Why have the last four years had mega-firestorms in California? Certainly we are experiencing increasingly toxic climate change, from extended droughts to record heat waves. And these climate changes have created conditions that create fires and the fires have become catastrophic.
But, why else? The science to keep this from happening has been known and advocate for decades. The problem is a culture in the state and in the state government that won't follow the science. Scientists have warned that the California management of the forests has long created conditions that would eventually lead to catastrophe, and the catastrophe has arrived. Elizabeth Weil of ProPublica has an excellent article that explores this (“They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?”).
Around 1905 the State of California adopted a "War-on-Fire" approach to California fires. From her article:
“The overarching reason is culture. In 1905, the U.S. Forest Service was created with a military mindset…The war-on-fire mentality found especially fertile ground in California, a state that had emerged from the genocide and cultural destruction of tribes who understood fire and relied on its benefits to tend their land. That state then repopulated itself in the Gold Rush with extraction enthusiasts, and a little more than half a century later, it suffered a truly devastating fire. Three-thousand people died, and hundreds of thousands were left homeless, after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and attendant fires. The overwhelming majority of the destruction came from the flames, not the quake. Small wonder California’s fire ethos has much more in common with a field surgeon wielding a bone saw than a preventive medicine specialist with a tray full of vaccines.
How do you wage war on fire? What that means is that if there is a fire, CalFire goes and puts it out. That sounds like a good approach, right? I always thought so. But, woe is us, it has terrible consequences.
The science says that we need to let fuel burn. If we don't, the fuel builds up and builds up and builds up. And then Climate Change enters the picture and we get record heat and winds and a spark from lightening or a campfire or some stupid fireworks display sets off a fire that turns into a conflagration that ends up creating its own weather and roars to unprecedented extremes.
From her article:
"A seventy-word primer: We dug ourselves into a deep, dangerous fuel imbalance due to one simple fact. We live in a Mediterranean climate that’s designed to burn, and we’ve prevented it from burning anywhere close to enough for well over a hundred years. Now climate change has made it hotter and drier than ever before, and the fire we’ve been forestalling is going to happen, fast, whether we plan for it or not."
So, forest mismanagement has been going on for 100 years, and climate change just keeps getting worse. How much excess fuel needs to burn? 20 million acres. How much are we burning? About 40,000 acres per year. The rest will burn itself. Nature will do what our War of Fire won’t do.
What other factors are at cause? Money.
It turns out that CalFire is a giant financial enterprise that gets paid to wage war on fires, to put out fires. And it turns out that doing controlled burns is a financial and career risk for "burn bosses" because if they do a controlled burn and it gets out of hand their career suffers. And, environmental laws have strict limits on air quality that prevent some controlled burns because of other air quality issues at the time of the scheduled burn. So it just becomes a bureaucratic obstacle course to do controlled burns. So, not there is actually a financial incentive to have a War on Fire. By the way, apparently in the Southeast U.S. a stronger policy of controlled burns are practiced and accepted.
The governor and the U.S. Forest Service agreed to allow more controlled burns. Nice, except it is woefully inadequate. We need to burn a million acres a year, and we’re increasing from about 20,000 to 40,000. Whoopee.
The firefighters are stretched too thin and are wearing out. And we haven’t even entered the traditional fire season of October November. From the article:
“As Ingalsbee said, “You won’t find any climate deniers on the fire line.”
We need change. Fires are indigenous to California and the dry west. We need to stop the War-on-Fire and learn to live in balance with fire. We need to learn to live with fire, manage fire, control fire, live in dominion with fire not try to dominate fire – fire will win that war.
We need to do both - properly manage the forests in California and stop and reverse climate change nationally and internationally. The world is becoming uninhabitable. It is all different now.
