16 ms·

Years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western megafires of today

232 points by onychomys 5y ago

ggggtez 5y ago
From what I've read this is a red herring to get you to ignore the fact that global warming and neglect are the root causes of the wild fire issues.
- zepto 5y ago
  This is certainly wrong. There were wildfires in California before global warming was noticeable. Global warming is an accelerant, but not the root cause.
- ianhawes 5y ago
  Climate change definitely contributes to the crisis, but ignoring other factors does not help us improve the situation. For example, Spanish settlers in California planted invasive trees not adapted to the climate and specifically the wildfires. When the fire seasons came, the invasive trees burned hotter than native trees, causing the death of more of the flora than was typical.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  That is false. These issues were known to the US Forest Service at least 20 years ago, and broadly speaking nothing was done about it. Climate change is helping forest fires to ignite and burn hotter due to reduced moisture in both trees and the soil. To the extent that it may also increase the incidence of lightning, and thus the probability of naturally started fires, it can also influence the numbers of fires. But gross mismanagement of forests for most of the 20th century caused by misguided ideas about what keeps forests healthy is what has led to an almost unimaginable pile of fuel sitting on forest floors that would never have existed in the past.
  - noxer 5y ago
    >Climate change is helping forest fires to ignite and burn hotter [citation needed] Actually no, none needed this is obvious nonsense, everyone with a basic understanding of physics can spot that.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      Water has a high specific heat capacity. If you have a given amount of energy (stored in chemical bonds) and some of it goes to heating water, temperatures will be lower. It appears you have a very basic understanding of physics.
      - noxer 5y ago
        Maybe read the quote again especially the part you carefully avoided
- CarelessExpert 5y ago
  Read the article. It mentions in multiple places that climate change is increasing the duration of the forest fire season and worsening conditions that promote wildfire. The point of the article is that outcomes of poor forestry management practices (a build up of fuel that lead to truly enormous wildfires when they finally burn) were bad enough, and now climate change is dramatically exacerbating those effects. As a result, changing our forestry management practices to adopt controlled burns, thinning, and other techniques, will be a critical element of climate change adaptation. That's not to say we shouldn't stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible to avoid even worse future effects. But we've already warmed the globe enough that adaptation is already necessary, and this is just one example.
  - Eric_WVGG 5y ago
    The thing that's boggling my mind is, we've been hearing about this since the Yellowstone fire in 1988 — the forest immediately bounced back greener and healthier than before. That was over thirty years ago! It’s incredible that controlled burns are even controversial today.
    - CarelessExpert 5y ago
      Yeah, I find it deeply frustrating. We've known about the dangers of wildfire suppression for literally decades, and yet it's taken a very long time for forestry management practices to change. There's likely many reasons for that, from institutional momentum to a lack of funding, but something has to change or forests will simply burn uncontrolled and the problem will solve itself...
go_elmo 5y ago
at least those megafires will decrease the likelihood of fires in the comming years. Lets just hope that people learn from this... Its even worth it setting smaller, local and controlled fires in less severe weather settings to prevent things like this.
- ianhawes 5y ago
  I think the issue is that when you're looking for "less severe weather settings" you have limited options - California is in a megadrought. Meanwhile, China has invested heavily in weather modification and is reportedly conjuring up rain storms all while weather modification science here in the US is treated like alchemy.
  - fathompinball 5y ago
    >California is in a megadrought. To be fair, we had big, honkin', town-killin' fires back when it rained and snowed more than average for decades. It's hard to tell how much is due to drought, how much to a shift from snow to rain, how much is home development, how much is homeless people torching off areas (more than you'd like to think).
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      The drought began in about 1999. The wet years in the two decades since then have not changed the drought. Soil moisture levels across the SW of the US are at their lowest levels in 1200 years. So, maybe you're referring to an earlier period, in which case, cool.
      - fathompinball 5y ago
        The really threatening fires we had here were in 1988, 1994, 1997, 1999.
  - chomp 5y ago
    > all while weather modification science here in the US is treated like alchemy I don't fully agree with this statement, it's more that you're not just affecting your rainfall, but neighbors as well. As we speak, 8 of the Western states in the US are performing scientific trials together. There's no hard data that shows exactly how much weather modification actually works. Some data shows 5 to 15% increased snowfall, but that's just statistical analysis. Once we get hard data that shows the cost/benefit, you're likely to see more weather modification efforts (e.g. how many dollars per acre-foot of water? Is this cheaper or more expensive than pipelines, or drinking water reservoirs? What would a budget look like for bolstering our agriculture? Can a state government budget a few million for the next year due to an anticipated reduction in rainfall? How many million would we need? What's the human and ecological (particularly beneficial bacteria and algae) impacts of being exposed to AgI?) We also don't know how wide-scale it works. Yes, China can seed clouds to reduce smog to have blue skies for PRC meetings in Beijing, but can it work on the scale of say, an entire mountain range? Or the agricultural area of an entire state? Can't say. It's only been in the last few years that we've gotten RADAR and compute that's capable of analyzing our experiments. Also another thing, you can generate precipitation, but even weather modification technology can't overcome a drought. If you have a high pressure system (like the one currently sitting over most of the West US at the moment) you're stuck with dry skies.
