Now that our dumbass president has graced us with his insights on California fires, I feel compelled to provide some balancing nuance on the forest management and wildfires issue. Fivethirtyeight.com provided a series of charts that illustrate nicely some, but not all, of the issues that contribute to the frequency and intensity of the fires. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-californias-wildfires-are-so-destructive-in-5-charts/
In a nutshell, California is dry, even when it isn’t technically in a drought and it is especially dry in the fall when rain doesn’t come early. Also, California is becoming crowded in the foothills and along the edges of forest areas. People are increasingly living in the WUI (Wilderness/Urban Interface) and also scattered throughout the forests in cabins. California is getting hotter, the average temperatures have been rising steadily for years. I don’t think we appreciate how an average increase of just a few degrees changes conditions in a forest radically. But there is one more aspect to the California fires that Fivethirtyeight.com doesn’t address. That is forest management.
As Trump put it, we haven’t been sweeping the forest floor. Of course his comments are simplistic, illiterate, lack nuance and reveal his dementia (just my opinion, of course), but he does illustrate that the National Forest Service has been administering the forests incorrectly. Historically, the forests burned on a regular basis. Because of the frequency, the fires were less intense and only burned the ground and lower branches. Trees have adapted to this burning by developing seeds that require fire to sprout, developing thick bark in some species, or the ability to sprout from the base in other species. Indigenous people set the fires themselves for thousands of years. These fires improved the quality of the grasses for basketry and for food for grazers, they made the brush grow with straight shoots and bursts of berries, and the ash fertilized the soil. When the Forest Service replaced Native Americans as managers of the forest, that was stopped. No fires were allowed to burn even in the empty quarters. The Forest Service was trying to “save” trees for timber harvest. This led to a massive build up of seedlings, leaves, dead wood and downed trees. Now, when a fire starts, it turns huge fast and burns up into the crowns of the trees, killing them. The Forest Service leases forest to timber companies for the harvesting of trees. Part of the Forest Service budget is comes from tree sales. The only commercially viable way to harvest trees is to clear cut large areas. Once all the trees are removed, one of two things happens, either the slash is left covering the soil and over time seedlings naturally appear to replace the forest or a plantation is established by completely clearing the ground of everything, deep plowing the ground and hand planting seedlings every 10 feet apart. In either case, what grows back is of a uniform age and size and is much more dense than would otherwise be. When these trees are so close together, they are ripe for the next lightning strike to start another conflagration.
The concept of “thinning” a forest isn’t really compatible with profitable harvest. In a natural, historically managed forest, the trees are of mixed size, species and age and they are spaced apart, providing an open look. This keeps the fires low and slow. Seedlings do grow but only the strongest survive and the occasional dead snag provides housing for animals. This is a healthy forest. So a well managed forest would be patchy, with old trees left along waterways, snags left standing, and seedlings thinned so they will never touch even when mature. Clear cutting is probably unavoidable but it could be done in strips and smaller patches so the forest is mixed in density and age and erosion is limited. An additional benefit of this kind of forest is that without the overly dense forest sucking up all the water, trees are less stressed throughout the year and bark beetles are kept at bay. Right now we have the worst case scenario of having large infestations of beetles that have killed vast chunks of forest, leaving dead trees standing, just waiting for a PG&E power line to spark it. With a thinner forest, the beetles would be kept at bay.
We need to learn to live WITH fire, control its behavior and we need to stay out of its way. Rural towns need to alter their design to provide more protection and separation from the fires. Controlled burning programs should be implemented and animal based brush suppression and even hand clearing can help as well.
There is another aspect of this whole dynamic: the role of forest burning in releasing carbon into the atmosphere. This is a complex issue and the science is not as clear cut as we would wish. I am not a scientist who could clarify this issue and am trying to learn more myself but can suggest that readers go to the links provided below to read for themselves the state of research on this. These links are provided from the website of a film that I worked on about the California fires called “Wilder Than Wild”. There are a series of news articles at the top and below are the real science papers.
https://www.wilderthanwildfilm.org/resources/