USFS decision to halt prescribed burns in California is history repeating
(cepr.net)341 points by danboarder 8 days ago
341 points by danboarder 8 days ago
> It sounds like it's a resourcing issue, not a change in philosophy.
Yes.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41920127 ("HN: The Forest Service Is Losing 2,400 Jobs–Including Most of Its Trail Workers")
Relevant comment by S201: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41922195
"The overall Forest Service budget has indeed been increasing, but it's nearly all going to wildfire fighting. I recently wrote about the state of forest road funding and went in depth on this here: https://ephemeral.cx/2024/09/losing-access-to-the-cascades
> Overall, in 1995 16% of the Forest Service budget was dedicated to wildfires. By 2015 it was 52% and by 2025 it’s projected to be upwards of 67%. Without large amounts of additional funding it is virtually guaranteed that the Forest Service’s budget will continue to be siphoned away by firefighting needs."
Sadly no, and (IANAL) the law here is clear AFAIK. Money cannot be spent outside of what it was allocated. Firefighting I'm given to understand explicitly excludes prevention. This might be one of the most short sighted budget allocations I've ever seen. As a dollar spent on prevention easily covers 10 on fighting.
Can the Forest Service make this up with use fees? Like, could California pay the Forest Service to take care of its land surrounded by California?
Here in Oregon (and elsewhere), we have multi-agency partnerships between governments, different federal agencies, local tribes, homeowners, etc.:
https://www.conservationgateway.org/ConservationPractices/Fi...
I'm not sure how it works in California, but wildfires don't really care about our jurisdictional boundaries...
It could possibly be managed by the state by placing a tax on fire insurance which would basically be a workaround to Proposition 13. That would probably be about as popular as a Chinese "weather" balloon but it does have a certain poetry of having the people who use the forest — by living in it — pay to manage it.
They can use the lumber fees from the forests to pay for the cost.
They're still going broke despite using prison labor to fight the fires?
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/31/us/prison-inmates-fight-calif...
If they stopped funding that completely it would halt the problem. Fire is part of nature.
So is death. Interestingly we've responded by trying to minimize it where rational. Part of preventing fire is preventing death. Fires also shut down roads which can be a major problem where alternative routes don't exist.
A wholesale "do not prescribed burn" is not sensible. Determining which areas are high and low value and then concentrating what resources you have on the highest value areas is.
Your point of stopping fire suppression has something to it.
Though, 3 issues I see with complete disengagement: (1) there are whole towns that would burn down, avoidably so if some fires were not suppressed
(2) modern fires are rangers and turn the landscape into Savannah. This is not necessary. Healthy forests would be fire resistant and more fires could just run their course (in other words, not suppressing fires can lead to CA forests being removed)
(3) kinda related to (2), the wet/dry seasons creates a lot of burnabke grasses and bushes that pop up. Prescribed burns would tamp that down, giving forests more time to age and be fire resistant
Fire is part of nature, but many of these fires are caused by target shooters, OHV users, and even from home construction. It doesn't make sense to take torches to the forest and then claim it's fine because fire is natural.
Trees and empty land cost nothing. But:
CA Insurance Claims USFS Wildfire
Year and Settlements Management Budget
2018 $13.6 billion $2.5 billion
2019 $2.8 billion $2.4 billion
2020 $3.5 billion $2.35 billion
2021 $4.75 billion $2.4 billion
2022 (unknown) $2.65 billion
2023 (unknown) $2.97 billion
It is a little complicated, but it isn't that complicated. The simple question is, should the government pay a safe home's price for a burnt down home?
No. Let owners exercise owner's responsibility (e.g. insurance, and if insurance is too expensive -- well, the risk is too high).
PS: I heard the thing California does, however, is putting a cap on insurance premiums, so insurers just avoid some regions, and owners cannot find insurance to buy. It's kinda the same thing -- owner's responsibility.
The camp fire was caused by a failed hook on lines where similar hooks showed extreme wear-and-tear, despite PG&E claiming to have inspected them recently. It's not like we just decided to say it was PG&E's fault; their inspections were clearly missing important deferred maintenance.
If the fire had been caused by someone without the funds to pay for damages (e.g. a homeless encampment (Day Fire) or college students improperly extinguishing an illegal bonfire (Tea fire)), then there might be criminal charges, but insurance companies will be on the hook.
Bad philosophy. Less prescribed burns mean more uncontrollable wildfires which means in the long term costs are even higher.
Prescribed burns are expensive now because we haven't done them for so long. California banned the indigenous practice of cultural burns before it was even a state! But the more we work on restoring this practice the cheaper it'll be for everyone in the long term
Enshittification strikes again. In this case, fees and costs go down by virtue of being pushed out into the future as even higher costs as a result of lack of fees being paid now. Someone should make an encyclopedia or reference doc detailing all the different and specific ways Enshittification manifests. Bonus points if they tie it into Socialism/Communism because I'd bet there is a high degree of overlap between the two in terms of failure modes.