nitrogen 5y ago
The early-20th-century sci-fi novel Earth Abides is about the lives of some of the remnants of humanity after a virus wipes out most of the population. Even then, California had a reputation for wildfires, and in the story large parts of the state burn after there are no people to fight the fires. In addition to excessive fire suppression causing fires to become ever more extreme, I suspect that the fact that people move around so much caused there to be no "living memory" of the natural conditions of an area, and thus people collectively "forgot" that their areas burn, and need fuel removal and careful management, not just fire suppression.
- Enginerrrd 5y ago
  In my opinion, there's also the fact that very few people know what an old growth forest looks like compared to 2nd growth in the PNW. There's a profound difference in ecosystems with new growth having tremendously more undergrowth. If you spend enough time in the forests, you'll start to see it too. The 2nd growth stuff looks and feels imbalanced.
  - titzer 5y ago
    Forests take thousands upon thousands of years to mature. It can take centuries for the mix of tree species to develop to the point where the "apex" species of tree appears and then dominates the ecosystem. Ecosystems are extraordinarily complex. In my head, I see reforested areas like the Potato Jesus painting with a bonus "Mission Accomplished" banner.
    - bishoprook2 5y ago
      " Forests take thousands upon thousands of years to mature." I can't be too many thousands of years. It doesn't take too many thousands to completely change the nature of forests (spruce to pine for example).
- deeviant 5y ago
  I'm rather confident very few in California "forgot" that their areas burn. Large parts of California burn down every year and have done so through the height of "excessive fire suppression". Also fire insurance premiums help jog the memory. The core of the issue has little to do with the fire suppression policy and more to do with the interface between humans and wildlands. There just aren't many areas that are even safe to do proscribe burns en masse that won't threaten some property or structures even if prescribed burns were emphasized. And I just don't understand how ever single one of these "The REAL problem is California doesn't let wildfires burn" threads is they always start with, "yeah climate change could possibly maybe be one cause but the REAL cause is..." No, really, climate change is not some incidental factor here, the climate conditions in CA are a huge contributor to these fires and possibly dominating factor in these fires.
MuirsGhost 5y ago
We forget so quickly. We used to burn the forests out of indifference and perceived abundance. > By the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run into the woods. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/the-american-forests/305017/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/the-ame...
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > "We forget ..." We also forget that pre-european cultures in the Americas seem to have regularly practiced deliberate forest burning, for several reasons. They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s, but American human-driven forest management didn't started with Europeans.
  - fathompinball 5y ago
    >They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s I doubt it. There just weren't nearly as many of them.
    - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
      They also had a few thousand years of practice figuring out what works in the local environment. Human nature is one of the few things that seems to be consistent throughout all of history across all civilizations. The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.
      - wizzwizz4 5y ago
        > The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization. If one person can cause a tragedy by mistake, you have a systematic failure, not a failure of the individual. A sign of a good system is that the occasional fool doesn't end up with the horizon burning.
lcam84 5y ago
This remind me of interventionism described on the antifragile book. Also the role of small stresses in the health of a system.
- sjg007 5y ago
  Eh.. it's just more that you reduce the fuel density by having more frequent wildfires. It's not about increasing resilience.
  - lcam84 5y ago
    Avoiding stress (frequent wildfires) makes you fragile (megafires).
    - sjg007 5y ago
      If you accept anti fragility as a true theory it still doesn’t fit with forest fires.
      - lcam84 5y ago
        Now you are reminding me the Procrustean bed story :)
ortusdux 5y ago
WA state HB 1168, which passed last year, provides $125m to the DNR for wildfire management and prevention. I know some people involved and the money should help buy them some breathing room to be able to actually be proactive with prescribed burns, thinning, and the like. https://www.dnr.wa.gov/publications/em_leg_dnr_wildfire_forest_health_funding_2021.pdf https://www.dnr.wa.gov/publications/em_leg_dnr_wildfire_fore...
noxer 5y ago
