? All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. Isn't it subsidising rich people if we allow them to live on the best land, while others contributing to society elsewhere observe no benefit?
unreal37 11y ago
An interesting thought that you don't hear expressed in the mainstream media - letting small fires burn a little longer prevents big fires.
- djrogers 11y ago
  We hear that all the time in the media here in California - I've been hearing it since i lived in SoCal in the early 90s in fact. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing anything about it...
- ihsw 11y ago
  I was under the impression that it was part of a regular fire safety program in all public schools (mentioned once at the very least) -- they're known as controlled burns[1]. Prescribed burning[2] has been present in forest fire management for centuries across the world, a practice which was largely discontinued in the US (and recently re-introduced). NIMBY folks don't care for it because of the risk of outbreak (of which is minimal as those doing it are knowledgeable and it is done in a generally controlled environment) and the fact that it is unsightly and that minor smoke inhalation is unpleasant. It's not a matter of letting small fires burn but rather continuing the time-honored tradition of proper forestry management. As mentioned, the US Forest Service discontinued this practice after enacting a policy of suppressing all fires. I'm not even going to get into the issue of civilization encroaching upon nature and the risk surrounding it. Wildfires that consume large percentages of a given state (well above 20% in some cases) are far less forgiving than coyotes and brown bears. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn [2] http://bcwildfire.ca/prevention/PrescribedFire/ http://bcwildfire.ca/prevention/PrescribedFire/
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  "Burnoffs" are common here in Australia.
programnature 11y ago
Fukuyama's recent book Political Order and Political Decay goes into some detail on the forest service, from its origins as a model of a modern effective government agency in the Progressive era to one captured by special interests and turned ineffective by conflicting mandates from congress.
lisa_henderson 11y ago
This article has an innocence that seems almost willfully blind. They write: "But assiduous firefighting is also to blame." They don't spend much time talking about the most obvious force that drives the "assiduous firefighting". The expansion of the suburbs have pushed human habitation out into what used to be the middle of a forest. Also, the increased popularity of what is sometimes referred to as "country living" but which is really a form of low density suburban living, has added to the trend. The point is, areas that used to be free of humans now have a bunch of $1.2 million dollar homes. And thus you have an affluent demographic that is pushing hard for "assiduous firefighting". And that trend will continue so long as the suburbs continue to expand, which will likely be a long time. The article has a tone that suggests policy makers are simply making an mistake by engaging in "assiduous firefighting". Overlooking the political forces that drive this make it difficult to understand why it is difficult to stop.
- seiji 11y ago
  Tangentially related: it's almost a "capitalism vs. nature" problem. We see it in SF/SV even today. Hundreds (thousands?) of companies are hiring employees and moving them into a resource starved state because it's good for their growing startups. We need some rule like: if your company hires someone and moves them to California for employment, your company should pay to relocate 2 to 5 families (voluntarily) outside of California.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    Every other state in the union would applaud California for such foresight.
- lisa_henderson 11y ago
  I wonder why this was downvoted? I'm stating what should be obvious to everyone. As the human habitation moves deeper into the woods, there is an increase in the political motivation to engage in "assiduous firefighting".
  - CamperBob2 11y ago
arca_vorago 11y ago
I grew up where two very large fires happened in AZ, the Rodeo-Chediski fire and the Wallow, and I have spent quite a bit of time in those forests, as has my grandfather who was a logger in the area in the 70's. My takeaway is that the forest service spent too much time listening to freshly degreed environmentalists and not enough time listening to locals who know the forest, and have created unintended consequences of huge fires through their insistence against thinning of forests, especially after the pine beetle infestation got crazy. All the old loggers, including my grandfather, were saying we needed to be thinning the forest out, because they were interrupting the normal natural cycle of forest burn through lighting, etc, and by doing preburns too small. I admit I didn't believe he was right, until the fire happened and we all realized that it was mismanagement by the BLM and Forest Service that caused the unnecessary level of devastation. It makes me wonder if the same thing is happening in other forest areas in the west. On a side note, I am wondering how much of the lack of moisture is due to unintended consequences of cloud seeding in other areas. Every year I can remember there has been less and less snowfall, which is critical for forests health in the summer, even during the 90's El-Nino.
- maxcasey 11y ago
  Well you're not wrong actually. The Forest Service took over fire management for most of the country in the early 1900's (1910 I think?) and did what fire fighters do best - put fires out. Today we understand that just putting the fire out isn't always the best long term course of action though... I will say that we are seeing hotter and drier fire seasons than before. While this isn't entirely a result of the lack of moisture, it definitely doesn't help.