The USFS (Department of Agriculture) never had enough resources. The amount of land is almost unprotectable: California: 20 million acres Idaho: 20 million Oregon: 16 million. Fighting fires really should be a state job. I think Idaho delivers much better results for resources spent, in areas that are more vulnerable. California is dysfunctional when it comes to multiple teams and agencies working together, and making decisions that could be controversial. I suspect USFS is relieved to interact less.
Climate change absolutely increases the fire risk:
Fire activity in Australia is strongly affected by high inter-annual climate variability and extremes. Through changes in the climate, anthropogenic climate change has the potential to alter fire dynamics. Here we compile satellite (19 and 32 years) and ground-based (90 years) burned area datasets, climate and weather observations, and simulated fuel loads for Australian forests. Burned area in Australia’s forests shows a linear positive annual trend but an exponential increase during autumn and winter.
The mean number of years since the last fire has decreased consecutively in each of the past four decades, while the frequency of forest megafire years (>1 Mha burned) has markedly increased since 2000.
The increase in forest burned area is consistent with increasingly more dangerous fire weather conditions, increased risk factors associated with pyroconvection, including fire-generated thunderstorms, and increased ignitions from dry lightning, all associated to varying degrees with anthropogenic climate change.
Multi-decadal increase of forest burned area in Australia is linked to climate change, Nature, Nov 2021, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-27225-4
https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/news/2021/november/new-rese...
This is a very convenient global scapegoat for those responsible for mismanaging the forests here and now. Nobody is disputing these studies. But then Newsom comes out and instead if saying "it's my fault for underinvesting in fire prevention, i will personally see that prevention (not just fighting) gets funded properly today", he says "too bad, it's all climate change's fault", how does that look?
This isn't actually a very good attribution to specifically anthropogenic global warming. But it is a decent one to anthropogenic factors broadly. The metaphor of laying a fire is quite literal here: if global warming increases the number of sparks, that's actually the smaller piece of the problem. The bigger one is mismanagement of forest and ecological disruption leading to more and bigger fires laid for those sparks to catch.
My guess is there could be future impacts around the condition of forests that leads to susceptibility. Drought comes to mind as a serious risk. But a forest of dry trees is still a much harder environment for wildfires to form and spread than a forest of dry trees and no proper forestry to manage it.
> ... to blame the conflagration on 'climate change' ...
Climate change is a significant factor in wildfire statistics. So is forest management.
Apologies to your political bloodthirst, but it's a bipartisan issue. Texas, Idaho, Utah, Arizona and Idaho are in the top ten, along with California, Colorado, Washington, Montana, and Oregon.
It's a particularly irrelevant question for this specific article, given that it's about Federal land and it's been a persistent issue regardless of which party holds national power.
> It's a particularly irrelevant question for this specific article, given that it's about Federal land and it's been a persistent issue regardless of which party holds national power.
I tend to agree that it's a bipartisan issue. However, the solutions will tend to fray along party lines. Ultimately, politics comes into play regardless of how bipartisan a problem is.
Famously, Donald Trump initially said "let it burn" when prompted for what to do about California wildfires. It was only after learning from his aides that there were more Republicans in California than many other red states combined that he reversed course. That alone makes for a pretty good reason for asking the original question.
Slight tangent, USFS has been using outdated models for their prescribed burns, and burned as late as July in my area, right at the beginning of fire season and months away from any expected precipitation. This turned into a big wildfire in my area and they spent ~$100m putting it out. You may have been able to get away with burning during the summer in the 90's here, but not anymore.
I'm not opposed to prescribed burns, either, I think they are totally necessary. But do them in the fall, when you've got nothing but rain and cool temperatures for the next 6 months, instead of weeks before the hottest and driest stretch of the year.
As to why they burn in early summer, they said at a community meeting it's because it requires fewer people to manage the fire.
Prescribed burns do more than just burn up the dead wood to prevent forest fires. One of the other main goals is to kill invasive trees / plants while they are young. Doing burns in the fall after they have already spread their seeds for the next season would do nothing to prevent this. Another goal of spring burns is to stimulate the germination of specific tree species like the Giant Sequoia, Closed-cone coniferous, and some berry trees (maybe others). Most prescribed burns are done in early to late spring, not sure about summer burns.
If the only goal is to prevent forest fires, then in theory you could just send a hoard of people in to gather up all the dead wood at the end of each season, pile it up and have some nice fall bonfires, which might be fun. The main issue is the terrain harsh and would be very time-consuming.
To your last paragraph - it's not just dead wood that is the issue - right?
In CA, there is a lot of shrubbery that turns brown and grasses.
Second, (west coast) forests that have not burned in a while look like a big brick of plant matter. Mostly living, dense, from ground to 30 feet high of plant matter that will combust when it is dry, windy, and a fire that is plenty hot to even burn the roots several feet deep.