Strange, for the last few yeas NH pretty much sold the idea that its climate change and thous evil politicians that aren't 100% in on the the green movement who cased the wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves.
whalesalad 5y ago
We forget that we are guests on this earth. The earth is not here for us. We are here for it.
- weimerica 5y ago
  Weird, my religion grants me domain over the natural world.
- CountDrewku 5y ago
  We're no more "guests" than anything else on this planet. I'm all for keeping the planet nice for future humans but there's no need for some weird pseudo religious element about being caretakers.
  - whalesalad 5y ago
    What I mean is we need to let wildfires do their thing and stop trying to terraform and control every facet of the environment.
  - benatkin 5y ago
    Anthropocentrism is the psuedo religious thing. If you take away the layers of BS, it's pretty obvious that animals and plants are important too.
    - CountDrewku 5y ago
      Too is the key word.
- bishoprook2 5y ago
  Plate tectonics will cure all ills.
0xbadcafebee 5y ago
It would be nice if we could take the resources used to fight fires, and instead put it into making homes more fire-resistant. Let the forests be (burned or not) and learn to live with them.
- kec 5y ago
  It doesn't matter if your house is made out of asbestos and concrete if the AQI is off the charts and ambient temperature is over 600 degrees due to fires surrounding it.
  - 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
    I didn't say we had to live in the house while a fire burned around it...
fizx 5y ago
We also logged everything, and then re-planted with the most profitable trees assuming we'd log it all again. Who knew that densely planted tall pine trees burn so much?
- brianwawok 5y ago
  Is this actually the case where the fires are happening? It's all man planted? Much of north america is naturally "a sea of pine trees". It would have been like this in 1700.
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwood > In the United States the pine tree, Pinus palustris, known as the longleaf pine, once covered as much as 90,000,000 acres (360,000 km2) but due to clear cutting was reduced by between 95% and 97%. The trees grow very large (up to 150 feet), taking 100 to 150 years to mature and can live up to 500 years. The wood was prized and cutting resulted in many hundreds of thousands of stumps that are very resinous, do not rot, and eventually become fatwood. This ushered in a new industry for many years. Some of these trees burn like firebombs, they probably find it useful too. As a species. The individual tree, maybe, but if so far more briefly.
- Wohlf 5y ago
  This is not true in the majority of the Americas, especially the West Coast.
beloch 5y ago
This highlights one of the problems with pop culture and science. Pop culture has a tendency to fixate on a small number of big problems or sexy technologies to the exclusion of all others. e.g. If you bring up forestry management's role in setting the stage for megafires, you will typically be labelled a climate change denier unless you go out of your way to address climate change first, as this article does. Even then, you'll likely be seen by many as "minimizing the real problem". Yes, climate change is a bigger problem, overall, than megafires, but past (and continuing) forestry practices are the larger part of the megafire problem. Should we ignore small problems until the big ones are all solved? Of course not. The problem with pop culture is that it influences everything. If you want to have any success with grant applications, finding ways to work in current pop-culture buzzwords in is essential. Anyone trying to do research on forestry would be well advised to have "climate change" somewhere in their proposal even if it's not important to their work at all. If you want to get politicians to devote public funding to improving forestry practices, good luck! There's money for exploring the impact of climate change on forests, but not for improving forestry practices themselves. At least, not until enough megafires make people look more carefully at the problem. The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades. It just wasn't something that fit into pop culture narratives, so we've let things get worse and worse. The next time you hear someone saying that X is an important part of a problem that climate change also affects, pay closer attention. Don't just dismiss that person as a climate change denier. Make room for small problems as well as the big ones, because ignoring many small problems soon leads to big ones.
- abakker 5y ago
  This is exactly right. Especially the part about how this phenomenon is not new. I seem to remember an article for grade school kids in a scholastic magazine from the late 90s that mentioned this. Documentaries about Yellowstone at the time mentioned the importance of fired in the germination of new trees. Of course, policy has not effectively reacted to well known science. Sigh.
  - 5y ago
chris_va 5y ago
(disclaimer, I work in a Climate&Energy group and have been studying wildfires, though by no means a deep expert in forestry) The implication of this article is that we should have let the forests burn, and as a corollary we should go back to doing that. The former seems like a reasonable argument. This article misses a couple of important details, though, notably the effects of invasive species and how climate change affects the regrowth of forests post fire. As a result, the latter is by no means obvious. At this point, it's unlikely that forests will go back to how things were, even if we stop suppression.
- ysavir 5y ago
  I'm not sure what's being suggested here. That we continue the current practices of preventing smaller fires? If the eventually of preventing smaller fires is creating a later megafire, aren't were merely delaying the inevitable--and doing more damage in the long term?
  - chris_va 5y ago
