The wildfires in California seem to be getting worse, and maybe they are. Why? Ila;ways suspected the answer and here it is. from Bill Croke in The American Spectator.
In August, 1910, a huge fire burned three million acres (destroying whole towns and taking 87 lives) in Washington state, Idaho, Montana, and adjacent Canada. This has come down to us as “The Big Burn,” the title of a 2009 book by Timothy Egan, which chronicled the disaster. At the time, the United States Forest Service (USFS) was in its infancy and its first director, Gifford Pinchot, was appalled. Consequently, it became the policy of the USFS that all fires were to be extinguished as soon as possible. Over the decades this has left us with today’s conundrum, a century of fire suppression that has in turn given us catastrophic blazes costing life, property, and treasure.
In pre-Columbian North America fires started by lightning or by resource-minded natives kept forests and grasslands in a healthy state. For instance, on the Great Plains grasslands were burned so new growth would attract bison. In the forests, the ground and understory were kept clear for the benefit of wildlife and better hunting opportunities. Lodgepole pine actually needs heat from fires to open up closed pine cones, thus releasing seeds that aid reforestation.
While I was a college student in the late 1970s, I had a summer job performing trail maintenance and cleaning campgrounds in the Plumas National Forest in California. I participated in the “mopping up” operations of two small wildfires that summer “on the Plumas,” the same national forest that was the origin of the recent Camp Fire, the 153,000 acres blaze that incinerated much of the town of Paradise, California, killing 88 people and destroying 18,800 homes and businesses, or in the nomenclature “structures.” According to the Wall Street Journal, “Seven of California’s 20 most destructive fires and five of its deadliest have occurred in just the last thirteen months.” During that time the Tubbs Fire in Sonoma and Napa counties (which killed 22) and the Carr Fire near Redding held the most destructive honors until the Camp Fire superseded them with its near total destruction of Paradise, a town of 26,000 people. So what has changed in forty years?
Any of us who grew up in farm country will likely recall the overwhelming urge of farmers to burn off the ditch banks, to be rid of various weeds, as well. It was good to best practice when I was young and practiced to this day.
Commercial logging on federal public land hardly exists nowadays. Forest service timber sales get stuck in what is commonly called “analysis paralysis,” sometimes for years when the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) process allows them to be approved at all. Environmental groups routinely file lawsuits to further stall the process. The Northern Spotted Owl controversy of three decades ago is illustrative of that. According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, timber companies harvested 2 billion board feet from USFS sales in the state in 1990; in 2015 the figure was 55 million. Even “salvage sales” in previously burned areas are contested to the point where the trees lose their market value because they begin to rot after a couple of years. Consequently, most timber harvesting occurs on private land. For instance, Sierra-Pacific Industries (SPI) is the largest private landowner in California.
The result of three decades of this neglect is vast areas of the western national forests that are choked with undergrowth and deadfall (downed trees lying on the forest floor). In California alone, roughly 130 million trees are dead due to bark beetle infestations (though this plague is noted throughout the mountain west), leaving swaths of fire-prone brown on otherwise green mountainsides. Periodic drought that afflicts the West adds to the likelihood of bad fire seasons because beetle-infested trees are simply dead fuel. Whatever one’s view of climate change is, all this is nothing new. Drought has always been a factor related to the health of western forests.
Which is a shocking waste of resources. It goes to show why environmentalists are amongst the worst stewards of the land one could imagine.
President Trump’s recent tweets blasting the “gross mismanagement of the forests” sound generalized and may reflect his understandable ignorance of detailed western forest management, but in his own simple way he is right on the mark. There are two ways to accomplish the president’s calls to action.
“Prescribed” burns are done in the winter months. In the Sierra foothills, for example, there is little or no snow cover, yet in a normal year the soil is wet from regular rainfall. Temperatures are also cooler, humidity is higher, and wind usually absent. These fires are set and monitored for days and weeks as they slowly burn away brush on the ground over a specific area.
“Thinning” projects are commercial endeavors that harvest smaller trees from around mature ones, opening up the forest floor and removing a source of fuel that would produce a “ladder effect” in the event of a forest fire. This causes those smaller trees to send a fire up into the forest “canopy,” thus producing “crown” fires that destroy the entire forest. Thinning allows a future fire to move through a forest merely singeing the thick bark near the ground of mature trees, but not killing them.
These are the fires this time. Policy changes in the modus operandi of the public lands agencies emanating from the Trump administration might improve what is now an intolerable situation.
Or not, since it seems to be another instance where an ‘elite’ sets itself against common sense and often to people’s detriment. But we will see.