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We really have to get back on track with controlled burns after the environmentalist 'save all trees' experiment that started in the 1960's has put us in the po

We really have to get back on track with controlled burns after the environmentalist 'save all trees' experiment that started in the 1960's has put us in the position we are in now. Canada used to have many controlled burns throughout last century until the last quarter - Nova Scotia is a typical example (1979 paper): https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x79-031 https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/abs/10.1139/x79-031 California is dangerously behind on forestry and therefore fire management compared to earlier decades. Fuel has to be removed or fire and smoke will cause massive damage and have a very serious psychological and economic impact. Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-affirms-indigenous-right-to-controlled-burns https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/12/3/new-california-law-... There are no saw mills left in Northern California and strict rules about not cutting trees down. Wood is imported from Canada at massive expense, driving up the cost of housing. we seem to have lost the plot a bit here.

_fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
That sounds like wishful thinking that there is an easy solution for this. Controlled burns can help, but the real issue is that global warming makes areas dryer and the vegetation there is not adapted for the dryer/warmer conditions. We have to tackle more seriously the elephant in the room.
gerbilly 3y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that the indigenous were practising controlled burns over millions of hectares of boreal forest? I find this 'sweep your floors' meme a bit of an oddity: 1. It involves conservatives casting native americans in a good light. Who's going to argue with that? 2. It contains a false epiphany which just feels right (the solution to forest fires is...fires) 3. It contains a grain of truth. Native americans did perform controlled burns, and in the NW they did take care of salmon streams etc, but not on a scale that would prevent today's wildfires. It's a classic diversion from climate change, and our terrible 'foresty' practices of cutting down forests and planting monocrops of high resin species all packed together and calling it reforestation and finally, spraying entire valleys with roundup (often where indigenous people live of course)
- pookha 3y ago
  There was something like 10 times more hectares being burned as far back as 1850. https://www.publish.csiro.au/WF/WF22090 https://www.publish.csiro.au/WF/WF22090 We've effectively stopped this with modern fire suppression techniques and have fewer managed burns...Parks Canada only had 12 last year. And here's a story where they ran out of funding and had to defer burns: https://www.rmoutlook.com/local-news/parks-canada-prescribed-fires-on-hold-1563346 https://www.rmoutlook.com/local-news/parks-canada-prescribed... Not good. I think you can focus on climate change while at the same time have a conservationist approach.
seadan83 3y ago
Agree with your points, though your premise is incorrect. Fire suppression started in the 30s [1] and became industrialized following WWII [1] https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service-history/policy-and-law/fire-u-s-forest-service/u-s-forest-service-fire-suppression/#:~:text=In%201933%2C%20the%20federal%20government,day%20following%20its%20init https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...
seadan83 3y ago
I guess also worth mentioning, modern forestry uses tree farms and has been for a while. Those tree farms burn differently than natural forest and are super dense. Getting more logging into the mix, or more wood mills is not necessarily a solution due to second order effects (more tree farms)
ArlenBales 3y ago
I think population growth is the main factor for why prescribed burns of forests have dwindled. We have cities and towns that have expanded into forests and high-risk fire areas. Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).
- version_five 3y ago
  That may be true in California. In northern Canada there are very few populated places, I believe these are mostly in complete wilderness
- olivermarks 3y ago
  Environmental fashion became obsessed with trees as 'the lungs of the planet' despite ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath. We have been conditioned to believe humans are destroying the fragile planet but ironically the reality is that we are increasingly irresponsible stewards of it, flying in the face of thousands of years of evidence.
  - DayDollar 3y ago
    Well, that plancton will die off, when the oceans get accidic.. so it will be the trees only in the long run.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    We're killing the phytoplankton too. https://medium.com/climate-conscious/how-the-loss-of-phytoplankton-could-lead-to-our-demise-8f9c91b937a8 https://medium.com/climate-conscious/how-the-loss-of-phytopl...
  - sampo 3y ago
    > ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath. This is not true. Ocean photosynthesis produces about 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, but ocean respiration also consumes about the same amount. The oceans are about oxygen neutral. Same goes for the other 50%, but in land ecosystems. https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-to-breathe-but-we-cant-say-the-same-for-ocean-life-165148 https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-t...
downWidOutaFite 3y ago
It's environmentalists fault! (ignore how much we're overheating the planet)
- lxgr 3y ago
  There is no contradiction between the statements “global warming is a serious problem” and “preventing wildfires completely has some disadvantages vs. controlled burns”.
  - throwbadubadu 3y ago
    But there is a lot wrong with blaming "preventing wildfires" on "those environmentalists" and making that the sole root cause of this problem, which it isn't too much at all. Contributing, but far from root cause. Controlled burns btw also easier quickly said then done...
  - olivermarks 3y ago
    @ixgr Exactly. Thank you.
  - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    When people start talking about how much smarter "indigenous practices" were I can smell the own-the-libs bullshit even above the burning forests. Prescribed burns aren't going to stop these forests from dying out over the next 50 years.
    - swader999 3y ago
      They aren't going to die out. Forested land is increasing and has since the 50's. Source: https://www.fao.org/3/X4995e/X4995e.htm https://www.fao.org/3/X4995e/X4995e.htm A snapshot of current conditions is as follows: After two centuries of decline, the area of US forestland stabilized in about 1920 and has since increased slightly. The forest area of the US is about two-thirds what it was in 1600. The area consumed by wildfire each year has fallen 90 percent; it was between eight and twenty million hectares (20-50 million acres) in the early 1900s and is between one and two million hectares (2-5 million acres) today. Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997 forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.
barbazoo 3y ago
Surely the much dryer/warmer weather due to climate change has something to do with it, no?
- swader999 3y ago
  Hotter climate is supposed to create more rain is it not?
  - mcdonje 3y ago
    The effects of climate change are different in different regions. And the types of weather patterns that deliver more precipitation to some regions could be quite different from what the local wildlife has adapted to.
- S201 3y ago