You are correct that there is typically more to wildfires than dead wood, as in they typically start with dry pine needles, leaves, tall dry grasses, and spread quickly via slightly taller vegetation up to the trees. There is a science to when a prescribed burn can happen, and there are seasons that will not be right for any given location, so the burn is a no go. The conditions need to be just right (wind so it does not cross a highway / blow into a farmer’s livestock, humidity, time since last rain fall. This has a lot to do with the rate at which the fuel will burn. Fuel less than 0.25 inches will burn within an hour of the last rain and may burn for an hour after igniting. 0.25 – 1 inch 10-hour, 1 - 3 inch 100-hour, 3 – 8 1,000 hour. So, the smaller stuff burns quickly but may or may not start a larger hour fuel. Once the larger fuel starts is when it becomes a serious problem since now it’s hotter and hotter and eventually starts the living trees on fire. If you were to manually remove the 100 – 1000 hour fuels, some of which are dead trees still standing or held up by living trees (unable to fall / stuck sideways). The risk of an all-out forest fire starting would go down, but still not be zero (like you say in a drought / super dry conditions). In the end you can only reduce the risk, never eliminate it (short of clear cutting).
> big brick of plant matter
as an avid outdoorsman, please explain this. I’ve never seen a “brick of plant matter”.
I have seen overgrown shrubs and grass, but I’ve never seen the forest form a compressed brick of plant matter.
Also if plants are living they have water in them.
California is in the middle of a huge fire insurance crisis. It started with the intentional housing supply restrictions that drove up property prices and rents. In suburban areas, rebuilding costs were mostly increased indirectly through higher wages (as tradespeople and laborers have to make rent.) This sent insurance rates through the roof and caused a wave of policy cancellations. Many insurance companies exited the market altogether [1].
Climate change is also to blame. The firestorms of 2017, 2018 and 2020 broke all records, and were insanely expensive to rebuild after. The typical trigger is a katabatic wind event [2] after a long dry spell. This massively reduces relative humidity (often to 5-10%,) making ignition much easier. Once a fire starts, the wind spreads it extremely quickly. Sustained wind speeds of 50-60mph are not uncommon near mountain peaks.
In 2017/2018/2020, the precipitating events were so intense that the initial responses focused exclusively on helping the residents out. By the time the actual firefighting began, the fires were already enormous.
It's surprising to me that we haven't seriously looked into large-scale sprinkler systems, such as this one deployed in Spain [3]. These could take a major bite out of the initial uncontrolled stage. They could either be deployed in the wild along naturally defensible lines, or at the perimeters of inhabited areas.
They're expensive upfront, but not as expensive as the alternative. They might also reduce the need for prescribed burns.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/10/home...
I remember the smoke hovering over San Francisco, CA during the fires in late 2018. It was the worst I've personally experienced. I had an office job at the time. At the end of the day I didn't want to walk home in such poor air quality, so I ordered an Uber. The driver had been driving in that smoke all day and it caught up with him. Halfway to my home, he opened the door, puked his guts out, canceled ride, ended his shift, and I ended up walking the rest of the way.
Potential hiccup: isn't California in a water crisis? So, upstream of all of this is something like, "Dealing with foreign land-owners who are buying up all the water rights on the West Coast in order to irrigate their animal feed alfalfa farms (say that 5 times fast)." Your fire management issue just became an international concern.
Hi, yes, it's the Arabians and the Chinese. We let one get away with a massive terrorist attack and the other is a nuclear power who we're trying not to go to war with. Remember, our entry into the Pacific Theater of WWII was predicated on a trade embargo.
...But in general, I do agree that we shouldn't be selling out American resources for foreign countries at our loss.
"scenario shows what happens when Congress is less committed than California to tackling forest management. With wildfire management funding constantly tied up in unpredictable budget debates, the current state-federal partnership is fragile and based on the whims of the legislative and executive branches, which can withhold funding based on which political party is currently in power. The Forest Service’s latest decision is the consequence of these issues"
Would California have standing for damages? What would honestly be the consequences if the Governor and Legislature ordered Calfire to conduct controlled burns on federal land? (Can the Forest Service give Calfire permission to conduct burns on its land?)
except none of that is accurate. After the 2017 Tubbs fire, Gov Gavin Newsom did real work and caused a new, binding agreement to be signed between the stakeholder agencies, State, local and Federal. IANAL but I did read the agreement announcement from the Governor's Office. Next, California terminated the employment of the life veteran CalFire Chief, passed a budget increase for CalFire that was ... 10x larger than it had ever had before (?) over time minus details... and set out to work on fires with multi-state partnerships for well-paid fire fighting groups from other states to work on emergency basis.
And work they did .. subsequent years included massive fires that broke records, mostly 2018 and 2020. All the new money and agreements and on-call resources did ameliorate but did not prevent or even lessen, the massive catastrophic fire destruction.
Now, in an election year, someone is definitely jockying for new agreements somehow, but who knows the details... maybe someone here?
Did all of that allow them to do more prescribed burns?
> All the new money and agreements and on-call resources did ameliorate but did not prevent or even lessen, the massive catastrophic fire destruction.
This seems a bit disingenuous, didn't the number of acres burned dramatically decrease starting in 2021?
