[HN Gopher] Wildfire restored a Yosemite watershed
___________________________________________________________________
Wildfire restored a Yosemite watershed
Author : incomplete
Score : 191 points
Date : 2021-08-09 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.berkeley.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.berkeley.edu)
| agentultra wrote:
| A now-rare ecosystem in Southern Ontario, Canada -- the oak
| savanna -- was the dominant ecosystem in the region until
| colonization started suppressing the cycle of wild-fires in the
| region. This enabled foreign invasive species to take hold and
| redefine the forest composition and character.
| hinkley wrote:
| Also can build up pathogens.
| aaaxyz wrote:
| Southern Ontario has forests?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Certainly, but it's mostly farmland now.
| almost_usual wrote:
| Relevant talk by US Forest Service Researcher Paul Hessburg.
|
| https://youtu.be/O6Vayv9FCLM
|
| https://www.fs.fed.us/research/people/profile.php?alias=phes...
| 1-6 wrote:
| Wildfires are a bit like crop rotation in nature. I think we're
| returning to the idea that wildfires aren't a bad thing when done
| in a safe manner. Visiting Lassen National Park, there was a big
| area where it was nothing but blackened trees but an interesting
| caveat was that a lot of smaller trees were present in that same
| area.
| gordon_freeman wrote:
| I remember one of the national parks I visited a while ago (I
| think it was Redwoods NPS in California but not sure) where the
| Ranger told me that one of the tough decisions sometimes they'd
| need to make when a wildfire is raging is to whether to put it
| out or just keep it spreading naturally to the benefit of
| health and biodiversity of the forest. In an extreme case, he
| mentioned that for a few occasions the Park Service even may
| need to ignite the wildfire and they have done it a few times
| before. This all was pretty surprising to me considering all
| these wildfires news I've been reading recently.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I'd love to see a future where we build houses with the
| expectation that wildfires will rage nearby. Put up some huge
| heat-resistant walls around civilization, let the fires burn
| next door. Wildfires feel like the last area where we feel
| entitled to destroy nature's evolved processes, just because
| humans want cheap land.
| kzrdude wrote:
| The bigger wildfires are a sign of a changing equilibrium (for
| example hotter temperatures, no surprise).
| mfer wrote:
| Smaller regular fires burn at lower temperatures and they
| clean up basic debris. If we fail to let the lower temp fires
| clean up debris the debris tends to grow. When there is more
| of that the fires burn at hotter temperatures and cause more
| damage. To avoid the hotter temperatures the debris needs
| regular cleaning. The natural method of that is fire.
|
| That's what numerous articles written on the topic from
| experts have said.
| generalizations wrote:
| Or forest mismanagement.
| truffdog wrote:
| I was in a northern california campground a few years ago
| and was kind of blown away- great piles of dead trees and
| "no collecting firewood" signs.
| Zenst wrote:
| There are plants (including tree's) that depend upon fire to
| propagate. Pyrophytic plants and some examples covered here:
| https://www.britannica.com/list/5-amazing-adaptations-of-pyr...
| newbamboo wrote:
| I worry that we may committing a historical fallacy. Fires were
| good, back when the climate was very different. Can we
| extrapolate that forward given rapid changes in climate. Maybe
| there are other ways to accomplish similar effects. Logging
| gets a bad name, but maybe in _today's_ ecosystem and the
| ecosystem as it will be in future years leaving it up to fire
| to do naturally is longer optimal. We are no longer in the
| garden of eden. Some things do change.
| bawolff wrote:
| I don't see why climate change would affect the positive
| aspects of fire.
|
| Logging generally does not have the same effect (logging
| takes big trees and leave small stuff, fires leave big trees
| and kill small stuff. Also the heat from fire is important
| for the germination of some types of trees)
| chris_va wrote:
| Climate change brings invasive species, so fire behavior
| can be very different (and regrowth post-fire can be very
| different).