    I don't think there is a great prescriptive process here to follow, and we've kind of backed ourselves into a corner (but again I am not a forestry expert). The current practice is not a good equilibrium, but neither is going back to allowing most fires to burn out naturally. Going back to what worked before sounds appealing (minus the smoke), but really it's not likely to work again the second time around because of everything else that has changed. So an ideal solution is probably going to need to be more complicated.
bishoprook2 5y ago
You know, it's worth considering that 'California' isn't some big monolithic landscape. The dangerous fires mostly seem to erupt from hard-to-access river canyons. Do you just let those burn? Light 'em up on purpose? As a side note, these areas are filled with highly flammable buildings. 100 year old wood construction, shared attics in the small towns, nowhere near modern code.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Here's a great talk from a Forest Service expert on why wildfires have become worse. The TLDR is that forests have become much denser, particularly after old trees were logged, and this creates large areas of fuel. Additionally, forests need active management - prescribed burns, dry fuel cleanup, pest management, etc. Climate change may be aggravating or amplifying the intensity of wildfires but there are other causes that are potentially more important, and they present opportunities for wildfire prevention that are currently ignored by governments/news media/social media. https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_gotten_worse_and_what_we_can_do_about_it https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...
cushychicken 5y ago
This was one of the major findings after the major Yellowstone fire of 1988. Decades of stopping any fires led to a massive fuel buildup that caused a huge firestorm.
ggm 5y ago
In OZ, within the emergency volunteer firefighting community, there's dissent about "what to do" with people who have a strongly pragmatic view that there is no more wild landscape, and we need to actively manage it all, even national parks, and people who want nature to run its course and only manage around the fringes. NSW vs Vic vs Qld. City vs Country. Farmer vs Townie. Farmer and Townie vs Traditional landowners They get pretty heated, but I stress this is within a community of people who don fire-gear, get in trucks and actually have to deal with the damn things. There's a generation gap, a gender gap, a culture gap, a politics gap, a you're-not-from-round-here gap... I walked into the edge of the online flamefest. Wish I hadn't joined in. (yea. flamefest amongst fireies...)
- h0l0cube 5y ago
  I was under the impression that prescribed burning (including the return of indigenous burn practices) enjoyed majority support in Australia? (Save the few NIMBYs complaining about the smoke)
  - mastazi 5y ago
    It's more popular than elsewhere. In Italy where I grew up, it gets very little support. I now live in Sydney and in the past 10 years I became used to periodically having smoke from planned burning. I can't imagine something like that would go down well back in Italy. I was wondering if there are climatic/ecological differences that make controlled burning more effective / less disruptive for the ecosystem in some places compared to others.
    - oh_sigh 5y ago
      Ironic considering the number of farmers that do controlled burns on their farms in Italy.
      - mastazi 5y ago
        Yes that's true about Italian farmers! I grew up on a farm and we had controlled burnings every now and then. But when speaking of forests/unmanaged land/natural parks, there seems to be a much different sensitivity. At least among people that I know[0], there is a widespread belief that when a forest burns it will never recover to its original state, or it will do it only after an exceedingly long time[1]. The same belief doesn't apply to agricultural land[2]. [0] Obviously this is just based on my direct experience, maybe in different parts of Italy or in different social circles it would be different. [1] Again, I think this is more true in some environments than others - for example I seem to remember reading that, for tropical rainforests, the recovery time is very long. I don't know much about this topic though. [2] Even though it's probably the case that agricultural controlled burning affects aspects such as soil biology, beneficial species, pests, etc.
Ace357 5y ago
It comes down to poor forest management. Don't weed your garden? Don't allow logging to thin out trees? Reap what you sow. Overcrowded disease-prone trees, drought, beetle infestations, piles of deadfall, less wildlife, huge devastating fires with choking smoke, then flash floods, removal of topsoil, silt-filled rivers, lakes, and dams, and landslides. Controlled burns occasionally become uncontrolled burns and just destroy valuable resources. But, no surprise here. You can't expect common sense from academics.
celerrimus 5y ago
Yeh, however I'm not sure that the only cause. I think that record temperatures, and less moisture, are more important factors here. For example, I know that in recent years we observe unprecedented fires in Siberia region where, due to wast areas and very low population/infrastructure, smaller natural fires were never artificially suppressed.
BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5y ago
Controlled burns don't always stay under control. Lawsuits have effectively shut down controlled burns anywhere near houses. The trade-off is between the probability that a controlled burn will accidentally spread to houses and the eventual big wildfire that will take out a subdivision or entire town.
cratermoon 5y ago
Sadly, back during the Yellowstone fires of 1988 the press and uninformed people got the phrase "let it burn" from somewhere and proceeded to wreck all political will for any sort of measured and responsible wildland fire management. Two decades later, if Americans see a wildfire burning and it isn't swarmed with attempts to put it out, they complain.