  OP did not say that climate change was not a factor. Both of these are contributing factors. I will second the point about lack of controlled burns and logging absolutely being a problem. Look at photos of western forests from the late 1800s and you'll see that we have far more trees now than a century ago. Here's an example of Yosemite valley: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunday/california-wildfires-forest-management.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda.... A century of fire suppression and climate change have proved to be a dangerous combination. One of these is easier to correct though if we could get past the idea that every tree must be saved at all costs.
  - timeon 3y ago
    OP was just shifting the focus while blaming "environmentalists".
  - pharrington 3y ago
    OP didn't even mention climate change in the post, and previously has explicitly denied that climate change is a problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166197
akiselev 3y ago
The problem is that Canada is covered in peatlands. Once they dry out, controlled burns can ignite peat several meters deep and release one of the biggest carbon stores on the planet. See what happened with the Russian wildfires in 2010 [1] - this is a consequence of climate change and unfortunately many of the old fire prevention strategies won't work with Canadian peatland drying out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires
- zamadatix 3y ago
  Won't that happen whether or not these fires are controlled or uncontrolled, at this point?
  - christophilus 3y ago
    Yep.
  - akiselev 3y ago
    Yes but the point of controlled burns in California (for example) is that they eliminate fuel as the ecosystem gets drier. In peatlands, controlled burns instead make more fuel available by drying out the peat, causing a death spiral.
    - Solvency 3y ago
      So, what do you do?
      - 2devnull 3y ago
        How much you want to spend?
      - akiselev 3y ago
        In Canada? Invest in indoor hockey rinks.
      - vkou 3y ago
JohnMakin 3y ago
Almost all of California wildfire fuel is dense brush, not trees.
- thepasswordis 3y ago
  That dense brush, to people in forest management, is referred to as "fuel loading". It's like the tinder that you would use to start a larger bonfire. The brush ends up being the thing that starts massive forest fires.
EatingWithForks 3y ago
My understanding is that this isn't due to a lack of controlled burns but actually due to an unseasonally warm winter not killing bugs that attack and kill trees, leaving an excessive amount of dead wood to burn this year. No amount of controlled burning of the years before would prevent a lot of dead trees this year making for kindling.
- AlecSchueler 3y ago
  Surprised this point wasn't higher up. I'm starting to see this everywhere, dry grass, yellow leaves, dead trees. Growing up in Ireland I never saw anything but green but it's become visibly more lifeless year on year since around 2017.
  - dmix 3y ago
    You’ve had warm winters every year since 2017 in Ireland? What about El Nina and the usual trends?
    - AlecSchueler 3y ago
      Yes, every year since 2016 has been above average and the average temperature has increased with every decade since the 1850s.
- xattt 3y ago
  Specific to Atlantic Canada, there is a lot of felled trees turning to kindling after Hurricane Fiona last September.
- carabiner 3y ago
  It's everything. Natives used to practice controlled burns to sustain habitability. Observe parallels to three sisters agriculture. Then as their populations were eradicated these methods were lost.
  - seadan83 3y ago
pvaldes 3y ago
Again, it does not matter. Open your eyes This is environmental crime. And when there is a crime, there is a benefit for criminals. Saying that if we burn some, here and there, the criminals will stop, is like saying that if we paint the banks in a nice pastel tone and put a banner asking politely not to rob, the bank robbers will agree to stop and go away. Europe tried that in the past repeatedly. It didn't worked. Even worse, the trend is increasing among farmers manipulated by extreme European political currents that overlap extensively the Putin and Trump speeches. Places of Europe that never had a problem with wildfires started to burn since a couple of years. We hear political parties trow the first stone and claim that environmental laws are unfair. Just one week later, the place burns down magically. Is environmental boycott, and will not stop until we stop them or remove the benefits. Either we wake up and strike back, or we accept that the extinction whirl will be much closer than we expected, and much faster than we can adapt.
M4v3R 3y ago
There’s actually stuff being done about preventing Wildfires in the US, controlled burns being of these things, creating “fuel breaks” (gaps that prevent fire from progressing) is another, and there’s a LOT more. But a lot of time that’s not enough and the reason for that is like with every other government effort - bureaucracy and endless paperwork. It can take months before a project can even start because the forest management has to compile all the necessary paperwork. But they are really passionate about doing this to prevent as many wildfires as possible. Source: I currently work for a startup that makes software that shortens the time necessary to prepare this paperwork which potentially could cut the time it takes in half or more.
- fragmede 3y ago
  fascinating. what about the paperwork makes it take so long? is it the coordination between all the relevant agencies and landowners?
  - putnambr 3y ago
    This is hearsay, but folks in Colorado tend to complain about federal air quality guidelines prohibiting controlled burns during the times of the year that it makes sense to do a controlled burn. During the winter, air quality guidelines dictate you can't exceed a certain amount of wood smoke in an area for example. NEPA studies might be another.
  - adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
    the fact that if you do a controlled burn badly, it's a forest fire that kills people and does 10s of millions in property damage
    - fragmede 3y ago
      that doesn't explain why the paperwork takes so long at all.
  - M4v3R 3y ago
    You have to gather a lot of information and answer dozens of questions before you start a project. In the planning phase you have to do scoping, make a public notice, consult the local communities, take wildlife, insects, wetlands, native tribes and many more things into account (which require gathering all sorts of data from national databases). There are multiple people inside a National Forest’s office that are working on all this. Then the other hard part is gathering all this data from all the people in one place and writing documents that will be published or submitted to various government agencies. This process is at the moment manual and extremely time consuming (because it’s basically an email back and forth that can take weeks or months). And that’s only the planning phase. The app I’m working on tries to automate as much as possible both the data gathering part and the document preparation part, letting multiple people collaborate together to create necessary paperwork. This drastically cuts on the time needed to complete the planning phase and thus lets them do more projects in the same amount of time.
mfb 3y ago
"no saw mills left in Northern California" - eh? This is just one company's sawmills (they are hiring): https://www.spi-ind.com/Operations/SawmillOperations https://www.spi-ind.com/Operations/SawmillOperations
- ajross 3y ago
  I don't know what that poster was talking about either. Even if CA were to outlaw lumber milling in the north of the state, the rest of the PNW produces enough for the continent already. There's plenty of wood in the deep blue queer tree-hugging west coast. The USA is a huge exporter of the crop, actually.
