Comment by toomuchtodo

Comment by toomuchtodo 9 days ago

69 replies

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> 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."

Ajedi32 9 days ago

Don't "prescribed burns" fall under the category of firefighting? That's the whole reason you do controlled burns in the first place, right? To prevent a larger fire later?

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  • leeter 9 days ago

    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.

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JumpCrisscross 9 days ago

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?

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  • akira2501 9 days ago

    I think the issue is that it's federal land. They would just have to authorize California to do it on their behalf.

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  • scythe 9 days ago

    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.

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    • bragr 9 days ago

      The fire insurance that is unaffordable or just straight not available anymore to those same people?

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      • crooked-v 9 days ago

        If the fire insurance is just straight not available, that is probably because people should not be living there.

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      • scythe 9 days ago

        Most California landowners are hardly poor. We're talking about a state with more than double the GDP per capita of Japan. And the property taxes are in some cases among the cheapest in the world. We're talking about just over a million homes in fire zones, while the total budget for the Forest Service is about $10 billion per annum. That's $10k per year per house to fund the financial equivalent of the entire Forest Service — for roughly a third the rent I pay on a studio apartment in Bergen County. I'll try to find a small enough violin for these landowners. Yes, there are some people who are asset-rich and liquidity poor, but we are not talking about West Virginia.

        Effective fire prevention will also make fire insurance cheaper and reducing development in fire-prone areas will reduce the cost of forest management.

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    • tekknik 8 days ago

      People living in the forest (who’s doing this exactly? you didn’t specify) are not the problem. Wildfires are a natural event meant to bring balance to an overgrown forest. All of CA suffers from this so why force only some to pay?

      Since CA tends to be a rich state, I vote that those living in SF and LA pay 75% of the required fees, and the remainder of the state pay the rest.

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  • pkaye 9 days ago

    They can use the lumber fees from the forests to pay for the cost.

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    • m0llusk 9 days ago

      That is much more complicated than it appears. Cutting and transporting trees is not easy or free, and there is already a huge glut of wood caused by the die off from phytophthera. Might still be worth looking into.

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      • Teever 9 days ago

        I'm not from the region so I'm wonder if this glut of wood translating into low prices for end consumers?

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  • wbl 9 days ago

    Not without Congress doing something to enable it.

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    • JumpCrisscross 9 days ago

      > Not without Congress doing something to enable it

      Why? We played with the farfetched hypothetical of California unilaterally acting on federal land. But if the Forest Service says “come on in” and they do, I’m struggling to see who would face any real consequences given the Congress’s power of the purse isn’t being touched.

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      • wbl 9 days ago

        OP is talking about CA paying money to the park service. Different than them handing over a license to burn.

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        • JumpCrisscross 9 days ago

          > OP is talking about CA paying money to the park service

          Sure. I don’t see how the Congress stops that if the USFS (not Parks) and Sacramento strike a deal.

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jwlake 9 days ago

If they stopped funding that completely it would halt the problem. Fire is part of nature.

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  • akira2501 9 days ago

    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.

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    • jwlake 9 days ago

      No my point is stop overfunding firefighting. Over fund forest management.

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      • irjustin 9 days ago

        At the risk of being an idiot, is the problem firefighting? Is the problem that we're continuing a losing battle? That, even when we had proper forest management, the costs were still shifting towards firefighting? Warming making everything drier on average?

        In the end though the only one we're truly hurting is ourselves and our desired life style when it burns out of control.

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  • seadan83 9 days ago

    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

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  • [removed] 9 days ago
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  • ultrarunner 8 days ago

    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.

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    • LorenPechtel 8 days ago

      Fire is going to happen. The more you prevent fire the bigger the fire becomes when it does happen.

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      • ultrarunner 7 days ago

        Fire is going to happen to a certain level, given a certain evironment. Again, if people show up and start burning everything around them, fires that would not have happened at all will burn valuable places. I don't need to have preventative fires wash through my living room to maintain an acceptable level of destruction; I just don't do things that will burn down my house inside.

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        • LorenPechtel 6 days ago

          Removing the human-caused fires from the picture will reduce the number of fires but the fuel will still be there, the fires that remain will be bigger.

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