tdaltonc 11y ago
This is easy to say from Britain, since they cut all the trees down more than 100 years ago.
- saryant 11y ago
  They have correspondents in the US.
petewailes 11y ago
How about just stop building houses near places where they're going to light on fire? And stop building them on floodplains while we're at it. Or anywhere else that, you know, is a bloody stupid place to put a house. It's not like there's no room to put them in a more sensible place. If you know it's not just possible but likely that the house will be seriously damaged or destroyed within ten years or so, it's probably best not to build it. Madness.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  Good point. Areas around major faultlines should be off limits too.
  - kbenson 11y ago
    There are good reasons to build in some of the areas that are prone to disasters. Much of the west coast is fault lines, but there are extremely lucrative ports there as well. I think the real problem is that the people are bad at planning for things that happen on the timescale of many types of disasters, so we need to combat this deficiency. E.g. Requiring insurance for disaster areas over a certain level, pseudo-pooling by level to increase cost for worse areas, etc. The big problem is the existing populace, which may be priced out of their homes. You could probably ameliorate those problems by only enforcing the new requirements on sale/inheritance of existing homes or new buildings. Eventually the market will adjust.
- wallyhs 11y ago
  Say I build a house in a town near a forest in Idaho. Now, there are 20,000,000 acres of national forest in Idaho of which 200,000 are currently burning. So only 1% of the forest is burning and mostly in remote locations in which there are no roads. Even if one of the fires happens to be near me, I am not too worried: I have a metal roof and a fuel-free buffer zone around the house. Additionally, the local fire department has my back. This is a one-time event for me, because the same forest won't burn again in my lifetime. The chance of my house being destroyed by a wildfire in any ten-year period is practically zero. Note that high deserts also burn, and the wind moves those fires along at a frightening pace. Forest and desert are pretty much the only choices in places like Idaho or Montana.
DarkTree 11y ago
What are everyone's thoughts on natural disasters being overall beneficial for the environment? Just because forest fires occur naturally, and would spread naturally without human intervention, does that necessarily mean they are beneficial for the earth? If humans didn't try to put out forest fires, and perhaps by chance many lightning strikes caused fires all across the northern west coast within a small timeframe, would this still be a net positive for the ecosytem? I don't know enough about the equilibrium.
- ambicapter 11y ago
  Well, fires have been happening for a long time, so long that some species have adapted to it (pine cones only opening up and releasing seeds when exposed to high heat being one of them), so I can only assume that the ecosystem has learned to deal with it.
- petawatt 11y ago
  Usually we define "good" for the environment to be the state it would be in without human interference. The Great Oxygenation wiped out most life on Earth, which sounds like a bad thing. But clearing out so many species leaves the way for an evolutionary boom to fill all the new niches. So... we can't really even say that mass extinctions are bad.
innertracks 11y ago
What and where people choose to build in a given environment is a curiosity. I've looked at property east of the Cascades over the years. Probably never happen as I definitely feel the pull of the ocean more. If I ever built over there I figured I would build a house like this guy's house. http://inhabitat.com/this-concrete-dome-home-survived-a-wall-of-flames-without-a-scorch-mark/ http://inhabitat.com/this-concrete-dome-home-survived-a-wall...
ptrklly 11y ago
We can't perfectly suppress fire on a natural landscape. And the act of trying increases the risk that when a fire does start it will become huge and uncontrollable because small trees and forest undergrowth—which would have burned in a small fire if we’d not suppressed them--act as kindling that speeds the ignition of mature trees. More frequent removals of biomass through controlled burns and selective timber harvest can reduce the risk that a hugely catastrophic wildfire occurs. Hotter and bigger fires consume disproportionately more carbon than a series of "normal" fires, particularly in the soil. So more regular and controlled burns improve the landscape's ability to act as a greenhouse gas sink. I worked with a forester in Oregon on this issue (at the time my work was focused on greenhouse gas accounting). It all gets a lot more complicated and messy, but there's good progress going on right now to try to move toward a more sensible fire management regime rather than the pure suppression. It's also better for animal habitat and human safety. http://www.oregon.gov/ODF/BOARD/docs/2011_March/BOFATTCH_20110309_J_02.pdf http://www.oregon.gov/ODF/BOARD/docs/2011_March/BOFATTCH_201...
gdubs 11y ago
This has been a problem in Malibu, California for some time now. The issue there is that controlled burns are necessary, but there is chronic NIMBYism due to the fact that the controlled burns result in a charred, ugly landscape. [1] If I recall correctly, California was actually on fire when the first settlers sailed up along the coast. The native population used to burn the coast annually. It's a tremendous cost (both financial, and the lives of firefighters lost) to support housing development in an area that's not really suited for it. 1: http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Fear-Angeles-Imagination-Disaster/dp/0375706070/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Fear-Angeles-Imagination-Disas...