232 points by onychomys 5y ago

From what I've read this is a red herring to get you to ignore the fact that global warming and neglect are the root causes of the wild fire issues.

zepto 5y ago
This is certainly wrong. There were wildfires in California before global warming was noticeable. Global warming is an accelerant, but not the root cause.
ianhawes 5y ago
Climate change definitely contributes to the crisis, but ignoring other factors does not help us improve the situation. For example, Spanish settlers in California planted invasive trees not adapted to the climate and specifically the wildfires. When the fire seasons came, the invasive trees burned hotter than native trees, causing the death of more of the flora than was typical.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
That is false. These issues were known to the US Forest Service at least 20 years ago, and broadly speaking nothing was done about it. Climate change is helping forest fires to ignite and burn hotter due to reduced moisture in both trees and the soil. To the extent that it may also increase the incidence of lightning, and thus the probability of naturally started fires, it can also influence the numbers of fires. But gross mismanagement of forests for most of the 20th century caused by misguided ideas about what keeps forests healthy is what has led to an almost unimaginable pile of fuel sitting on forest floors that would never have existed in the past.
- noxer 5y ago
  >Climate change is helping forest fires to ignite and burn hotter [citation needed] Actually no, none needed this is obvious nonsense, everyone with a basic understanding of physics can spot that.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Water has a high specific heat capacity. If you have a given amount of energy (stored in chemical bonds) and some of it goes to heating water, temperatures will be lower. It appears you have a very basic understanding of physics.
    - noxer 5y ago
      Maybe read the quote again especially the part you carefully avoided
CarelessExpert 5y ago
Read the article. It mentions in multiple places that climate change is increasing the duration of the forest fire season and worsening conditions that promote wildfire. The point of the article is that outcomes of poor forestry management practices (a build up of fuel that lead to truly enormous wildfires when they finally burn) were bad enough, and now climate change is dramatically exacerbating those effects. As a result, changing our forestry management practices to adopt controlled burns, thinning, and other techniques, will be a critical element of climate change adaptation. That's not to say we shouldn't stop CO2 emissions as quickly as possible to avoid even worse future effects. But we've already warmed the globe enough that adaptation is already necessary, and this is just one example.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  The thing that's boggling my mind is, we've been hearing about this since the Yellowstone fire in 1988 — the forest immediately bounced back greener and healthier than before. That was over thirty years ago! It’s incredible that controlled burns are even controversial today.
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    Yeah, I find it deeply frustrating. We've known about the dangers of wildfire suppression for literally decades, and yet it's taken a very long time for forestry management practices to change. There's likely many reasons for that, from institutional momentum to a lack of funding, but something has to change or forests will simply burn uncontrolled and the problem will solve itself...

go_elmo 5y ago

at least those megafires will decrease the likelihood of fires in the comming years. Lets just hope that people learn from this... Its even worth it setting smaller, local and controlled fires in less severe weather settings to prevent things like this.

ianhawes 5y ago
I think the issue is that when you're looking for "less severe weather settings" you have limited options - California is in a megadrought. Meanwhile, China has invested heavily in weather modification and is reportedly conjuring up rain storms all while weather modification science here in the US is treated like alchemy.
- fathompinball 5y ago
  >California is in a megadrought. To be fair, we had big, honkin', town-killin' fires back when it rained and snowed more than average for decades. It's hard to tell how much is due to drought, how much to a shift from snow to rain, how much is home development, how much is homeless people torching off areas (more than you'd like to think).
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    The drought began in about 1999. The wet years in the two decades since then have not changed the drought. Soil moisture levels across the SW of the US are at their lowest levels in 1200 years. So, maybe you're referring to an earlier period, in which case, cool.
    - fathompinball 5y ago
      The really threatening fires we had here were in 1988, 1994, 1997, 1999.
- chomp 5y ago
  > all while weather modification science here in the US is treated like alchemy I don't fully agree with this statement, it's more that you're not just affecting your rainfall, but neighbors as well. As we speak, 8 of the Western states in the US are performing scientific trials together. There's no hard data that shows exactly how much weather modification actually works. Some data shows 5 to 15% increased snowfall, but that's just statistical analysis. Once we get hard data that shows the cost/benefit, you're likely to see more weather modification efforts (e.g. how many dollars per acre-foot of water? Is this cheaper or more expensive than pipelines, or drinking water reservoirs? What would a budget look like for bolstering our agriculture? Can a state government budget a few million for the next year due to an anticipated reduction in rainfall? How many million would we need? What's the human and ecological (particularly beneficial bacteria and algae) impacts of being exposed to AgI?) We also don't know how wide-scale it works. Yes, China can seed clouds to reduce smog to have blue skies for PRC meetings in Beijing, but can it work on the scale of say, an entire mountain range? Or the agricultural area of an entire state? Can't say. It's only been in the last few years that we've gotten RADAR and compute that's capable of analyzing our experiments. Also another thing, you can generate precipitation, but even weather modification technology can't overcome a drought. If you have a high pressure system (like the one currently sitting over most of the West US at the moment) you're stuck with dry skies.

