Last Blog post, I tried to layout a (very abbreviated) vision of Californian’s history with fire and why we have gotten ourselves into such bad shape today. Today I will start to lay out what we can do to reverse course and move to more sustainable living with wildfires. I will try to look at multiple dimensions of the issue and various levels on which change can improve this deteriorating situation.
As you will see, wildfires make for a very complex problem where there is no silver bullet that we can rely on to fix the problem by itself. By its nature, wildfires will always be with us here in California, and given the danger inherent to fire, the state will always have some risk of fires burning out of control and threatening damage to human life and home. However, if our state government can pursue a patchwork of incremental reforms, I believe we can see the long-term trajectory improve for the better on the issue.
In many ways, the real limiting factor is that we are currently facing a crisis of elected leaders (at all levels of government) shifting blame and refusing to take ownership of the problem at all government levels in the US. President Trump blamed the wildfires on the state’s forestry practices while refusing to acknowledge the role climate plays in wildfires’ rise. Our state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has repeatedly shifted blame onto the federal government for not acting on Climate Change while dragging his feet on implementing forestry management changes best addressed on a state level. Many local officials also shift blame onto both the state and the federal government. Simultaneously, they do nothing to address the housing crisis in their city that pushes people into wildfire zones and makes it harder to combat climate change (more on this in the next post). So as we go through these solutions, it is important to remember that without holding elected officials accountable for doing what is in their control (and not their political enemies on a different level of government), we are unlikely to see much progress.
Today we are going to two solutions that are often at the center of wildfire debate: forestry management and climate change.
Solution 1: Shift our Forestry Management Strategy
In sports, military conflict, and business, there is often a distinction between “strategy” and “tactics.” Great tacticians are good at making micro-level changes and adaptions in the face of pressure, like a basketball team switching defensive assignments mid-game to shut down the other team’s best player. As I wrote last time, California has traditionally excelled in terms of tactical approaches to fire suppression. Our state fire agency’s sophistication is quite astonishing, as one would expect, knowing their expenses may approach one Billion dollars in 2020.
However, excellent tactics cannot make up for our fundamentally flawed strategy of failing to recognize how fire is inevitable. Our deeply ingrained philosophy of seeing nature as idyllic, and fire as a human imposed rather than natural phenomenon, makes us forget that, as Stephen Pyne points out, “54 percent of California ecosystems are fire dependent, and most of the rest are fire adapted. So the first step in making progress is changing our strategic approach to wildfires in the state. We need to embrace the implications of the ”Fire Paradox” that says: “The harder you try to fight fire, the worse it gets when it does happen.”
Instead, we should be looking to set controlled fires when conditions are least conducive to massive blazes (not too dry, not too windy). Controlled burns require experts to administer and create more polluted air, but ultimately are far less risky or dirty than the massive burns that rage uncontrolled. There is virtually no scientific debate about controlled burning: it works, and California’s failure to make use of it is a form of malpractice. But too often, competing incentives in our state bureaucracy make doing the smart thing a rarity.
We can also move away from the philosophy of letting forests grow undisturbed by humans and take a more active role in managing forests. As the San Francisco Chronicle points out, California forests often contain two to three times the trees per acre than they did 100 years ago. When those trees die, as many do when California deals with drought, they become fertile kindling for wildfires. The recent, massive Creek fire around Shaver Lake likely was fueled by these dead trees going up in flames. Thinning our forests is thus imperative to reducing the destructive capacity of these fires.
Some may be skeptical that this will work in the face of out of control wildfires, but for an example of this, look no further than the devastating Camp fire of 2018 in Paradise, California. Analysis after the fact found that certain surrounding communities were spared, including the northern part of the nearby Magalia. As the Sacramento Bee writes:
“The reason was a series of forest-thinning projects conducted in recent years and overseen by the U.S. Forest Service, Sierra Pacific Industries, and the volunteer Butte County Fire Safe Council. The council also worked diligently with area residents to clear brush from their property.”
It is important to note that this thinning strategy is not the equivalent of logging. Logging focuses on cutting down mature trees that can turn into profitable timber. However, the most effective thinning process involves looking for growth that presents the highest risk of fire. This strategy means removing dead trees, young trees, and brush that grows on the forest floor. To do this effectively will require reliance on public dollars, not the private timber industry.
Well maintained forests, both on a macro and micro level, really did make a huge difference in limiting the destruction in that case and can make a big difference on a broader scale. Of course, better forestry management cannot alone solve the issue: it is simply unrealistic to think the state will ever correctly manage our forests or that fires will never rage out of control and impact humans. So it is essential to also look at other solutions as well.
Solution 2: Address Climate Change
As I talked about in Part one, climate change is one of the inescapable drivers of wildfires. While it is almost impossible to attribute one particular fire to climate change, climate change does affect fires more broadly. As Stephen Pyne says, climate changes the “performance enhancer” that brings wildfires around more often and more intensely. Experts are increasingly saying that the management of fire requires monitoring both climate change and forestry management. Without taking steps to address the problem, we can expect a more extended fire season and new fire “hot spots” to pop up because of the shift to a hotter and more arid climate. In some ways, California is more susceptible to climate-induced burns because so much of our state is covered in chaparral or shrub-grass, plants that are incredibly prone to burning in hot and dry conditions.
There are a lot of things California can do to try to address climate change more effectively. For one thing, we could tighten up our cap and trade system for pricing the harmful effects of carbon. Ideally, cap and trade would harness capitalism; it incentivizes companies to find ways to decarbonize their operations without sacrificing their bottom line. But in reality, there are too many loopholes and are generous in allowing carbon offsets, allowing companies to offset their emissions by eliminating emissions or capturing carbon elsewhere. This policy is effective in theory, but in practice has been gamed in ways that will not pay off in terms of climate benefits. To illustrate this point, look no further than a recently planted Oregon forest, which had financed carbon offset credits in California, that burned in this summer’s most recent wildfires. But the system is a workable one and can push things in a more green direction without hurting the economy (as I have written about here). California could re-examine its attitude on Nuclear Power, which is safer than you think and could potentially become a significant and economical source of green energy in the future, in addition to the renewable sources we currently have and are producing. And of course, we could do a better job of cutting down on transportation emissions by actually putting housing where people disproportionately want to live: in dense, walkable cities (more on this in the next post).
Of course, it is important to note the limits of what California can do on climate change: While California is a large state with a large economy, it only accounted for 424 million metric tons of CO2. That sounds like a lot (and is!), but consider that in 2017 there were 32.5 gigatons of carbon emitted globally and 4.8 gigatons in the US alone. So California’s emissions only account for 9% of emissions in the US, and a little over 1% of global emissions. Even if California succeeded in zeroing out its emissions in the next five years, we would barely make a dent in the increase of wildfires.
So while’s hard to deny the link between the changing climate and wildfires, it is hard to see the state’s efforts being effective apart from state and federal action. California should still be tackling climate change, if for no other reason than California tends to a global trendsetter in pushing the boundaries of innovation. For more practical solutions, we will have to look at less high profile solutions in our final wildfires post.