  - olivermarks 3y ago
    THE IMPACT OF CALIFORNIA’S CHANGING ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ON TIMBER HARVEST PLANNING COSTS (2005) https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/19139176.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiQnMH_oLL_AhXeJkQIHbjKCi0QFnoECDEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3aZ0mLx-mno8vX6sc8DaCb https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... Sierra is processing imported lumber mostly https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestManagement#:~:text=Harvest%20cycles%20are%20separated%20by,approval%20by%20state%20regulatory%20agencies https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestManagement#:~:text=....
    - mfb 3y ago
      I'd be interested to see the data re: "processing imported lumber mostly". Statewide back in 2016, California timber harvest was 1,572 MMBF; wood processing facilities received 1,483 MMBF; 11.5 MMBF flowed into California from other states; 99.7 MMBF flowed out of California for processing out of state or export according to https://www.bber.umt.edu/pubs/forest/fidacs/CA2016%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf https://www.bber.umt.edu/pubs/forest/fidacs/CA2016%20Fact%20...
  - local_crmdgeon 3y ago
    That's true about Oregon and Washington but NOT California. It's also why you don't see wildfires to nearly the same extent in the Northeast or South - we cut our trees.
ajross 3y ago
This is almost exactly backwards. "Controlled burns" are the workaround, not the solution. Timber land naturally burns regularly, but we started fighting those fires in the last century to protect the lumber industry. The problem then becomes, a few decades later, that you have a forest filled with dead branches and snags that would have burned, piecewise, over decades, but didn't. Now eventually something gets out of control and you have a fire anyway, except that now it's much (much) larger than it would have been naturally. So the workaround becomes creating corridors of excess-fuel-free forest via "controlled burns". But that's not the fix! The problem was preexisting.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Climate change has also caused the spread of bark beetles, killing forests in BC and Alberta.
  - swader999 3y ago
    And their provincial governments both cut the helicopter rapid attack crews in the last few years
- olivermarks 3y ago
  I know people in the Sierra foothills who used to work in the logging industry until the bureaucrats made it impossible. I also know people in the same area who are fire fighters. When loggers used to find diseased trees they would isolate them by felling all the surrounding trees so they wouldn't infect them and spread. This practice was outlawed by the academic bureaucrats and is one of the reasons for the subsequent severe spread of dying trees that are the large scale fire fuel we see today. At this point in history there is illegal logging going on to create fire breaks around properties, such are the state restrictions on trees. We have lost sight of the forestry management practices that worked with nature, not against it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
This is literally not being able to see the wood for the tress. Controlled burns won't fix the fact that the Sea Surface Temperature anomalies are in the region of 2C in some areas. Or that the 2m Temp Anomalies are of the order of 6-10C across most of the US and large parts of Russia. Neither of those is going to make future fires less likely, controlled or otherwise. https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=sstanom&ortho=1&wt=1 https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=ssta...
- _fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
  It is pretty scary to see how people are in denial in this thread. I would also prefer if there was an easy solution like controlled fires to this, but physics doesn't care what I prefer. We need to get global warming under control. There is simply no way around it.
uoaei 3y ago
Wasn't the environmentalists of the 60s but the environmentalists of the early 1900s (John Muir and ilk) who thought they knew better than the native peoples how to preserve the dignity and beauty of natural spaces. We're just now coming back around to acknowledging indigenous land practices that have been the standard on this continent for millenia.
- perrygeo 3y ago
  Both environmentalists and early American naturalists have one common weak spot in their world view; they view humans as fundamentally distinct from nature. Nature is somehow both profane and awe inspiring compared to the "rational" human world. In that view, we need to preserve the wilderness (somewhere "out there") for aesthetic/spiritual/resource management reasons. From the indigenous viewpoint, there is little distinction; humans are part of the physical/natural world, same as a mountain lion or a worm, albeit a very powerful part capable of wielding great power and thus responsibility. There is no concept of wilderness. It's worth over-emphasizing that the indigenous viewpoint in North America was sustainable (and was actually sustained) for thousands of years. The modern industrial culture of bipolar consumption/reverence of wilderness is showing severe signs of overshoot after a couple hundred years. That's not to say that indigenous land practices are more ethical or wise... merely that they've been proven more effective by the test of time.
micromacrofoot 3y ago
sure, but it’s hard to ignore that wildfires in many places dropped when everyone was staying hone during the pandemic, it’s very much a multifaceted issue (and usually it’s underbrush catching fire and burning, not trees)
gibspaulding 3y ago
> Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago. I've been thinking about this lately. My wife and I were reading about a study of an old growth oak - hickory forest in the eastern US which without human intervention is slowly transitioning to maple - beach forests. Presumably this is because it is no longer experiencing the burns it would have historically. This transition is generally considered problematic since oak hickory forests supposedly support more biodiversity (and conveniently more profitable timber harvests). But this all raises the question for me - how did this all work before any human intervention? What's the natural rate of forest fires? We have species (such as giant sequoia) that seem to require fires, so they must have happened, but they must have been quite rare. Would there have been a truely horrible fire caused by lightning every 1000 years? Or perhaps would the megafauna that went extinct around the time native Americans arrived have played a similar role in clearing out underbrush while foraging? Does anyone know of studies on this?
- wefarrell 3y ago
  I know that human expansion has decreased the number of large predators, which has increased the number of dear, who eat more young trees. If they have a preference for one type of tree over another that will certainly change the composition of the forest.
- Kaibeezy 3y ago
  beech truly deer lightning Sorry, was bugging me. Better now.
- seadan83 3y ago
  Certain areas burn with differing frequencies (naturally). Eg, coast range burns every few centuries while cascades and sierras it is more like every other year. Sorry for no references, so please have a large grain of salt with those stated frequencies. IIRC those are the tight order of magnitude. Though, we are also talking much smaller fires compared to the mega blades we see today that kills everything rather than rejuvenates. These fires today burn everything and down to 4 feet under the soil. It's a different beast.