The US federal government is generally immune from lawsuits [1] and the places where federal law explicitly permits lawsuits [ibid] don't seem to cover this situation.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artIII-S2-C1-...
I'm very confused by this.
An ounce of prevention is worth pound of cure. But now they're doing away with the prevention... to be able to afford the cure instead (which they are now likely guaranteed to need more of)?
I'm genuinely confused and trying to figure out the logic. Is this a california/usa political kind of thing?
They're so backlogged on the prevention that the need for a cure is 100% of all available resources.
This is a "US Federal Government" thing. The funding for this department is decided fairly short term, so it is a political thing dependent on the current government, especially how it feels about California, climate change, etc.
No one gets reelected for avoiding a crisis.
For example, Trump’s running on blaming the next guy for problems that he created as president.
Similarly, when Arnold was governor he bought a fleet of mobile hospitals that could have been used for covid.
They were scrapped by the democrats the second he was voted out, and that mistake has had zero political repercussions.
I have good news, this is a problem that will eventually solve itself.
Though I also have bad news if you happen to own property in rural CA...
Snark aside… only sort of?
If I remember right about how these ecosystems work, you need the controlled burns so that the underbrush goes up but the trees don’t. Without the controlled burns, the trees also go up, and then “next year” all you have is the new underbrush… and the problem repeats.
What's old is new: defensible spaces around houses [1].
Excellent podcast on defensible space and how very few actually have it
> [1] https://www.fire.ca.gov/dspace
See also:
* https://wildfirerisk.org/reduce-risk/ignition-resistant-home...
* https://www.nfpa.org/en/education-and-research/wildfire/prep...
You'd think that insurance companies would make this a condition of coverage: you have to send in photos and be open to random inspections for verification.
Depending on the severity of the fire (and wind conditions), defensible space will increase the chance your house survives but won’t save it. In Sonoma county, fires hopped over vineyards due to the high winds carrying embers and stuff actively burning hundreds of feet
Wind can spread fire in surprising ways. Here in Norway a town experienced a fire getting out of control[1]. It was in the middle of winter and had been freezing outside for a long time, and was around -10C (13F) when the fire started[2].
Thanks to the wind, the fire managed to jump a distance of 130 meters (426 feet) across an ice rink and set fire to the watering truck.
[1]: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brannen_i_L%C3%A6rdal_2014
[2]: https://www.yr.no/nb/historikk/graf/1-139310/Norge/Vestland/...
This always amazes me when visiting the US. I'm from a dry part of Australia where bushfires are a regular summer threat, but the smoke seems to dissipate quite quickly. In the US, I've driven more than once for a week across areas where the sky is thick from smoke coming from a fire 1-2 states away. And it's a fire that started weeks prior.
It struck me last trip that an adversary so inclined could really sap lives, morale and resources from huge areas of the country by having rogue individuals secretly starting fires on top of regular lightning and firebug sources.
The news is wise enough not to make a huge deal of it, but a non-trivial number of the last bunch of fires were determined to be arson. It's hardly even a stretch to imagine that the arsonists might not have been just random folk who thought it'd be really cool to start a fire.
Then again, when a casual arsonist can set significant fractions of a state or even country on fire, and there's millions of people living in the area, and when "pyromania" is sufficiently common enough that it's got it's own entry in the DSM [1] (with estimated incidence at 1.13% (!)), it probably counts as an unnecessary complication to the explanation. There's no way 1.13% of "millions of people" can be stopped. The only solution is to not let the powder keg be created in the first place.
[1]: https://www.theravive.com/therapedia/pyromania-dsm--5-312.33...
Japan tried to do exactly that in WWII, albeit remotely:
On the topic of WWII incendiary bombs, the US also had some interesting programs!
In forested areas, it really could become a new form of terrorism that's practically impossible to defend against.
Please keep this idea to yourself, or delete it if you can
I thought we got rid of all those pesky things during covid
Somewhat meta, but can someone explain what an organization like this CEPR .. actually is?
I see these types all the time, they're the ones that produce various "studies" that are always get linked on HN. They usually have some generic name, some combination of various buzzwords, and their website is them displaying all the various "research" and "studies" they've produced.
Their stated goal is apparently to just "promote democratic debate on the most important economic and social issues that affect people’s lives".
How do they actually make money? They say they've got 33 staff members and 14 board members/advisors. Do they all work for free?
Do they actually sell some product somewhere? I see nothing on their site where something is for sale or where you can hire them for anything. Are they supported by ads somewhere?
All they seem to do is just spend year and year pumping out various "studies" and articles. Are there unknown backers paying them to produce this content?
> How do they actually make money? They say they've got 33 staff members and 14 board members/advisors. Do they all work for free?
Propublica's nonprofit explorer[1], and specifically the Form 990 filings[2], may be useful.
[1]: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/522... [2]: from 2022 https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/522...
wow they're banking ~1/3 of their budget? that seems excessive.
> Somewhat meta, but can someone explain what an organization like this CEPR .. actually is?
