In California, 15 of the 20 largest fires in state history have burned since 2000. The state is “a bit like a canary in a coal mine,” Ms. Pohl said. “We are also going to see the same trend across other states in the country in the future.”
emphasis added
Climate Change leads the list of the usual suspects, along with human encroachment into areas where fire risks are increasing. It’s also a consequence of the need to adapt land and fire management practices to reflect best practices.
Fire has always been a part of the landscape. Natural events lead to periodic wild fires; this clears out accumulating biomass, supports plant and animal species that thrive at different parts of the cycle, and maintains a biologically diverse landscape.
Human efforts to control fire interrupt this process: burnable vegetation accumulates over time, so when a fire eventually does break out (and increasingly it’s related to human actions), it’s much worse than it would have been otherwise.
That’s under normal conditions — but ‘normal’ isn’t what it used to be in the anthropocene. Hotter climate, more severe droughts have extended fire season. As the planet continues to warm, those conditions prevail over more and more of the globe. (This post I put up several days ago has more on this.)
Several consequences follow from this. An increasing amount of government effort is going to have to be devoted to dealing with fire — making more resources available, having more people available to fight fire (Climate change job creation!), modified land use codes, modified building codes, and so on. Deliberate, controlled burns are going to have to become standard practice — as will coping with them if/when they get out of control. Again from the Times:
In recent years, authorities have moved toward working with the natural fire cycle rather than fighting it at any cost. In 2010, California became one of the few states in the country to adopt a mandatory statewide building code to help reduce fire risk in wildfire-prone areas.
In neighboring Arizona, cities are taking the lead. Flagstaff, which sits in the world’s largest ponderosa pine forest, was an early adopter of policies addressing the city’s high wildfire risk head on through fire education, controlled fires and tree thinning.
Trees in fire-prone areas develop thicker bark, in part, because thick bark does not catch fire or burn easily. It also protects the inside of the trunk, the living this tissues that transport water and nutrients, from heat damage during high-frequency, low-intensity fires. Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa, also commonly known as the bull pine, blackjack pine or western yellow pine) is a great example. This signature tree in the western United States has a thick and flaky bark, sometimes compared to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, which perfectly withstands a low-intensity, surface fire. The species also drops lower branches as the trees grow older, which helps prevent fire from climbing up and burning the green needles higher up the tree.
The point is, low fires that stay on the ground help keep the Ponderosa Pine forests in good health.Some pine species actually need fire to spread their seeds. Here’s a description of what happens when fire is not allowed to keep the groves thinned and cleared.
A side bonus for humans. The thick, fire-resistant bark of the Ponderosa Pine gives the groves a distinctive odor. I’ve walked through such groves in New Mexico, and depending on the local gene pool, they smell faintly like either vanilla or butterscotch. You may also find yourself walking through the distinctive smell of wild sage, since that’s common in those areas as well — along with fire.
This is just one example of a particular ecosystem at risk. Now consider the impact on all the very different melanges of animals, plants, and humans coming together on a varied landscape, all of them experiencing increasing stress from climate change.
The fires in California are in the news because they’re huge, it’s going to take weeks to put them out, and the images of people who have lost everything to fire generate that ‘human interest’ angle in a way that graphs and charts of climate change don’t.
But what about living with a threat that can strike anywhere, cause massive devastation in a short time, and then move on? It’s a threat that can’t be prevented or fought; you just have to cope with it as best you can. And yes, it includes the possibility of drowning.
That will be Part 2 of this post, appearing tomorrow. Until then, try to stay safe.