Few topics have gained in salience faster in the past few years here in California than wildfires. 2018 set terrible records, with over 1 million acres burned in California, and the Camp Fire in Paradise California become the deadliest fire in California history, killing 85 people and destroyed 18,804 homes. 2020 has already seen fires have already broken the 2018 record, burning 1,059,583 acres. As I write this, California's sky has turned apocalyptic hues, and the Cal Fire map looks downright sobering. News reports are that Paradise, the town that suffered so much in the 2018 fire, is once again under mandatory evacuation orders.
San Francisco's sightlines this week (Photo Credit Aaron Bickel)
The western region of the United States has always been at risk of wildfires. As Fire Expert Stephen Pyne puts it:
“Almost all of California is built to burn. Climate, vegetation, terrain, and wind—the possible combinations of these factors to support free-burning fire are many, but nowhere else in the country do the effects seem so volatile and relentless. The wet-dry rhythm of California’s climate allows stuff to grow and then burn annually. Much of its vegetation is grass and shrub, which can burn with lightning speed with the right winds, of which California has many. The interplay with mountains even promotes a special suite of dry, offshore winds that can bring a landscape almost instantly to detonation. Of America’s billion burnable acres, California’s stand nearly alone in their explosive character.”
But while most ecological disasters follow a natural cyclical pattern, the long-term trend is clear: Wildfires are becoming the new normal for California.
Historical Context
To understand why this is, we need to situate ourselves in history a little bit. Fire expert Stephen Pyne goes so far as to argue that fire is a defining feature of our age. As humans have harnessed fire over the millennium, we have created tremendous power for ourselves. But that power is so strong that it often overpowers us. At the risk of greatly simplifying Pyne's incredibly extensive work, you can understand this history in three stages:
First was the era of fire as a tool: for most human history, we as humans were so impoverished, and our life so brutal, that fire's power as a tool outweighed any of its side effects. You can start with fire's ability to cook food and create a light and see how that developed through the ages into fire's ability to produce energy (often for light), and clear landscapes (usually for food). Regions of the world that lack access to electricity (North Korea or Sub-Saharan Africa) still use open flames in their daily lives. At the same time, electrified societies contain their fire to power plants and electrical lines.
Over time though, humanity has progressed into the era of conversation and suppression. In the late 1800s, many of the side effects of fire as a tool were becoming more apparent. The rise of railroads, factories, and pollution from cities pushed people to recognize that while fire's power was transformative and necessary, we needed to do something about its side-effects. The United States embarked on a widespread effort to suppress fires in the wildlands of the west, as a generally accepted policy. This trend coincided (and is best understood) within the context of the broader conservation movement that sought to preserve nature as a good in and of itself and keep humans from "disturbing" the otherwise natural landscape. We created National Parks and Forests, and much of the western US became national preservation territory. We built suburbs as a middle ground between "dirty" cities and pristine natural habitats because we wanted people to be in touch with nature. So it is not surprising that we also sought to eliminate all potential sources of fire, especially in wildlands.
Of course, nowhere did this philosophy become more deeply ingrained than California. Californias developed a deep culture of conservation, both generally and specifically, when it came to fire. California created best in the nation tactics at fighting fire breaking out, with airplanes dropping retardant and firefighters parachuting into hot spots. California protected lands from human disturbance and extinguished all fires at the source. The deep irony is that the philosophy that tried to conserve nature required massive technology investment to try to contain it. As Pyne writes:
“California could boast a concentration of firepower unrivaled elsewhere in the country. It acquired one of three national fire labs and one of two equipment development centers. The U.S. has 10 fire coordination centers; Alaska is the only state that has one to itself. California has two. By 1960, California claimed a quarter of the U.S. Forest Service fire budget. It is now closer to half.”
I want to be clear in saying that this attitude was not inherently wrong; after all, we needed correction to the excesses of the industrial age. Fire suppression has been quite effective in cities with extensive fire codes and fire breaks. But it has failed miserably in the vast majority of the state. Increasingly, the consensus among forestry experts has been that this approach has failed. Wildfires are still with us, and just getting more significant due to the aversion to letting small fires run their course. As one ProPublica article detailing the failure of this approach points out:
“Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres.”
It is just impossible to try to contain wildfires using a strategy that is so opposed to what the local ecosystem naturally does. The dry season, hot weather, extremely flammable underbrush, and high winds will cause fires. It is a question of when, not if, wildfires will come. Maybe most damning is how steeped this approach is in the myth of "Pristine America," the idea that we need to reclaim an America that never existed. As author Charles Mann says:
As a matter of cold, hard fact the Americas in 1491 were not a wilderness. They were a huge, special garden, planned and maintained by the active efforts of a wildly diverse range of societies. Environmentalists tend not to like this line of argument, because to them it implies that there is no preferred "natural" state…Knowing more about what the Indians accomplished suggests that human beings can have a large, long-lasting impact on the landscape without wrecking everything. To me, at least, that seems an incredibly hopeful notion to carry along into tomorrow.
Thus, Pyne insists that we have to move into an era of co-existence with fire. This approach comes from the recognition that fire will always be with us, and it is better to manage it wisely than try to conserve and preserve our ecology from ever having to deal with the fire. Instead of extinguishing every fire at its source, this new philosophy harnesses small fires to prevent big fires. As Pyne writes:
“For wildlands, the central code is “Learn to live with fire.” Firefighters...great challenge is to restore good fire to biotas that hunger for it.”
This approach is not only informed by California's ecological history but also a recognition of our climate's future. It is impossible to blame any specific wildfire on climate change. Yet, the power of statistics shows us that in many normal distributions, small changes to the median of a data-set can have a powerful impact on the edge cases. The Philippines and Serbia both love basketball, but far more Serbians have played in the NBA than Filipinos, despite the Philippines being a much larger country. Why? Because to play in the NBA, you have to be on an extreme end of the distribution of height. A modest difference in the average height of men in the two countries (Serbia average is 5'11.5," while in the Philippines its 5'3.75") goes a long way in influencing the height at the extreme end of the distribution.
Wildfires are naturally a by-product of extreme weather conditions. Thus, a modest difference in average temperature can have an enormous impact on the conditions that create wildfires. Many models of climate change show we already have warmed 2-4 degrees Fahrenheit, and will continue to over the decade. In the aggregate, this will create a lot more opportunities for the extreme condition necessary for wildfires. And even with aggressive action to mitigate climate change (which is a policy challenge in and of itself), the most optimistic models show that in the coming decades, these efforts will mitigate future warming, not reverse past warming.
There are some signs that California might be moving towards a co-existence approach. Gavin Newsom recently signed an MOU with the US Forest Service that urged the state to embrace a co-existence approach. But MOUs are empty talk: what can California do to push this approach forward? The good news is that even while wildfires are a force of nature that humans are incapable of fully controlling, our behavior can go a long way to mitigate and prevent the worst effects of fires. While there is no silver bullet solution, we can take many small actions to move the needle in a positive direction. That is something I will explore in part 2