It's a think tank. They generate good policy and good ways for politicians to explain that policy.
> How do they actually make money?
I've given them money. They've been around for a long time. I'm a big Dean Baker fan.
> All they seem to do is just spend year and year pumping out various "studies" and articles.
You say this as if it were a bad thing.
It looks like CEPR is funded mostly by donations, but some think tanks also make money by performing specific studies for funders. Sometimes a government agency or corporation wants to study the potential effects of a policy change or something like that, but doesn't have the capacity or expertise to do it themselves, so they will contract a think tank to do the work. There will be a clear disclaimer if that is the case though.
> Are there unknown backers paying them
There should never be any unknown backers. If you ever see an article like this that doesn't have a big "Our Funders" link in the page footer or somewhere else, you should be suspicious.
> There should never be any unknown backers. If you ever see an article like this that doesn't have a big "Our Funders" link in the page footer or somewhere else, you should be suspicious.
Yeah but sometimes the big funders for "Americans For Prosperity" are "Americans Against Poverty" and "People For Prosperity" who are both in turn funded by "People Against Poverty" which is funded in part by "Americans For Prosperity" so figuring out where exactly the funding is ultimately coming from can be challenging.
charitable foundations and donors. basically the same groups as "Sesame Street was brought to you by..."
Yes! Necessary for a number of trees to reproduce. Morelle mushrooms are another example, their spores are fire activated. Look fo them in burn areas the following spring.
West coast trees evolved to drop their lower branches. They naturally won't have branches for 20 to 40 feet off the ground. They need to grow old enough to do that. Most forests have already been chopped down a few times over though in the last 150 years.
The ecosystem managed by indigenous peoples through proscribed burns, yes. Nowhere humans have lived escaped humans altering the ecosystem to serve our needs.
Yes, go back to primal forest as far as you can, then one dry hot year the country will burn flat? If we build houses in forested areas = that will happen. Home owners and insurers along with state/city must burden home owners with enforced brush/tree clearance laws. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1922
If the problem in California is anything like the problem in Australia, it's that it's not primal forest. We clearcut all the ancient tress, so what's left is secondary growth.
The huge old trees cut out the light reaching the forest floor, so there was less underbrush to burn. It absolutely did burn, regularly, but did little damage because the fire never got hot enough to burn the trees.
But with the secondary growth, it's vulnerable to fire. So we have to burn it often to clear the fuel load before it gets too much. But there's a lot of opposition to this kind of preventative burning, and then the fuel load builds up until we get a monster bush fire, everything burns down, and it all has to start again.
We need about 100 years with no major bush fires, and no logging, to regenerate the first-growth forest that evolved here. But that's a major economic asset and the chances of it not being logged are tiny.
It's wild that we can't afford to solve the root problem because we're spending too much time and money literally fighting actual forest fires.
The US Forest Service used to deliver 12 billion board feet of lumber a year. The sale of this lumber helped fund the org and its mission. Environmental lawsuits from activists in the 90s drastically restricted the amount of logging being done on these lands and production dropped to a trickle.
(The Biden administration increased the amount of logging in the last few years from a historic low. But the goal is still only to log up to 4 billion board feet next year.)
While not a complete replacement for each other, prescribed burns are specifically more necessary now because of the lack of logging. And more importantly, these agencies are only collecting a fraction of the fees they once did to sustain their mission while having more unharvested forests to maintain.
Can you provide more evidence that logging suppressed the modern super fires?
It strikes me as implausible and unrelated: - fire fighting costs is now exponentially more AFAIK
- that revenue from the 90s might not have gone back to forests
- while billions of log feet sounds a lot, it might not be
- young forests burn, old forests are fire resistant. That logging creates young forests
- logging requires access. Places inaccessible will still burn and still be a problem
- fire breaks from logging only helps so much with santa anna style winds that blow embers very, very far
- logging does not remove undergrowth, per the article it creates a ladder situation where tree tops will combust
- old growth west coast forests are fire adapted and burns are necessary. Logging and suppression do not seem like the right solutions
- conditions have changed since the 90s. Different rainfall patterns, different cycle of draughts, 30 more years of fire suppression and combustible materials, and 30 more years of (hyper fast) climate change (significant changes have occurred in that minuscule amount of time)
Protecting the environment costs money, so I don't think it's a problem that the government should be adding funding to offset what was previously funded by logging.
These types of articles never list the actual arguments that are supposed to convince congressmen to expend some of their finite political capital for committee battles…
If it’s known to be at least partially political, then that would seem to be a pretty critical thing to know.
Edit: And needed to gauge relative prospects versus everything else on the agenda…
Why are you asking me? I’m not the expert on how the USG spending policies are decided… hence why I wrote the comment in the first place.
As always happens in these threads - and for good reason - let's be sure to mention the book "Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources", by M. Kat Anderson. I learned about this book here on HN and it has transformed the way I think about this topic.
I particularly recommend the superb audiobook.