- kuschku 11y ago
  > It's a tremendous cost to support housing development in an area that's not really suited for it. Be it deserts, be it wildfires, be it floods – this is a huge issue, and just continuing to fight against nature is not easy. Well, unless you are the dutch, but they can only keep their cities safe of floods because they keep floodplains for the rivers.
  - bjelkeman-again 11y ago
    And they are deeply committed to their flood defence infrastructure. They even have a democratically elected regional government dealing only with this. [1] They are also moving houses out of the flood plain to make it work. The culture in the U.S. Would make that really hard I think. Lots to read about it here. http://www.dutchwatersector.com http://www.dutchwatersector.com [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board#Netherlands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board#Netherlands
- tomjen3 11y ago
  The earth isn't suitable for human habitation. We spent unimaginable amounts of lives and created tons of suffering to create the world we now inhabited. It seems, to me, odd to say enough is enough when a few houses are in danger of burning out.
astazangasta 11y ago
An acquaintance working on her forestry PhD told this story more like: some species are adapted to produce forest fires. Pines lay down beds of dry needle and produce compounds that promote flammability. This is their strategy for getting ahead. She also described an interspecies war to claim territory: pines trying to make more fire to burn out their competition, oaks promoting damp and moisture to drown out theirs. In the future when we all live in the sky, a burning mountain will be a great spectacle that we travel to see. "It's fire season, I'm going north to catch the show this week."
- A_COMPUTER 11y ago
  I was shown a pine cone once that snapped open when burned, enabling its seeds to pop out. It was explained to me that fire was a necessary part of the tree's lifecycle, and that this is why logging isn't a suitable substitute for fires.
  - zevyoura 11y ago
    A similar (or maybe the same) species is mentioned in the article: "The jack pine depends on fire to melt the hard resin that encases its seeds."
sudo_bang_bang 11y ago
As people have stated here, the forests need to burn. Ponderosa Pine, which covers a lot of the Western U.S., burns at a cycle between 5-25 years. [1] However, we could and already do, control the natural process this through prescribed burns. The issue is the federal government is appropriating less funds to the Department of the Interior and Forest Service. In fact 2016 will represent, "a decrease of $246 million below the fiscal year 2015." [2] Climate change could potentially shorten these life cycles. We definitely need to spend more to ensure safety and survival of homes and the forest. [1]http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/fire-in-depth/different-ecosystems/ponderosa-pine.cfm http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/fire-i... [2] http://appropriations.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=394247 http://appropriations.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Doc...
dummy7953 11y ago
Nice title for a 9/11 headline.
SandersAK 11y ago
The biggest problem has been reducing the ladder fuel (underbrush etc). The fuels dept is notoriously understaffed and underfunded for national forest service. On top of his, it's difficult to convince locals to deal with lots of controlled burns in winter and spring. Logging practices have gotten better, especially with dispersed thinning, but my gut is hat climate change is the real culprit. Also, lodge pole pine is becoming more dominant in the PNW, and we're losing more fire resistant (and dependent) trees like ponderosa. Lodge pole grows like a weed and burns like hay. Couple this with an antiquated federal service entirely dependent on chain of command that fights every year to preserve operations and their career posts and you get one of the most wasteful inefficient services in U.S. Govt. Source: I was a forest firefighter and left after being fed up w the bureaucracy. So take my cynicism w a grain of salt.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > my gut is hat climate change is the real culprit. Whether or not this particular incident is caused by it, climate change is and will create massive costs for society, from forest fires, to coastal cities flooding, to water and food shortages, to all the associated mitigations and social consequences (wars, starvation, migrations, etc.). Who should pay for all of it? These are massive externalities dumped on the public by the fossil fuel industry and, to be fair, by the very many users of fossil fuel, including me. However, I didn't conduct a propaganda campaign that has turned a problem into this catastrophe. Regarding this particular situation: I'm not sure a particular fire can be directly linked to climate change. Climate change will make some places wetter, some drier, some warmer, some cooler. The average temperature globally is increasing, but that's an average over a huge area (also, does someone happen to know about humidity and rainfall?).
  - SandersAK 11y ago
    Def agree that it's more complicated but PNWhas record dryness and heat last five years. An the level tho you're right and it warrants more inspection than my cursory gut check.
fitchjo 11y ago
Reminds me of the joke that if a forest firefighter woke up in the middle of the night and saw his house was on fire, he would go light his neighbor's house on fire to fight it.