nitrogen 5y ago

The early-20th-century sci-fi novel Earth Abides is about the lives of some of the remnants of humanity after a virus wipes out most of the population. Even then, California had a reputation for wildfires, and in the story large parts of the state burn after there are no people to fight the fires. In addition to excessive fire suppression causing fires to become ever more extreme, I suspect that the fact that people move around so much caused there to be no "living memory" of the natural conditions of an area, and thus people collectively "forgot" that their areas burn, and need fuel removal and careful management, not just fire suppression.

Enginerrrd 5y ago
In my opinion, there's also the fact that very few people know what an old growth forest looks like compared to 2nd growth in the PNW. There's a profound difference in ecosystems with new growth having tremendously more undergrowth. If you spend enough time in the forests, you'll start to see it too. The 2nd growth stuff looks and feels imbalanced.
- titzer 5y ago
  Forests take thousands upon thousands of years to mature. It can take centuries for the mix of tree species to develop to the point where the "apex" species of tree appears and then dominates the ecosystem. Ecosystems are extraordinarily complex. In my head, I see reforested areas like the Potato Jesus painting with a bonus "Mission Accomplished" banner.
  - bishoprook2 5y ago
    " Forests take thousands upon thousands of years to mature." I can't be too many thousands of years. It doesn't take too many thousands to completely change the nature of forests (spruce to pine for example).
deeviant 5y ago
I'm rather confident very few in California "forgot" that their areas burn. Large parts of California burn down every year and have done so through the height of "excessive fire suppression". Also fire insurance premiums help jog the memory. The core of the issue has little to do with the fire suppression policy and more to do with the interface between humans and wildlands. There just aren't many areas that are even safe to do proscribe burns en masse that won't threaten some property or structures even if prescribed burns were emphasized. And I just don't understand how ever single one of these "The REAL problem is California doesn't let wildfires burn" threads is they always start with, "yeah climate change could possibly maybe be one cause but the REAL cause is..." No, really, climate change is not some incidental factor here, the climate conditions in CA are a huge contributor to these fires and possibly dominating factor in these fires.

MuirsGhost 5y ago

We forget so quickly. We used to burn the forests out of indifference and perceived abundance. > By the act of March 3, 1875, all land-grant and right-of-way railroads are authorized to take timber from the public lands adjacent to their lines for construction purposes; and they have taken it with a vengeance, destroying a hundred times more than they have used, mostly by allowing fires to run into the woods. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/the-american-forests/305017/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1897/08/the-ame...

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> "We forget ..." We also forget that pre-european cultures in the Americas seem to have regularly practiced deliberate forest burning, for several reasons. They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s, but American human-driven forest management didn't started with Europeans.
- fathompinball 5y ago
  >They were much more measured and careful than the idiots who arrived after the 1500s I doubt it. There just weren't nearly as many of them.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    They also had a few thousand years of practice figuring out what works in the local environment. Human nature is one of the few things that seems to be consistent throughout all of history across all civilizations. The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization.
    - wizzwizz4 5y ago
      > The natives probably had just as many idiots as every other civilization. If one person can cause a tragedy by mistake, you have a systematic failure, not a failure of the individual. A sign of a good system is that the occasional fool doesn't end up with the horizon burning.

lcam84 5y ago

This remind me of interventionism described on the antifragile book. Also the role of small stresses in the health of a system.

sjg007 5y ago
Eh.. it's just more that you reduce the fuel density by having more frequent wildfires. It's not about increasing resilience.
- lcam84 5y ago
  Avoiding stress (frequent wildfires) makes you fragile (megafires).
  - sjg007 5y ago
    If you accept anti fragility as a true theory it still doesn’t fit with forest fires.
    - lcam84 5y ago
      Now you are reminding me the Procrustean bed story :)

ortusdux 5y ago

WA state HB 1168, which passed last year, provides $125m to the DNR for wildfire management and prevention. I know some people involved and the money should help buy them some breathing room to be able to actually be proactive with prescribed burns, thinning, and the like. https://www.dnr.wa.gov/publications/em_leg_dnr_wildfire_forest_health_funding_2021.pdf https://www.dnr.wa.gov/publications/em_leg_dnr_wildfire_fore...

noxer 5y ago

Strange, for the last few yeas NH pretty much sold the idea that its climate change and thous evil politicians that aren't 100% in on the the green movement who cased the wildfires, hurricanes and heat waves.

whalesalad 5y ago

We forget that we are guests on this earth. The earth is not here for us. We are here for it.

weimerica 5y ago
Weird, my religion grants me domain over the natural world.
CountDrewku 5y ago
We're no more "guests" than anything else on this planet. I'm all for keeping the planet nice for future humans but there's no need for some weird pseudo religious element about being caretakers.
- whalesalad 5y ago
  What I mean is we need to let wildfires do their thing and stop trying to terraform and control every facet of the environment.
- benatkin 5y ago
  Anthropocentrism is the psuedo religious thing. If you take away the layers of BS, it's pretty obvious that animals and plants are important too.
  - CountDrewku 5y ago
    Too is the key word.
bishoprook2 5y ago
Plate tectonics will cure all ills.