- 3y ago
tinyplanet-o 3y ago
Most of the "environmentalists" I know are deeply in favor of controlled burns. At a national level, the Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns). And the timber companies are definitely not involved in any prescribed burning efforts (don't want to lose out on all that inventory).
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  USFS adopted prescribed burns in 1978. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236104>
- thepasswordis 3y ago
  >Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns). This is comically false. The USFS absolutely engages in controlled burns.
- pharrington 3y ago
  You are lying. Don't deliberately spread disinformation. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
- karaterobot 3y ago
  No, this is incorrect. The USFS does a lot of controlled burns, and has done them for a long time. Not sure where you heard otherwise: it's a significant part of what they do. They briefly paused doing them last year after a controlled burn got out of control in New Mexico, resulting in a high-profile wildfire. But that's only evidence that they were already doing them. Anyway, after updating their policies, they resumed prescribed burns later that year.
jmull 3y ago
Yeah, the real problem we need to solve here is too much environmentalism. The silver lining, I guess, is that it won’t be a profoundly unfortunate tragedy. As a species, we’ll have really earned the ultimate Darwin award.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  Come on...multiple posts claim that here, but I really miss the environmentalist campaigns who drove that fire policies?! References? Please look it up, we didn't know better, and it was wrong but quite natural for the peak of the civilization that we are (/s) to fight and prevent fires. The subtone here that "it was the environmentalists" is really hilarious and shocking at the same time.. lol. Blame everything bad on the environmentalists, ignore the rest we all did and still do, and just let nature rule! Hehe.. Especially, as while totally agree and true that it is right that this was the wrong approach, the denial that this is currently maybe only 10% of the problem is also funny. We lost nature, just wait it out and let it go its natural way here now until most is burned down and then desertificated, which will inevitably come. No more fire problems, just some others then..
bariumbitmap 3y ago
California already has a pretty good prescribed burn program, but it needs to be expanded, in part because the climate is significantly different today than it was a hundred years ago. There are some obstacles to prescribed burns: smoke inhalation is a public health hazard, firefighters need to be paid, private landowners are worried about liability, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of California is federal land, and the U.S. Forest Service does not have funding to perform prescribed burns. The private sector hasn't solved the problem either, in part because a lot of the fuel isn't desirable timber. Californians who are serious about this issue should lobby their federal and state representatives. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05997-w https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05997-w > Our results show that California and Oregon are the only severe-risk US states to conduct prescribed fire programs that are impactful at reducing wildfire risks, while other southeastern states such as Florida maintain fire-healthy ecosystems with very extensive prescribed fire programs. Our study suggests that states that have impactful prescribed fire programs (like California) should increase their scale of operation, while states that burn prescribed fires with no impact (like Nevada) should change the way prescribed burning is planned and conducted. > California has historically resisted prescribed burning to control their already big smoke problem > There are various reasons preventing California from conducting more Rx [prescribed burns], including lack of enough firefighters and 57% of land being owned by the Federal Government which lacks the funds to conduct Rx, especially after recent budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0451-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0451-7 > Academics warned that the financial incentives offered by mechanical thinning may be elusive, given the high ratio of thinning to merchantable timber in many locations. Legislative staff and analysts criticized the traditional forestry model of removing large-diameter, valuable trees and leaving smaller, less valuable and more flammable biomass.
- iisan7 3y ago
  There's one consideration missing from your list though, which is the fact that controlled burning is way more risky now than ever before, due to the immense fuel build up. The reduced frequency of controlled burns has contributed to making them much harder to implement. Hard to put the cat back in the bag at this point.
dredmorbius 3y ago
This is a seriously misinformed comment. Total fire suppression dates to the early 20th century, not the 1960s. It was driven largely by the forest / wood products industry, not environmentalists. Formal adoption of "the 10 am rule" (all fires must be suppressed by 10 am the following morning) was in 1935. Formal adoption of prescribed burns by the USFS was in 1978. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.gov/fire_policy/docs/chp1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.g...> California has had numerous controlled-burn projects for decades. They are limited in scope, and opposed, usually by local residents and businesses, for ... somewhat understandable reasons, though in the long run more-frequent controlled burns are better than the megafires of the past few decades. Genocide of the indigenous North American population, especially in California, was transacted first by Spanish and Mexican missionaries, then by Americans, both private citizens and government agents (mostly military), and was largely completed by 1873. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide> The US Forest Service was not organised until 1905. Its antecedents date only as far back as 1875, after the dates given above for the California genocide. Yes, controlled burns would help with some of California's wildfire issues, but evidence from elsewhere, including Canada and Siberia in which total fire suppression was never policy or effectively achieve, recent history suggests that megafires are not strictly dependent on overgrowth and fuel accumulation. Regions of California such as Santa Barbara experience recurring fires over the same terrain at intervals of a decade or two, suggesting that even short-term fuel-load accumulation is sufficient to give rise to huge and uncontrollable fires which intrude well into the urban region, and are not limited to remote bush or the urban-wildland interface. See particularly the 2017 Tubbs Fire which obliterated a Santa Rosa neighbourhood, and Thomas Fire, also 2017, which reached downtown Ventura.
webnrrd2k 3y ago
”Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years" Not to be snarky, but I think that they were uncontrolled burns... Once they started there was no Native American Fire Department to put them out, they just burned until they wefe done.
bparsons 3y ago
Canada does lots of controlled burns. The forests are on fire because it has barely rained in most parts of the country since April.
- swader999 3y ago
  Yes and they cut the rapid attack helicopter crews in BC and Alberta. Also, the fires there started in a short window when vegetation hadn't started growing yet and there was old dry winter grass everywhere.