Through a series of interviews, this book makes the case the practice of basketweaving by indigenous people living in present-day California - and the massive and well-organized trade of hundreds of different types of baskets - is/was not merely a mechanism of subsistence, but actually a brilliant wildfire control strategy.
Anderson and her many stunning interview subjects - indigenous people recalling the practices of grandparents and their siblings - make a compelling case that by encouraging the hundreds of different species which went into the creation of baskets to grow in certain places and not others, ancestors sculpted the landscape into one in which fires burned out in predictable patterns rather than scorching a significant portion of the continent.
Eh.
There's not much evidence that indigenous Californians were doing any kind of fire management in the California coniferous forests - which is largely what the US Forest Service manages and have been in the news for megafires.
Indigenous Californians lived, overwhelmingly, in chaparral and grasslands near coastal areas and foothills rather far away. There is evidence that burns happened there (mostly burn scars in nearby coastal redwood forests, but also various written accounts by the Spanish).
That said, an estimated 4.5-12% of California land burned annually prior to the Spanish getting here - so whatever wildfire management practices happened still resulted in far more land burning than today and months of smoke filled skies - which matches up with early written accounts.
> That said, an estimated 4.5-12% of California land burned annually prior to the Spanish getting here
What's the source for that? It sounds insanely high - enough to burn the entire land area of California every decade or two if the fires did not overlap (I assume they must have in this model)
They specifically mentioned "grasslands" which covers a range of not forrest type lands, from waist high dense grass to sparser knee high grass bush land.
It's common enough for indigenous people to burn off dry grass ranges every year or two, often in chequered patterns to lessen the chances of wind picking up and fanning a full front across unburnt grasslands.
That's likely the 10% referred to, repeated burning of grasslands along with the livable fringes and common paths of forrest areas.
Add onto that "natural" fires from lightening strikes, etc. Some of these would start in ares with little human management and years of built up leaf litter leading to big burns that reduce large areas to ash on the ground and a few scattered trunks .. many would start in areas that have had fires in past five years or so and would result in "cool burns" through leaf litter, some tree trunk climbing, but essentially leave big trees standing and alive with clear floors for new growth.
> There's not much evidence that indigenous Californians were doing any kind of fire management in the California coniferous forests
My impression from the book was that there was. They specifically mention burning in around Yosemite and for the harvesting and health of pines whose nuts were used for food.
Also "Eh" seems somewhat dismissive of a really thorough and well researched book. I'm curious if you've read it.
Interesting.
Was the smoke less toxic?
With lower populations, the smoke impacted less population?
Is a large part of this the fact that fire supressiondid did not occur on industrial scale?
How comparable is the situation? I've heard that it is possible that california has been abnormally wet for the last 500 years. Could be a case of settling cities on a volcano. Ie: it erupts frequently on a geologic scale, but on a human time scale it is a complete surprise
Was there any evidence that fire control was intentional or just a happy side effect of the basket weaving practice?
They used fire for much more than just promoting plant growth for baskets, I don't think OP did a very good job of explaining that.
Fire was used to promote plant growth to encourage game, keep meadows open and clear to aide hunting, select for fire tolerant plants which native preferred, and even harvesting of grasshoppers.
I'm sure the natives had some idea that frequent fires helped prevent more catastrophic burns, they would regularly schedule burns from every year to every few years depending on the landscape. But I doubt they could have predicted the kinds of catastrophic fires we've seen after decades and decades of severe fire suppression.
California’s state budget is higher than the gdp of Finland.
You would think this would be high up on the list of hiring competent people to manage this part of CA life.
This comparison doesn't make any sense? California is 7 times bigger than Finland.
Strikes me more as a quick way to subvert zoning laws and force new construction.
The forest service can only spend what Congress authorizes. And Congress is kind of a shit show, more so the last decade.
Minor note: as a percentage of GDP, the US military budget under both Biden and Trump is/was significantly lower than the post cold war "peace dividend" years under Bill Clinton.
If we are not doing prescribed burns or, say, schools need to hold bake sales, it is because Congress just isn't choosing to spend money on those priorities, not that the massive military budget is making this impossible.
frustrating. I have sympathy for them, b/c it is actually a catch-22. one rogue prescribed burn can cost millions and millions.
meanwhile forests keep burning in unplanned ways.
Technically a risk-asymmetry / dilemma, not a catch-22, which is when to take some action you need to have already completed the action.
This is like owning a house and stacking cordwood right next to it so all the termites can get in.
If you own something you got to take care of it and if you don't want to take care of it you should get rid of it.
Probably the most effective thing we could do is re-imagine Smokey Bear from a "put out your campfire" mascot to a spokesperson for effective forest management & prescribed fire.
Our prescribed burns are not nearly aggressive enough... now this. Wow.
In 2021, nearly half of RMNP burned down due to the lack of effective prescribed burns. I know the NPS/USFS are criminally underfunded, but losing these wonders is also a crime.