0xbadcafebee 5y ago

It would be nice if we could take the resources used to fight fires, and instead put it into making homes more fire-resistant. Let the forests be (burned or not) and learn to live with them.

kec 5y ago
It doesn't matter if your house is made out of asbestos and concrete if the AQI is off the charts and ambient temperature is over 600 degrees due to fires surrounding it.
- 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  I didn't say we had to live in the house while a fire burned around it...

fizx 5y ago

We also logged everything, and then re-planted with the most profitable trees assuming we'd log it all again. Who knew that densely planted tall pine trees burn so much?

brianwawok 5y ago
Is this actually the case where the fires are happening? It's all man planted? Much of north america is naturally "a sea of pine trees". It would have been like this in 1700.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwood > In the United States the pine tree, Pinus palustris, known as the longleaf pine, once covered as much as 90,000,000 acres (360,000 km2) but due to clear cutting was reduced by between 95% and 97%. The trees grow very large (up to 150 feet), taking 100 to 150 years to mature and can live up to 500 years. The wood was prized and cutting resulted in many hundreds of thousands of stumps that are very resinous, do not rot, and eventually become fatwood. This ushered in a new industry for many years. Some of these trees burn like firebombs, they probably find it useful too. As a species. The individual tree, maybe, but if so far more briefly.
Wohlf 5y ago
This is not true in the majority of the Americas, especially the West Coast.

beloch 5y ago

This highlights one of the problems with pop culture and science. Pop culture has a tendency to fixate on a small number of big problems or sexy technologies to the exclusion of all others. e.g. If you bring up forestry management's role in setting the stage for megafires, you will typically be labelled a climate change denier unless you go out of your way to address climate change first, as this article does. Even then, you'll likely be seen by many as "minimizing the real problem". Yes, climate change is a bigger problem, overall, than megafires, but past (and continuing) forestry practices are the larger part of the megafire problem. Should we ignore small problems until the big ones are all solved? Of course not. The problem with pop culture is that it influences everything. If you want to have any success with grant applications, finding ways to work in current pop-culture buzzwords in is essential. Anyone trying to do research on forestry would be well advised to have "climate change" somewhere in their proposal even if it's not important to their work at all. If you want to get politicians to devote public funding to improving forestry practices, good luck! There's money for exploring the impact of climate change on forests, but not for improving forestry practices themselves. At least, not until enough megafires make people look more carefully at the problem. The fact that our forestry practices, by artificially arresting a natural part of forest life-cycles, create powderkegs of old, unhealthy, and highly flammable forests is not news. It's been known for decades. It just wasn't something that fit into pop culture narratives, so we've let things get worse and worse. The next time you hear someone saying that X is an important part of a problem that climate change also affects, pay closer attention. Don't just dismiss that person as a climate change denier. Make room for small problems as well as the big ones, because ignoring many small problems soon leads to big ones.

abakker 5y ago
This is exactly right. Especially the part about how this phenomenon is not new. I seem to remember an article for grade school kids in a scholastic magazine from the late 90s that mentioned this. Documentaries about Yellowstone at the time mentioned the importance of fired in the germination of new trees. Of course, policy has not effectively reacted to well known science. Sigh.
- 5y ago

chris_va 5y ago

(disclaimer, I work in a Climate&Energy group and have been studying wildfires, though by no means a deep expert in forestry) The implication of this article is that we should have let the forests burn, and as a corollary we should go back to doing that. The former seems like a reasonable argument. This article misses a couple of important details, though, notably the effects of invasive species and how climate change affects the regrowth of forests post fire. As a result, the latter is by no means obvious. At this point, it's unlikely that forests will go back to how things were, even if we stop suppression.

ysavir 5y ago
I'm not sure what's being suggested here. That we continue the current practices of preventing smaller fires? If the eventually of preventing smaller fires is creating a later megafire, aren't were merely delaying the inevitable--and doing more damage in the long term?
- chris_va 5y ago
  I don't think there is a great prescriptive process here to follow, and we've kind of backed ourselves into a corner (but again I am not a forestry expert). The current practice is not a good equilibrium, but neither is going back to allowing most fires to burn out naturally. Going back to what worked before sounds appealing (minus the smoke), but really it's not likely to work again the second time around because of everything else that has changed. So an ideal solution is probably going to need to be more complicated.