_fizz_buzz_ 3y ago

That sounds like wishful thinking that there is an easy solution for this. Controlled burns can help, but the real issue is that global warming makes areas dryer and the vegetation there is not adapted for the dryer/warmer conditions. We have to tackle more seriously the elephant in the room.

gerbilly 3y ago

Are you seriously suggesting that the indigenous were practising controlled burns over millions of hectares of boreal forest? I find this 'sweep your floors' meme a bit of an oddity: 1. It involves conservatives casting native americans in a good light. Who's going to argue with that? 2. It contains a false epiphany which just feels right (the solution to forest fires is...fires) 3. It contains a grain of truth. Native americans did perform controlled burns, and in the NW they did take care of salmon streams etc, but not on a scale that would prevent today's wildfires. It's a classic diversion from climate change, and our terrible 'foresty' practices of cutting down forests and planting monocrops of high resin species all packed together and calling it reforestation and finally, spraying entire valleys with roundup (often where indigenous people live of course)

pookha 3y ago
There was something like 10 times more hectares being burned as far back as 1850. https://www.publish.csiro.au/WF/WF22090 https://www.publish.csiro.au/WF/WF22090 We've effectively stopped this with modern fire suppression techniques and have fewer managed burns...Parks Canada only had 12 last year. And here's a story where they ran out of funding and had to defer burns: https://www.rmoutlook.com/local-news/parks-canada-prescribed-fires-on-hold-1563346 https://www.rmoutlook.com/local-news/parks-canada-prescribed... Not good. I think you can focus on climate change while at the same time have a conservationist approach.

seadan83 3y ago

Agree with your points, though your premise is incorrect. Fire suppression started in the 30s [1] and became industrialized following WWII [1] https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service-history/policy-and-law/fire-u-s-forest-service/u-s-forest-service-fire-suppression/#:~:text=In%201933%2C%20the%20federal%20government,day%20following%20its%20init https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service...

seadan83 3y ago

I guess also worth mentioning, modern forestry uses tree farms and has been for a while. Those tree farms burn differently than natural forest and are super dense. Getting more logging into the mix, or more wood mills is not necessarily a solution due to second order effects (more tree farms)

ArlenBales 3y ago

I think population growth is the main factor for why prescribed burns of forests have dwindled. We have cities and towns that have expanded into forests and high-risk fire areas. Maybe we shouldn't have ever allowed this, but it happened, and now we're stuck with it (good luck getting people to move out).

version_five 3y ago
That may be true in California. In northern Canada there are very few populated places, I believe these are mostly in complete wilderness
olivermarks 3y ago
Environmental fashion became obsessed with trees as 'the lungs of the planet' despite ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath. We have been conditioned to believe humans are destroying the fragile planet but ironically the reality is that we are increasingly irresponsible stewards of it, flying in the face of thousands of years of evidence.
- DayDollar 3y ago
  Well, that plancton will die off, when the oceans get accidic.. so it will be the trees only in the long run.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  We're killing the phytoplankton too. https://medium.com/climate-conscious/how-the-loss-of-phytoplankton-could-lead-to-our-demise-8f9c91b937a8 https://medium.com/climate-conscious/how-the-loss-of-phytopl...
- sampo 3y ago
  > ocean phytoplankton processing most of the air we breath. This is not true. Ocean photosynthesis produces about 50% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, but ocean respiration also consumes about the same amount. The oceans are about oxygen neutral. Same goes for the other 50%, but in land ecosystems. https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-to-breathe-but-we-cant-say-the-same-for-ocean-life-165148 https://theconversation.com/humans-will-always-have-oxygen-t...

downWidOutaFite 3y ago

It's environmentalists fault! (ignore how much we're overheating the planet)

lxgr 3y ago
There is no contradiction between the statements “global warming is a serious problem” and “preventing wildfires completely has some disadvantages vs. controlled burns”.
- throwbadubadu 3y ago
  But there is a lot wrong with blaming "preventing wildfires" on "those environmentalists" and making that the sole root cause of this problem, which it isn't too much at all. Contributing, but far from root cause. Controlled burns btw also easier quickly said then done...
- olivermarks 3y ago
  @ixgr Exactly. Thank you.
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  When people start talking about how much smarter "indigenous practices" were I can smell the own-the-libs bullshit even above the burning forests. Prescribed burns aren't going to stop these forests from dying out over the next 50 years.
  - swader999 3y ago
    They aren't going to die out. Forested land is increasing and has since the 50's. Source: https://www.fao.org/3/X4995e/X4995e.htm https://www.fao.org/3/X4995e/X4995e.htm A snapshot of current conditions is as follows: After two centuries of decline, the area of US forestland stabilized in about 1920 and has since increased slightly. The forest area of the US is about two-thirds what it was in 1600. The area consumed by wildfire each year has fallen 90 percent; it was between eight and twenty million hectares (20-50 million acres) in the early 1900s and is between one and two million hectares (2-5 million acres) today. Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997 forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920.

barbazoo 3y ago

Surely the much dryer/warmer weather due to climate change has something to do with it, no?