Edited: us forest service
Rocky Mountain National Park, National Park Service, National Forest Service
Rocky Mountain National Park, US Forest Service, National Parks Service
1. Bureaucrats choose to stop prescribed burns to ensure availability of staff and equipment to fight forest fires
2. Forest fires increase due to build up of flammable materials
3. Bureaucrats pat themselves on the back for their decision
This is a cry for help, not some myopic bureaucrat thinking they're clever. Most of the USFS budget goes to forest fires (both fighting them and prevention), up from 16% 30 years ago, and they're now saying just fighting the fires is taking up too much of their budget to do much of anything else. The USFS already announced they won't hire any seasonal employees next year, which means basic things like emptying trash cans probably won't happen.
Unless you think they should just let the fires burn, which would be catastrophic.
Also it needs to be contextualized further: fighting wildfires is done to save lives. When they have to make a distinction between funding for prescribed burns, which are a mitigation but not prevention measure, and having the people and resources on hand to defend settlements then they're going to choose the latter.
Prescribed burns are treated as a panacea whenever there's wildfires, but they are only a mitigation strategy - you're still always going to have wildfires, the degree of severity and in what areas is what matters (they're also not cheap: it is after all, just starting a forest fire you try to keep under control).
Firefighting is only done to save property. People are completely beside the point. The problem is people don't know when they live in a town (defensible) and the countryside (you're on your own). In general the forest service is spending way too much time and resources in places that they should always let burn. You can actually build and live in a forest fire zone. Its much more convenient to ignore that though.
>Unless you think they should just let the fires burn, which would be catastrophic.
Why? I think it's probably the best thing to do. If the USG doesn't want to allocate enough money to properly manage forests, then why not just let it burn? If that results in some towns burned down, that's fine: voters in those towns can complain to their elected representatives and maybe vote for someone else.
Update: the voters in these towns have voted now, and they voted overwhelmingly for the party that wants to cut federal spending, so I think "let it burn" is absolutely the right thing to do now, and is likely what's going to happen.
You act like this is some intentional issue. It's funny because this describes every IT dept I've ever worked for. Understaffed, so we can't be proactive. Since we can't be proactive, things break and we have to spend money on consultants to come fix it. Or we have some big project so we consult it out. Since we've spent money on the consultants, we can't afford to hire more staff...
this may be true generally but not the case with California, CalFire and binding legal agreements for responsibility, that were enacted under Gov Newsom. The State budget is cyclic, but there is a lot of cash in those cycles. CalFire is funded very well at this time.
>privatize everything
Maybe we should do like China and have multiple big state-owned enterprises in the same sectors competing against each other. The competitive forces stay without the intervening short-sighted interests of the ownership class.
I wonder why this Chinese model is not included in discussions about government vs. privatization. Almost half of the Chinese economy is made up of SOEs competing against other SOEs. In some sectors that means the Chinese have multiple competing state-owned options to pick from while we in the "capitalist west" only have one state provided option.
The Chinese model has been a series of huge debt gambles that have been failing in slow motion for a couple years. The companies are generously supported by the government but otherwise deeply unprofitable and vulnerable to anti dumping laws.
I wouldn’t say it looks like a great model personally
>Maybe we should do like China and have multiple big state-owned enterprises in the same sectors competing against each other. The competitive forces stay without the intervening short-sighted interests of the ownership class.
Where's the incentive for the various SOEs to actually compete? At least in capitalism there's money on the line. When all the executives/board members are political appointees of the same party, things can get really chummy between "competitors".
Arguing for Chinese-style state owned enterprises on Hacker News, a site created specifically around entrepreneurship and startups? This place has certainly changed in the 12+ years I’ve been here.
But to your point — the corruption of SOEs is unmatched. They make the South Korean Chaebols look like a libertarian farmers market.
California likely won’t address the issue independently, as those most affected by forest fires often lean Republican, leaving little political incentive. Meanwhile, federal intervention seems unlikely since California’s electoral outcome is consistently Democratic, reducing any strategic motivation for federal support.
The result? Despite urgent needs, little action is taken on either side.
Why not fund the local tribes to run it the burns? Kinda feel they have a lot more experience in this area.
Not just experience but desire. They're fighting for their right to take care of their land throughout most of California. The indigenous practice of cultural burns was banned before California was even officially a state. To many tribes, the practice was really important for generating staple foods like acorns so its banning was important to the overall strategy of mass genocide of native Californians
I bet a lot of that hands on knowledge is long gone now. The last people who actually did it were several generations ago.
That's not true. In fact they are still actively working with firefighters to teach traditional techniques:
I must say, I'm interested in why this ended up at -3, if anyone is keen to expand on their downvote for me - is it because you'd rather the state run it? Or because I suggested that the native people of California were better to run it?
Most private owners are tree farms, right? Those burn like crazy. I've seen very few well managed tree farms, they do exist. Anecdotally, after observing several thousand linear miles of west coast forest, just a handful were well managed and fire resistant. The majority is a dense mass of q-tip like trees with dense underbrush. There in grows not trees, but tree trunks and the habitat is good for rats and no large game. (Sorry for the rant, I've got strong feelings on how gross tree farms are. To see how peevelant they are - check satellite images. It looks like a checkerboard, it is not due to images being stitched together, it is the boundaries of clear cuts and tree farms- and it is just everywhere (west coast))
Might be good for making a few people rich, but seems bad for long term forest health. We've seen how private capital can come in, suck all the value out of something and leave only a husk. Over and over again.