128 points by Futurebot 11y ago

ejcx 11y ago

Anyone else notice the date on this article is wrong ? I first expected this to be something about 9/11. I read the date to see when it was published, and it is from tomorrow!

notwhereyouare 11y ago
it is apparently for the print edition, so it may be for tomorrows print?
- ihsw 11y ago
  That is correct. http://www.economist.com/printedition/covers/2015-09-10/ap-e-eu-la-me-na-uk http://www.economist.com/printedition/covers/2015-09-10/ap-e... Contrary to the URL, this 'America in Flames' article is for next week's issue (Sept 12-18).

Zmetta 11y ago

Too many environmentally minded people are under the impression that environmental preservation means holding an ecological system in stasis to prevent change. I think this is a decent article showing a few of the reasons that those ideas need a little rethinking on what it means to help the environment.

ghouse 11y ago
Disagree: Environmentalists (at least here in California) understand that fire has a role in forest management. Parties opposed to that course of action are the homeowners in the forests and portions of the timber industry who would prefer to log the unnaturally dense forests (caused by fire suppression).
- sp332 11y ago
  From the other side of the country, I'm glad to know there are some sane environmentalists in CA. We only hear about the stupid ones over here.
  - XorNot 11y ago
    It's worth considering that this angle is frequently and aggressively pushed by parties which want to discredit all environmentalists for various reasons.
    - sp332 11y ago
      Or all Californians :)
      - sageikosa 11y ago
        One decent underwater rock-slide in Hawaii will end the need to debate conservation in California. Likewise in the Azores for New Jersey. Nature doesn't judge nor plan, it just happens.

skrebbel 11y ago

Offtopic, but I thought it was funny: I got a "YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR ARTICLE LIMIT" banner after the first paragraph, but the banner looked so much like all the other crap on the site that I had looked over it. I spent 2 entire minutes figuring out where the hell the rest of the article was. I think paywalls are a pretty good idea so no comment there, but if you want people to sign up, at least make sure the place is otherwise void of mess so people can find the "buy" button.