swader999 3y ago
Hotter climate is supposed to create more rain is it not?
- mcdonje 3y ago
  The effects of climate change are different in different regions. And the types of weather patterns that deliver more precipitation to some regions could be quite different from what the local wildlife has adapted to.
S201 3y ago
OP did not say that climate change was not a factor. Both of these are contributing factors. I will second the point about lack of controlled burns and logging absolutely being a problem. Look at photos of western forests from the late 1800s and you'll see that we have far more trees now than a century ago. Here's an example of Yosemite valley: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunday/california-wildfires-forest-management.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/29/opinion/sunda.... A century of fire suppression and climate change have proved to be a dangerous combination. One of these is easier to correct though if we could get past the idea that every tree must be saved at all costs.
- timeon 3y ago
  OP was just shifting the focus while blaming "environmentalists".
- pharrington 3y ago
  OP didn't even mention climate change in the post, and previously has explicitly denied that climate change is a problem - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166197 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36166197

akiselev 3y ago

The problem is that Canada is covered in peatlands. Once they dry out, controlled burns can ignite peat several meters deep and release one of the biggest carbon stores on the planet. See what happened with the Russian wildfires in 2010 [1] - this is a consequence of climate change and unfortunately many of the old fire prevention strategies won't work with Canadian peatland drying out. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Russian_wildfires

zamadatix 3y ago
Won't that happen whether or not these fires are controlled or uncontrolled, at this point?
- christophilus 3y ago
  Yep.
- akiselev 3y ago
  Yes but the point of controlled burns in California (for example) is that they eliminate fuel as the ecosystem gets drier. In peatlands, controlled burns instead make more fuel available by drying out the peat, causing a death spiral.
  - Solvency 3y ago
    So, what do you do?
    - 2devnull 3y ago
      How much you want to spend?
    - akiselev 3y ago
      In Canada? Invest in indoor hockey rinks.
    - vkou 3y ago

JohnMakin 3y ago

Almost all of California wildfire fuel is dense brush, not trees.

thepasswordis 3y ago
That dense brush, to people in forest management, is referred to as "fuel loading". It's like the tinder that you would use to start a larger bonfire. The brush ends up being the thing that starts massive forest fires.

EatingWithForks 3y ago

My understanding is that this isn't due to a lack of controlled burns but actually due to an unseasonally warm winter not killing bugs that attack and kill trees, leaving an excessive amount of dead wood to burn this year. No amount of controlled burning of the years before would prevent a lot of dead trees this year making for kindling.

AlecSchueler 3y ago
Surprised this point wasn't higher up. I'm starting to see this everywhere, dry grass, yellow leaves, dead trees. Growing up in Ireland I never saw anything but green but it's become visibly more lifeless year on year since around 2017.
- dmix 3y ago
  You’ve had warm winters every year since 2017 in Ireland? What about El Nina and the usual trends?
  - AlecSchueler 3y ago
    Yes, every year since 2016 has been above average and the average temperature has increased with every decade since the 1850s.
xattt 3y ago
Specific to Atlantic Canada, there is a lot of felled trees turning to kindling after Hurricane Fiona last September.
carabiner 3y ago
It's everything. Natives used to practice controlled burns to sustain habitability. Observe parallels to three sisters agriculture. Then as their populations were eradicated these methods were lost.
- seadan83 3y ago

pvaldes 3y ago

Again, it does not matter. Open your eyes This is environmental crime. And when there is a crime, there is a benefit for criminals. Saying that if we burn some, here and there, the criminals will stop, is like saying that if we paint the banks in a nice pastel tone and put a banner asking politely not to rob, the bank robbers will agree to stop and go away. Europe tried that in the past repeatedly. It didn't worked. Even worse, the trend is increasing among farmers manipulated by extreme European political currents that overlap extensively the Putin and Trump speeches. Places of Europe that never had a problem with wildfires started to burn since a couple of years. We hear political parties trow the first stone and claim that environmental laws are unfair. Just one week later, the place burns down magically. Is environmental boycott, and will not stop until we stop them or remove the benefits. Either we wake up and strike back, or we accept that the extinction whirl will be much closer than we expected, and much faster than we can adapt.

M4v3R 3y ago

There’s actually stuff being done about preventing Wildfires in the US, controlled burns being of these things, creating “fuel breaks” (gaps that prevent fire from progressing) is another, and there’s a LOT more. But a lot of time that’s not enough and the reason for that is like with every other government effort - bureaucracy and endless paperwork. It can take months before a project can even start because the forest management has to compile all the necessary paperwork. But they are really passionate about doing this to prevent as many wildfires as possible. Source: I currently work for a startup that makes software that shortens the time necessary to prepare this paperwork which potentially could cut the time it takes in half or more.

fragmede 3y ago
fascinating. what about the paperwork makes it take so long? is it the coordination between all the relevant agencies and landowners?
- putnambr 3y ago
  This is hearsay, but folks in Colorado tend to complain about federal air quality guidelines prohibiting controlled burns during the times of the year that it makes sense to do a controlled burn. During the winter, air quality guidelines dictate you can't exceed a certain amount of wood smoke in an area for example. NEPA studies might be another.
- adgjlsfhk1 3y ago
  the fact that if you do a controlled burn badly, it's a forest fire that kills people and does 10s of millions in property damage
  - fragmede 3y ago
    that doesn't explain why the paperwork takes so long at all.
- M4v3R 3y ago
  You have to gather a lot of information and answer dozens of questions before you start a project. In the planning phase you have to do scoping, make a public notice, consult the local communities, take wildlife, insects, wetlands, native tribes and many more things into account (which require gathering all sorts of data from national databases). There are multiple people inside a National Forest’s office that are working on all this. Then the other hard part is gathering all this data from all the people in one place and writing documents that will be published or submitted to various government agencies. This process is at the moment manual and extremely time consuming (because it’s basically an email back and forth that can take weeks or months). And that’s only the planning phase. The app I’m working on tries to automate as much as possible both the data gathering part and the document preparation part, letting multiple people collaborate together to create necessary paperwork. This drastically cuts on the time needed to complete the planning phase and thus lets them do more projects in the same amount of time.