bishoprook2 5y ago

You know, it's worth considering that 'California' isn't some big monolithic landscape. The dangerous fires mostly seem to erupt from hard-to-access river canyons. Do you just let those burn? Light 'em up on purpose? As a side note, these areas are filled with highly flammable buildings. 100 year old wood construction, shared attics in the small towns, nowhere near modern code.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Here's a great talk from a Forest Service expert on why wildfires have become worse. The TLDR is that forests have become much denser, particularly after old trees were logged, and this creates large areas of fuel. Additionally, forests need active management - prescribed burns, dry fuel cleanup, pest management, etc. Climate change may be aggravating or amplifying the intensity of wildfires but there are other causes that are potentially more important, and they present opportunities for wildfire prevention that are currently ignored by governments/news media/social media. https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_gotten_worse_and_what_we_can_do_about_it https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_hessburg_why_wildfires_have_g...

cushychicken 5y ago

This was one of the major findings after the major Yellowstone fire of 1988. Decades of stopping any fires led to a massive fuel buildup that caused a huge firestorm.

ggm 5y ago

In OZ, within the emergency volunteer firefighting community, there's dissent about "what to do" with people who have a strongly pragmatic view that there is no more wild landscape, and we need to actively manage it all, even national parks, and people who want nature to run its course and only manage around the fringes. NSW vs Vic vs Qld. City vs Country. Farmer vs Townie. Farmer and Townie vs Traditional landowners They get pretty heated, but I stress this is within a community of people who don fire-gear, get in trucks and actually have to deal with the damn things. There's a generation gap, a gender gap, a culture gap, a politics gap, a you're-not-from-round-here gap... I walked into the edge of the online flamefest. Wish I hadn't joined in. (yea. flamefest amongst fireies...)

h0l0cube 5y ago
I was under the impression that prescribed burning (including the return of indigenous burn practices) enjoyed majority support in Australia? (Save the few NIMBYs complaining about the smoke)
- mastazi 5y ago
  It's more popular than elsewhere. In Italy where I grew up, it gets very little support. I now live in Sydney and in the past 10 years I became used to periodically having smoke from planned burning. I can't imagine something like that would go down well back in Italy. I was wondering if there are climatic/ecological differences that make controlled burning more effective / less disruptive for the ecosystem in some places compared to others.
  - oh_sigh 5y ago
    Ironic considering the number of farmers that do controlled burns on their farms in Italy.
    - mastazi 5y ago
      Yes that's true about Italian farmers! I grew up on a farm and we had controlled burnings every now and then. But when speaking of forests/unmanaged land/natural parks, there seems to be a much different sensitivity. At least among people that I know[0], there is a widespread belief that when a forest burns it will never recover to its original state, or it will do it only after an exceedingly long time[1]. The same belief doesn't apply to agricultural land[2]. [0] Obviously this is just based on my direct experience, maybe in different parts of Italy or in different social circles it would be different. [1] Again, I think this is more true in some environments than others - for example I seem to remember reading that, for tropical rainforests, the recovery time is very long. I don't know much about this topic though. [2] Even though it's probably the case that agricultural controlled burning affects aspects such as soil biology, beneficial species, pests, etc.

Ace357 5y ago

It comes down to poor forest management. Don't weed your garden? Don't allow logging to thin out trees? Reap what you sow. Overcrowded disease-prone trees, drought, beetle infestations, piles of deadfall, less wildlife, huge devastating fires with choking smoke, then flash floods, removal of topsoil, silt-filled rivers, lakes, and dams, and landslides. Controlled burns occasionally become uncontrolled burns and just destroy valuable resources. But, no surprise here. You can't expect common sense from academics.

celerrimus 5y ago

Yeh, however I'm not sure that the only cause. I think that record temperatures, and less moisture, are more important factors here. For example, I know that in recent years we observe unprecedented fires in Siberia region where, due to wast areas and very low population/infrastructure, smaller natural fires were never artificially suppressed.

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 5y ago

Controlled burns don't always stay under control. Lawsuits have effectively shut down controlled burns anywhere near houses. The trade-off is between the probability that a controlled burn will accidentally spread to houses and the eventual big wildfire that will take out a subdivision or entire town.

cratermoon 5y ago

Sadly, back during the Yellowstone fires of 1988 the press and uninformed people got the phrase "let it burn" from somewhere and proceeded to wreck all political will for any sort of measured and responsible wildland fire management. Two decades later, if Americans see a wildfire burning and it isn't swarmed with attempts to put it out, they complain.