jshap70 11y ago
Yeah their ad's don't look very professional, so I think most people never even give them the first glance. I had the same thing happen with a pop up.
Shivetya 11y ago
I simply read the article behind the banner, it scrolled just fine and was quite readable. I have no problem not using an ad blocker to read articles however I do expect sites to present such requests neatly.
bainsfather 11y ago
In firefox, you can 'open link in new private window' - as long as you only have one article open at a time, you can read as many articles as you want. btw - The Economist has had poor business execution for at least the last 2 decades - a nice irony given how they like to lecture others on how to run things.
- hackuser 11y ago
  > The Economist has had poor business execution for at least the last 2 decades IIRC, they are one of the most successful magazines in the world, with rapidly growing readership and revenue.
  - bainsfather 11y ago
    Their publication/journalism is rather good. My experience (and others' I know) of buying subscriptions has been a pain - mail sent to totally incorrect address, also time between signing up and delivery being many weeks. Their on-line subscription used to allow many tens of people to use 1 account, simultaneously (I cannot be sure whether this was a clever way to increase readership&advertising revenue, or whether their systems didn't detect multiple simultaneous logins from different countries on 1 account). It is possible to have a fine product, but poor execution on the business/commercial side. e.g. many UK football clubs have historically had a fine product (rights to view football matches etc) but have failed to make the most of it in a business sense. Some have been commercially successful, despite squandering income opportunities.

textingplan 11y ago

As a Coloradan, this is something that we have been especially hard hit by. More and more people are living in/around our national forests in the mountains. Naturally, they don't want to deal with fires, nor the remnants left behind (charred landscape for a decade or more.) But as this article alludes to, it has to burn. It does naturally. We have to let go - we are wasting valuable resources to fight these fires. People have _died_ fighting these fires. And for what? So your house doesn't burn down? I'm sorry, but a fire is typically a slow-moving natural disaster. It rarely strikes without a fair warning. I've been saying for years now that if you live in a potential burn area, know where your irreplaceables are, carry fire insurance, evacuate and LET IT BURN. We can't keep fighting nature and winning.

ghouse 11y ago
"Carry Fire Insurance" -- That raises the fundamental economic issue, which surprisingly the Economist was silent; a policy of fire suppression is a subsidy for the people who choose to live int he forest. If there wasn't a policy of fire suppression, a home owner wouldn't be able to get fire insurance, and without it, they wouldn't be able to get a mortgage so fewer homes would be built in the forest.
- kjs3 11y ago
  See also: flood insurance
  - eastbayjake 11y ago
    Yes! The far bigger cost is subsidizing people who live near hurricane-prone coasts rather than sparsely-populated Western forests.
    - learnstats2 11y ago
      Where are people supposed to live? All of the premium non-hurricane, non-forest land, is taken already by rich people. Isn't it subsidising rich people if we allow them to live on the best land, while others contributing to society elsewhere observe no benefit?

unreal37 11y ago

An interesting thought that you don't hear expressed in the mainstream media - letting small fires burn a little longer prevents big fires.

djrogers 11y ago
We hear that all the time in the media here in California - I've been hearing it since i lived in SoCal in the early 90s in fact. Unfortunately, nobody seems to be doing anything about it...
ihsw 11y ago
I was under the impression that it was part of a regular fire safety program in all public schools (mentioned once at the very least) -- they're known as controlled burns[1]. Prescribed burning[2] has been present in forest fire management for centuries across the world, a practice which was largely discontinued in the US (and recently re-introduced). NIMBY folks don't care for it because of the risk of outbreak (of which is minimal as those doing it are knowledgeable and it is done in a generally controlled environment) and the fact that it is unsightly and that minor smoke inhalation is unpleasant. It's not a matter of letting small fires burn but rather continuing the time-honored tradition of proper forestry management. As mentioned, the US Forest Service discontinued this practice after enacting a policy of suppressing all fires. I'm not even going to get into the issue of civilization encroaching upon nature and the risk surrounding it. Wildfires that consume large percentages of a given state (well above 20% in some cases) are far less forgiving than coyotes and brown bears. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_burn [2] http://bcwildfire.ca/prevention/PrescribedFire/ http://bcwildfire.ca/prevention/PrescribedFire/
voltagex_ 11y ago
"Burnoffs" are common here in Australia.

programnature 11y ago

Fukuyama's recent book Political Order and Political Decay goes into some detail on the forest service, from its origins as a model of a modern effective government agency in the Progressive era to one captured by special interests and turned ineffective by conflicting mandates from congress.