mfb 3y ago

"no saw mills left in Northern California" - eh? This is just one company's sawmills (they are hiring): https://www.spi-ind.com/Operations/SawmillOperations https://www.spi-ind.com/Operations/SawmillOperations

ajross 3y ago
I don't know what that poster was talking about either. Even if CA were to outlaw lumber milling in the north of the state, the rest of the PNW produces enough for the continent already. There's plenty of wood in the deep blue queer tree-hugging west coast. The USA is a huge exporter of the crop, actually.
- olivermarks 3y ago
  THE IMPACT OF CALIFORNIA’S CHANGING ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATIONS ON TIMBER HARVEST PLANNING COSTS (2005) https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/19139176.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiQnMH_oLL_AhXeJkQIHbjKCi0QFnoECDEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw3aZ0mLx-mno8vX6sc8DaCb https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/... Sierra is processing imported lumber mostly https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestManagement#:~:text=Harvest%20cycles%20are%20separated%20by,approval%20by%20state%20regulatory%20agencies https://www.spi-ind.com/OurForests/ForestManagement#:~:text=....
  - mfb 3y ago
    I'd be interested to see the data re: "processing imported lumber mostly". Statewide back in 2016, California timber harvest was 1,572 MMBF; wood processing facilities received 1,483 MMBF; 11.5 MMBF flowed into California from other states; 99.7 MMBF flowed out of California for processing out of state or export according to https://www.bber.umt.edu/pubs/forest/fidacs/CA2016%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf https://www.bber.umt.edu/pubs/forest/fidacs/CA2016%20Fact%20...
- local_crmdgeon 3y ago
  That's true about Oregon and Washington but NOT California. It's also why you don't see wildfires to nearly the same extent in the Northeast or South - we cut our trees.

ajross 3y ago

This is almost exactly backwards. "Controlled burns" are the workaround, not the solution. Timber land naturally burns regularly, but we started fighting those fires in the last century to protect the lumber industry. The problem then becomes, a few decades later, that you have a forest filled with dead branches and snags that would have burned, piecewise, over decades, but didn't. Now eventually something gets out of control and you have a fire anyway, except that now it's much (much) larger than it would have been naturally. So the workaround becomes creating corridors of excess-fuel-free forest via "controlled burns". But that's not the fix! The problem was preexisting.

lamontcg 3y ago
Climate change has also caused the spread of bark beetles, killing forests in BC and Alberta.
- swader999 3y ago
  And their provincial governments both cut the helicopter rapid attack crews in the last few years
olivermarks 3y ago
I know people in the Sierra foothills who used to work in the logging industry until the bureaucrats made it impossible. I also know people in the same area who are fire fighters. When loggers used to find diseased trees they would isolate them by felling all the surrounding trees so they wouldn't infect them and spread. This practice was outlawed by the academic bureaucrats and is one of the reasons for the subsequent severe spread of dying trees that are the large scale fire fuel we see today. At this point in history there is illegal logging going on to create fire breaks around properties, such are the state restrictions on trees. We have lost sight of the forestry management practices that worked with nature, not against it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

This is literally not being able to see the wood for the tress. Controlled burns won't fix the fact that the Sea Surface Temperature anomalies are in the region of 2C in some areas. Or that the 2m Temp Anomalies are of the order of 6-10C across most of the US and large parts of Russia. Neither of those is going to make future fires less likely, controlled or otherwise. https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=sstanom&ortho=1&wt=1 https://climatereanalyzer.org/wx/todays-weather/?var_id=ssta...

_fizz_buzz_ 3y ago
It is pretty scary to see how people are in denial in this thread. I would also prefer if there was an easy solution like controlled fires to this, but physics doesn't care what I prefer. We need to get global warming under control. There is simply no way around it.

uoaei 3y ago

Wasn't the environmentalists of the 60s but the environmentalists of the early 1900s (John Muir and ilk) who thought they knew better than the native peoples how to preserve the dignity and beauty of natural spaces. We're just now coming back around to acknowledging indigenous land practices that have been the standard on this continent for millenia.

perrygeo 3y ago
Both environmentalists and early American naturalists have one common weak spot in their world view; they view humans as fundamentally distinct from nature. Nature is somehow both profane and awe inspiring compared to the "rational" human world. In that view, we need to preserve the wilderness (somewhere "out there") for aesthetic/spiritual/resource management reasons. From the indigenous viewpoint, there is little distinction; humans are part of the physical/natural world, same as a mountain lion or a worm, albeit a very powerful part capable of wielding great power and thus responsibility. There is no concept of wilderness. It's worth over-emphasizing that the indigenous viewpoint in North America was sustainable (and was actually sustained) for thousands of years. The modern industrial culture of bipolar consumption/reverence of wilderness is showing severe signs of overshoot after a couple hundred years. That's not to say that indigenous land practices are more ethical or wise... merely that they've been proven more effective by the test of time.

micromacrofoot 3y ago

sure, but it’s hard to ignore that wildfires in many places dropped when everyone was staying hone during the pandemic, it’s very much a multifaceted issue (and usually it’s underbrush catching fire and burning, not trees)

gibspaulding 3y ago

> Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years until they started getting shot by forestry rangers a hundred years ago. I've been thinking about this lately. My wife and I were reading about a study of an old growth oak - hickory forest in the eastern US which without human intervention is slowly transitioning to maple - beach forests. Presumably this is because it is no longer experiencing the burns it would have historically. This transition is generally considered problematic since oak hickory forests supposedly support more biodiversity (and conveniently more profitable timber harvests). But this all raises the question for me - how did this all work before any human intervention? What's the natural rate of forest fires? We have species (such as giant sequoia) that seem to require fires, so they must have happened, but they must have been quite rare. Would there have been a truely horrible fire caused by lightning every 1000 years? Or perhaps would the megafauna that went extinct around the time native Americans arrived have played a similar role in clearing out underbrush while foraging? Does anyone know of studies on this?

wefarrell 3y ago
I know that human expansion has decreased the number of large predators, which has increased the number of dear, who eat more young trees. If they have a preference for one type of tree over another that will certainly change the composition of the forest.
Kaibeezy 3y ago
beech truly deer lightning Sorry, was bugging me. Better now.
seadan83 3y ago
Certain areas burn with differing frequencies (naturally). Eg, coast range burns every few centuries while cascades and sierras it is more like every other year. Sorry for no references, so please have a large grain of salt with those stated frequencies. IIRC those are the tight order of magnitude. Though, we are also talking much smaller fires compared to the mega blades we see today that kills everything rather than rejuvenates. These fires today burn everything and down to 4 feet under the soil. It's a different beast.
3y ago

tinyplanet-o 3y ago

Most of the "environmentalists" I know are deeply in favor of controlled burns. At a national level, the Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns). And the timber companies are definitely not involved in any prescribed burning efforts (don't want to lose out on all that inventory).

