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This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS. If anything this should highlight the impor

by samtho 3y ago

This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS. If anything this should highlight the importance of doing controlled burns so that there is minimal chance of these raging infernos cropping up. Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead.

wswope 3y ago
Agreed; I don’t mean to imply I’m firmly against controlled burns now. I am disenchanted with our current system for executing them in the US, however. Like you say, we need a system for accountability to deal with the externalities.
XorNot 3y ago
> Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead. Wherein you've created the same problem in the opposite direction. Who's going to volunteer to do controlled burns if they can be held personally liable for failures? Starting from "prove you didn't cause the problem" with such a dynamic and hard to control activity is setting up the same issue.
- samtho 3y ago
  Most reasonable people understand the difference between accident and negligence. How is it we are able to have professional engineers sign on off plans if they know they will be held personally liable for failures? This is very much a solved problem and I don’t think it’s wise to entertain FUD.
  - lazide 3y ago
    People get sued all the time (and lose) due to damage caused by accidents (that weren’t negligence). Professional engineers ARE held personally liable for failures. That’s why there aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be extremely conservative and most things they sign off on are very limited in scope. No sane PE would ever sign off on a realistic prescribed burn plan, because they couldn’t control the variables enough to not get ruined. Any plan a PE would sign off wouldn’t be implementable because, surprise, conditions change rapidly and it’s not economic to do detailed real-time surveying of overgrown areas that need prescribed burns all the time.
magicalist 3y ago
> This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS You're not contradicting anything, that's literally the topic of this subthread. From the GGP: > We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.

by samtho 3y ago

wswope 3y ago

Agreed; I don’t mean to imply I’m firmly against controlled burns now. I am disenchanted with our current system for executing them in the US, however. Like you say, we need a system for accountability to deal with the externalities.

XorNot 3y ago

> Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead. Wherein you've created the same problem in the opposite direction. Who's going to volunteer to do controlled burns if they can be held personally liable for failures? Starting from "prove you didn't cause the problem" with such a dynamic and hard to control activity is setting up the same issue.

samtho 3y ago
Most reasonable people understand the difference between accident and negligence. How is it we are able to have professional engineers sign on off plans if they know they will be held personally liable for failures? This is very much a solved problem and I don’t think it’s wise to entertain FUD.
- lazide 3y ago
  People get sued all the time (and lose) due to damage caused by accidents (that weren’t negligence). Professional engineers ARE held personally liable for failures. That’s why there aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be extremely conservative and most things they sign off on are very limited in scope. No sane PE would ever sign off on a realistic prescribed burn plan, because they couldn’t control the variables enough to not get ruined. Any plan a PE would sign off wouldn’t be implementable because, surprise, conditions change rapidly and it’s not economic to do detailed real-time surveying of overgrown areas that need prescribed burns all the time.

magicalist 3y ago

> This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS You're not contradicting anything, that's literally the topic of this subthread. From the GGP: > We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.