lisa_henderson 11y ago

This article has an innocence that seems almost willfully blind. They write: "But assiduous firefighting is also to blame." They don't spend much time talking about the most obvious force that drives the "assiduous firefighting". The expansion of the suburbs have pushed human habitation out into what used to be the middle of a forest. Also, the increased popularity of what is sometimes referred to as "country living" but which is really a form of low density suburban living, has added to the trend. The point is, areas that used to be free of humans now have a bunch of $1.2 million dollar homes. And thus you have an affluent demographic that is pushing hard for "assiduous firefighting". And that trend will continue so long as the suburbs continue to expand, which will likely be a long time. The article has a tone that suggests policy makers are simply making an mistake by engaging in "assiduous firefighting". Overlooking the political forces that drive this make it difficult to understand why it is difficult to stop.

seiji 11y ago
Tangentially related: it's almost a "capitalism vs. nature" problem. We see it in SF/SV even today. Hundreds (thousands?) of companies are hiring employees and moving them into a resource starved state because it's good for their growing startups. We need some rule like: if your company hires someone and moves them to California for employment, your company should pay to relocate 2 to 5 families (voluntarily) outside of California.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  Every other state in the union would applaud California for such foresight.
lisa_henderson 11y ago
I wonder why this was downvoted? I'm stating what should be obvious to everyone. As the human habitation moves deeper into the woods, there is an increase in the political motivation to engage in "assiduous firefighting".
- CamperBob2 11y ago

arca_vorago 11y ago

I grew up where two very large fires happened in AZ, the Rodeo-Chediski fire and the Wallow, and I have spent quite a bit of time in those forests, as has my grandfather who was a logger in the area in the 70's. My takeaway is that the forest service spent too much time listening to freshly degreed environmentalists and not enough time listening to locals who know the forest, and have created unintended consequences of huge fires through their insistence against thinning of forests, especially after the pine beetle infestation got crazy. All the old loggers, including my grandfather, were saying we needed to be thinning the forest out, because they were interrupting the normal natural cycle of forest burn through lighting, etc, and by doing preburns too small. I admit I didn't believe he was right, until the fire happened and we all realized that it was mismanagement by the BLM and Forest Service that caused the unnecessary level of devastation. It makes me wonder if the same thing is happening in other forest areas in the west. On a side note, I am wondering how much of the lack of moisture is due to unintended consequences of cloud seeding in other areas. Every year I can remember there has been less and less snowfall, which is critical for forests health in the summer, even during the 90's El-Nino.

maxcasey 11y ago
Well you're not wrong actually. The Forest Service took over fire management for most of the country in the early 1900's (1910 I think?) and did what fire fighters do best - put fires out. Today we understand that just putting the fire out isn't always the best long term course of action though... I will say that we are seeing hotter and drier fire seasons than before. While this isn't entirely a result of the lack of moisture, it definitely doesn't help.

tdaltonc 11y ago

This is easy to say from Britain, since they cut all the trees down more than 100 years ago.

saryant 11y ago
They have correspondents in the US.

petewailes 11y ago

How about just stop building houses near places where they're going to light on fire? And stop building them on floodplains while we're at it. Or anywhere else that, you know, is a bloody stupid place to put a house. It's not like there's no room to put them in a more sensible place. If you know it's not just possible but likely that the house will be seriously damaged or destroyed within ten years or so, it's probably best not to build it. Madness.

waterlesscloud 11y ago
Good point. Areas around major faultlines should be off limits too.
- kbenson 11y ago
  There are good reasons to build in some of the areas that are prone to disasters. Much of the west coast is fault lines, but there are extremely lucrative ports there as well. I think the real problem is that the people are bad at planning for things that happen on the timescale of many types of disasters, so we need to combat this deficiency. E.g. Requiring insurance for disaster areas over a certain level, pseudo-pooling by level to increase cost for worse areas, etc. The big problem is the existing populace, which may be priced out of their homes. You could probably ameliorate those problems by only enforcing the new requirements on sale/inheritance of existing homes or new buildings. Eventually the market will adjust.
wallyhs 11y ago
Say I build a house in a town near a forest in Idaho. Now, there are 20,000,000 acres of national forest in Idaho of which 200,000 are currently burning. So only 1% of the forest is burning and mostly in remote locations in which there are no roads. Even if one of the fires happens to be near me, I am not too worried: I have a metal roof and a fuel-free buffer zone around the house. Additionally, the local fire department has my back. This is a one-time event for me, because the same forest won't burn again in my lifetime. The chance of my house being destroyed by a wildfire in any ten-year period is practically zero. Note that high deserts also burn, and the wind moves those fires along at a frightening pace. Forest and desert are pretty much the only choices in places like Idaho or Montana.