You may have accidentally fallen prey to timber baron misinformation. It just isnt true that private owners "actually care for them" in some way that prevents fires. [0][1][2][3]
And even if it were true, lets pretend we give all of the forests to timber barons--then we get to 1) still fight the fires anyway, and 2) we'd end up having to bail the timber barons out after the fires. The end state is more burned forests that we now dont own, or get to use, or have any say over, yet, we still pay for it all and the billionaires walk away with everything.
At this point we know they wouldn't care for the forests any more than the forest service.
[0] https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/osu-research-suggests-fore...
> OSU research suggests Forest Service lands not the main source of wildfires affecting communities
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[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/despite-what-the-logging-...
> For decades, Oregon’s timber industry has promoted the idea that private, logged lands are less prone to wildfires. The problem? Science doesn’t support that.
---
[2] https://missoulacurrent.com/study-wildfires-land/
> Study: Most destructive wildfires have started on private land
---
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-06002-3
> Human ignitions on private lands drive USFS cross-boundary wildfire transmission and community impacts in the western US
Why should CA budget to prevent forest fires when the federal government will just subsidize their natural disaster recovery?
> Why should CA budget to prevent forest fires when the federal government will just subsidize their natural disaster recovery?
We did just read the article about California spending money on fire mitigation while the federal government--the US part of the US Forest Service--skimps, right?
I'm no longer a resident of Caifornia, but California should use eminent domain to seize the forest land, or just burn it and ignore federal law. What are they possibly going to do?
> What are they possibly going to do?
What are or what could they do? The latter is basically the same as what would be done to you and me running out and torching federal forest. Jail.
> do firefighters not get qualified immunity when acting in their official capacity?
They do. But torching federal land might be somewhere the federal courts wouldn't find it.
They're going to jail the governor of California? Newsom has presidential ambitions and I can't imagine anything that would make him more popular and appeal to a substantial number of conservatives than defying federal law, risking jail, in order to literally save the state of California from fire.
He'd be the greatest folk hero we've made in a long time.
At some point politicians need to have some chutzpah.
> going to jail the governor of California?
Probably not. But you would see Calfire agents being arrested.
> some point politicians need to have some chutzpah
I agree and also asked the question [1]. As a political stunt, it might work for the individual. But it would also set a precedent most Californian voters probably wouldn't appreciate when it comes to federal land in red states. To say nothing of basically every Californian wildfire funding battle in D.C. being ex ante conceded for a few years.
> most Californian voters probably wouldn't appreciate when it comes to federal land in red states
Liberalism: the fear that someone, somewhere is doing something you disagree with.
But thanks for saying the quiet part out loud. If we want to make progress as a nation we have to literally love ourselves (in this case, our lungs) more than we hate those we disagree with.
>They're going to jail the governor of California? Newsom has presidential ambitions and I can't imagine anything that would make him more popular and appeal to a substantial number of conservatives than defying federal law, risking jail, in order to literally save the state of California from fire.
You clearly haven't seen the political scene in the past decade. Both democrats and republicans have gone 180 on several issues. Democrats, supposedly the stalwarts of bodily autonomy, fully embraced mask/vaccine mandates. Election security (eg. hackable voting machines) went from being the concern of left-leaning techies to a rallying cry of election denying republicans. It's impossible to predict where alliances will lie based on a few principles.
I’m not the OP, but Utah Power & Light Co. v. United States, 243 U.S. 389 (1917) says the state can not seize federal lands. There’s the Supremacy Clause and the Constitution specifically spells out that the (US) Congress has authority over the federal lands.
A state could apply for a license from the Department of the Interior, but no, a state can’t take federal lands via eminent domain. This is long-settled and even a plain English reading of the Constitution makes this pretty clear. There are mountains of cases on the Supremacy Clause that support this.
If California were to use a hypothetical eminent domain to seize U.S. land, they’d have already done it with Moffett Field if only to get the property tax revenue from the Google Gulfstreams parked there.
So the great thing about American politics is that the states can do whatever they want and the feds can do whatever they want and then we can see who did what legally after the fact. In the meantime, the state won't literally burn killing people as the fire wages its path of destruction.
again, we need politicians with chutzpah. Oregon recently arrested federal officials for similar environmental issues. I'm not 100% read up on the entire case, but I appreciate people trying to do what's right instead of armchair governance.
> This is long-settled and even a plain English reading of the Constitution makes this pretty clear. There are mountains of cases on the Supremacy Clause that support this.
Luckily we have a new Supreme Court makeup that might make a more sensible decision when it comes to states literally doing what needs to be done so their citizens don't literally die in infernos.
> This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.
It sounds like it's a resourcing issue, not a change in philosophy. It doesn't change the fact that it won't be happening though.