dredmorbius 3y ago
USFS adopted prescribed burns in 1978. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36236104>
thepasswordis 3y ago
>Forest Service is largely behind the dangerous build up in tree density in our national forests, due to the their total and complete ban on prescribed burns (although to be fair, they've slowly come around to realizing the importance of controlled burns). This is comically false. The USFS absolutely engages in controlled burns.
pharrington 3y ago
You are lying. Don't deliberately spread disinformation. https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
karaterobot 3y ago
No, this is incorrect. The USFS does a lot of controlled burns, and has done them for a long time. Not sure where you heard otherwise: it's a significant part of what they do. They briefly paused doing them last year after a controlled burn got out of control in New Mexico, resulting in a high-profile wildfire. But that's only evidence that they were already doing them. Anyway, after updating their policies, they resumed prescribed burns later that year.

jmull 3y ago

Yeah, the real problem we need to solve here is too much environmentalism. The silver lining, I guess, is that it won’t be a profoundly unfortunate tragedy. As a species, we’ll have really earned the ultimate Darwin award.

throwbadubadu 3y ago
Come on...multiple posts claim that here, but I really miss the environmentalist campaigns who drove that fire policies?! References? Please look it up, we didn't know better, and it was wrong but quite natural for the peak of the civilization that we are (/s) to fight and prevent fires. The subtone here that "it was the environmentalists" is really hilarious and shocking at the same time.. lol. Blame everything bad on the environmentalists, ignore the rest we all did and still do, and just let nature rule! Hehe.. Especially, as while totally agree and true that it is right that this was the wrong approach, the denial that this is currently maybe only 10% of the problem is also funny. We lost nature, just wait it out and let it go its natural way here now until most is burned down and then desertificated, which will inevitably come. No more fire problems, just some others then..

bariumbitmap 3y ago

California already has a pretty good prescribed burn program, but it needs to be expanded, in part because the climate is significantly different today than it was a hundred years ago. There are some obstacles to prescribed burns: smoke inhalation is a public health hazard, firefighters need to be paid, private landowners are worried about liability, etc. Perhaps the biggest issue is that most of California is federal land, and the U.S. Forest Service does not have funding to perform prescribed burns. The private sector hasn't solved the problem either, in part because a lot of the fuel isn't desirable timber. Californians who are serious about this issue should lobby their federal and state representatives. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05997-w https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-023-05997-w > Our results show that California and Oregon are the only severe-risk US states to conduct prescribed fire programs that are impactful at reducing wildfire risks, while other southeastern states such as Florida maintain fire-healthy ecosystems with very extensive prescribed fire programs. Our study suggests that states that have impactful prescribed fire programs (like California) should increase their scale of operation, while states that burn prescribed fires with no impact (like Nevada) should change the way prescribed burning is planned and conducted. > California has historically resisted prescribed burning to control their already big smoke problem > There are various reasons preventing California from conducting more Rx [prescribed burns], including lack of enough firefighters and 57% of land being owned by the Federal Government which lacks the funds to conduct Rx, especially after recent budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0451-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0451-7 > Academics warned that the financial incentives offered by mechanical thinning may be elusive, given the high ratio of thinning to merchantable timber in many locations. Legislative staff and analysts criticized the traditional forestry model of removing large-diameter, valuable trees and leaving smaller, less valuable and more flammable biomass.

iisan7 3y ago
There's one consideration missing from your list though, which is the fact that controlled burning is way more risky now than ever before, due to the immense fuel build up. The reduced frequency of controlled burns has contributed to making them much harder to implement. Hard to put the cat back in the bag at this point.

dredmorbius 3y ago

This is a seriously misinformed comment. Total fire suppression dates to the early 20th century, not the 1960s. It was driven largely by the forest / wood products industry, not environmentalists. Formal adoption of "the 10 am rule" (all fires must be suppressed by 10 am the following morning) was in 1935. Formal adoption of prescribed burns by the USFS was in 1978. <https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.gov/fire_policy/docs/chp1.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20070810191055/http://www.nifc.g...> California has had numerous controlled-burn projects for decades. They are limited in scope, and opposed, usually by local residents and businesses, for ... somewhat understandable reasons, though in the long run more-frequent controlled burns are better than the megafires of the past few decades. Genocide of the indigenous North American population, especially in California, was transacted first by Spanish and Mexican missionaries, then by Americans, both private citizens and government agents (mostly military), and was largely completed by 1873. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_genocide> The US Forest Service was not organised until 1905. Its antecedents date only as far back as 1875, after the dates given above for the California genocide. Yes, controlled burns would help with some of California's wildfire issues, but evidence from elsewhere, including Canada and Siberia in which total fire suppression was never policy or effectively achieve, recent history suggests that megafires are not strictly dependent on overgrowth and fuel accumulation. Regions of California such as Santa Barbara experience recurring fires over the same terrain at intervals of a decade or two, suggesting that even short-term fuel-load accumulation is sufficient to give rise to huge and uncontrollable fires which intrude well into the urban region, and are not limited to remote bush or the urban-wildland interface. See particularly the 2017 Tubbs Fire which obliterated a Santa Rosa neighbourhood, and Thomas Fire, also 2017, which reached downtown Ventura.

webnrrd2k 3y ago

”Native Americans conducted controlled burns for thousands of years" Not to be snarky, but I think that they were uncontrolled burns... Once they started there was no Native American Fire Department to put them out, they just burned until they wefe done.

bparsons 3y ago

Canada does lots of controlled burns. The forests are on fire because it has barely rained in most parts of the country since April.

swader999 3y ago
Yes and they cut the rapid attack helicopter crews in BC and Alberta. Also, the fires there started in a short window when vegetation hadn't started growing yet and there was old dry winter grass everywhere.