DarkTree 11y ago

What are everyone's thoughts on natural disasters being overall beneficial for the environment? Just because forest fires occur naturally, and would spread naturally without human intervention, does that necessarily mean they are beneficial for the earth? If humans didn't try to put out forest fires, and perhaps by chance many lightning strikes caused fires all across the northern west coast within a small timeframe, would this still be a net positive for the ecosytem? I don't know enough about the equilibrium.

ambicapter 11y ago
Well, fires have been happening for a long time, so long that some species have adapted to it (pine cones only opening up and releasing seeds when exposed to high heat being one of them), so I can only assume that the ecosystem has learned to deal with it.
petawatt 11y ago
Usually we define "good" for the environment to be the state it would be in without human interference. The Great Oxygenation wiped out most life on Earth, which sounds like a bad thing. But clearing out so many species leaves the way for an evolutionary boom to fill all the new niches. So... we can't really even say that mass extinctions are bad.

innertracks 11y ago

What and where people choose to build in a given environment is a curiosity. I've looked at property east of the Cascades over the years. Probably never happen as I definitely feel the pull of the ocean more. If I ever built over there I figured I would build a house like this guy's house. http://inhabitat.com/this-concrete-dome-home-survived-a-wall-of-flames-without-a-scorch-mark/ http://inhabitat.com/this-concrete-dome-home-survived-a-wall...

ptrklly 11y ago

We can't perfectly suppress fire on a natural landscape. And the act of trying increases the risk that when a fire does start it will become huge and uncontrollable because small trees and forest undergrowth—which would have burned in a small fire if we’d not suppressed them--act as kindling that speeds the ignition of mature trees. More frequent removals of biomass through controlled burns and selective timber harvest can reduce the risk that a hugely catastrophic wildfire occurs. Hotter and bigger fires consume disproportionately more carbon than a series of "normal" fires, particularly in the soil. So more regular and controlled burns improve the landscape's ability to act as a greenhouse gas sink. I worked with a forester in Oregon on this issue (at the time my work was focused on greenhouse gas accounting). It all gets a lot more complicated and messy, but there's good progress going on right now to try to move toward a more sensible fire management regime rather than the pure suppression. It's also better for animal habitat and human safety. http://www.oregon.gov/ODF/BOARD/docs/2011_March/BOFATTCH_20110309_J_02.pdf http://www.oregon.gov/ODF/BOARD/docs/2011_March/BOFATTCH_201...

gdubs 11y ago

This has been a problem in Malibu, California for some time now. The issue there is that controlled burns are necessary, but there is chronic NIMBYism due to the fact that the controlled burns result in a charred, ugly landscape. [1] If I recall correctly, California was actually on fire when the first settlers sailed up along the coast. The native population used to burn the coast annually. It's a tremendous cost (both financial, and the lives of firefighters lost) to support housing development in an area that's not really suited for it. 1: http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Fear-Angeles-Imagination-Disaster/dp/0375706070/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8 http://www.amazon.com/Ecology-Fear-Angeles-Imagination-Disas...

kuschku 11y ago
> It's a tremendous cost to support housing development in an area that's not really suited for it. Be it deserts, be it wildfires, be it floods – this is a huge issue, and just continuing to fight against nature is not easy. Well, unless you are the dutch, but they can only keep their cities safe of floods because they keep floodplains for the rivers.
- bjelkeman-again 11y ago
  And they are deeply committed to their flood defence infrastructure. They even have a democratically elected regional government dealing only with this. [1] They are also moving houses out of the flood plain to make it work. The culture in the U.S. Would make that really hard I think. Lots to read about it here. http://www.dutchwatersector.com http://www.dutchwatersector.com [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board#Netherlands https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_board#Netherlands
tomjen3 11y ago
The earth isn't suitable for human habitation. We spent unimaginable amounts of lives and created tons of suffering to create the world we now inhabited. It seems, to me, odd to say enough is enough when a few houses are in danger of burning out.

astazangasta 11y ago

An acquaintance working on her forestry PhD told this story more like: some species are adapted to produce forest fires. Pines lay down beds of dry needle and produce compounds that promote flammability. This is their strategy for getting ahead. She also described an interspecies war to claim territory: pines trying to make more fire to burn out their competition, oaks promoting damp and moisture to drown out theirs. In the future when we all live in the sky, a burning mountain will be a great spectacle that we travel to see. "It's fire season, I'm going north to catch the show this week."

A_COMPUTER 11y ago
I was shown a pine cone once that snapped open when burned, enabling its seeds to pop out. It was explained to me that fire was a necessary part of the tree's lifecycle, and that this is why logging isn't a suitable substitute for fires.
- zevyoura 11y ago
  A similar (or maybe the same) species is mentioned in the article: "The jack pine depends on fire to melt the hard resin that encases its seeds."

sudo_bang_bang 11y ago

As people have stated here, the forests need to burn. Ponderosa Pine, which covers a lot of the Western U.S., burns at a cycle between 5-25 years. [1] However, we could and already do, control the natural process this through prescribed burns. The issue is the federal government is appropriating less funds to the Department of the Interior and Forest Service. In fact 2016 will represent, "a decrease of $246 million below the fiscal year 2015." [2] Climate change could potentially shorten these life cycles. We definitely need to spend more to ensure safety and survival of homes and the forest. [1]http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/fire-in-depth/different-ecosystems/ponderosa-pine.cfm http://www.nps.gov/fire/wildland-fire/learning-center/fire-i... [2] http://appropriations.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=394247 http://appropriations.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?Doc...

dummy7953 11y ago

Nice title for a 9/11 headline.

SandersAK 11y ago

The biggest problem has been reducing the ladder fuel (underbrush etc). The fuels dept is notoriously understaffed and underfunded for national forest service. On top of his, it's difficult to convince locals to deal with lots of controlled burns in winter and spring. Logging practices have gotten better, especially with dispersed thinning, but my gut is hat climate change is the real culprit. Also, lodge pole pine is becoming more dominant in the PNW, and we're losing more fire resistant (and dependent) trees like ponderosa. Lodge pole grows like a weed and burns like hay. Couple this with an antiquated federal service entirely dependent on chain of command that fights every year to preserve operations and their career posts and you get one of the most wasteful inefficient services in U.S. Govt. Source: I was a forest firefighter and left after being fed up w the bureaucracy. So take my cynicism w a grain of salt.

hackuser 11y ago
> my gut is hat climate change is the real culprit. Whether or not this particular incident is caused by it, climate change is and will create massive costs for society, from forest fires, to coastal cities flooding, to water and food shortages, to all the associated mitigations and social consequences (wars, starvation, migrations, etc.). Who should pay for all of it? These are massive externalities dumped on the public by the fossil fuel industry and, to be fair, by the very many users of fossil fuel, including me. However, I didn't conduct a propaganda campaign that has turned a problem into this catastrophe. Regarding this particular situation: I'm not sure a particular fire can be directly linked to climate change. Climate change will make some places wetter, some drier, some warmer, some cooler. The average temperature globally is increasing, but that's an average over a huge area (also, does someone happen to know about humidity and rainfall?).
- SandersAK 11y ago
  Def agree that it's more complicated but PNWhas record dryness and heat last five years. An the level tho you're right and it warrants more inspection than my cursory gut check.

fitchjo 11y ago

Reminds me of the joke that if a forest firefighter woke up in the middle of the night and saw his house was on fire, he would go light his neighbor's house on fire to fight it.