| lazide wrote:
| One thing is clear - it is impossible to stop fire in
| these areas. So either it happens on a small scale in a
| semi-controlled fashion, eliminating fuel when it won't
| destroy everything and the like, or it happens
| catastrophically and in a uncontrolled fashion when some
| random event happens - often destroying everything in
| it's path, and sometimes being so intense it sterilizes
| the soil and destroys everything.
|
| So the point you're making is kind of besides the point I
| think?
|
| There is no apparent option where we don't have fire.
| Lightning, utility failure, random people smoking, a
| trailer with a flat tired (that happened), prescribed
| burns - it's inevitable it happens at some point.
| spfzero wrote:
| The article mentions that climate change only has a small
| effect, and that with or without it, natural management works
| to improve forest ecology as well as reduce the impact of
| fires.
| [deleted]
| rurp wrote:
| Logging is such a different process that I can't imagine this
| working well. As one example, certain seeds require extremely
| hot temperatures from forest fires in order to germinate.
| Forest ecosystems are so complex, trying to micro manage them
| is probably impossible.
| almost_usual wrote:
| The fallacy is thinking humans can prevent fire in forests
| forever.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Well, our current choices may be between 2 fallacies.
|
| First one is the one you described, and the second one is
| that given the changes in climate that it's even possible to
| contain these wildfires using mechanical means, such as
| trenches and water drops.
|
| It may not be.
|
| The question then is which one is the lesser evil.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| We have essentially never been in the garden of eden. Humans
| have been shaping the landscapes that they live, hunt, gather
| and farm in for at least 10s of thousands of years.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Loggers make big waste piles and then burn them.
| ip26 wrote:
| Not just about safety but also intensity. Super-hot fires
| sterilize the soil, and total-destruction fires destabilize
| hillsides & dramatically change microclimate (no shade -> hot &
| dry). Both can delay recolonization decades or centuries.
| zz865 wrote:
| Presumably in the meantime its also vulnerable to landslides
| and then coverage by invasive species of plants.
| plant-ian wrote:
| Also frequency. Burning the same area too often will destroy
| seed banks because the plants cannot reach seed maturity fast
| enough to rebuild the bank.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| You didn't actually present this take so I take
| responsibility for how I interpreted it, but...
|
| Why does it seem like this is presented as a bad take? What's
| wrong with ecological changes and corrections taking
| centuries, or longer?
|
| Too often I see environmental advocates wringing their hands
| over changes which absent humanity would be just a chance for
| other subsystems to adapt or related ecology to evolve while
| the initial system rebuilds itself.
|
| Just because humanity "depends" upon the later results or
| effects of these processes (or just because humanity caused
| them) doesn't mean any anything, really.
|
| Consider from the environment's perspective:
|
| This, too, shall pass.
| twinkletwinkle_ wrote:
| The rate of change.
|
| There's a climate science "gotcha" which is that the
| Earth's average temperature has been much higher in the
| past than it is now. No one disputes this. The problem is
| not so much the absolute level as the rate of change, which
| gives less time for everything to adapt.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Thank you, this gives me some perspective regarding
| humanity's effect. I won't claim to understand it all, or
| agree/disagree with it, but it definitely helps me
| account for scale.
| salt-thrower wrote:
| Bingo. Rapid temperature changes of only a few degrees
| can become mass extinction events. Of course, the natural
| world has eventually recovered from every mass extinction
| - but it can take millions of years to get back to the
| same level of biodiversity as before the extinction.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| What is recolonization in this context? Does it just mean
| growth of a new forest?
| throaway3141593 wrote:
| Perhaps a new forest, but plants in general (current
| conditions may favor grassland, or something else). It's
| "re" because there was an ecosystem there before, and now
| it's returning. Contrast with, say, a brand new island that
| is the result of volcanic action. Then it'd be just plain
| old colonization by way of wind-blown seeds, or seeds that
| survived a bird's digestive tract.
| masklinn wrote:
| Well yes and no. If the soil's been sterilised the entire
| thing needs to be rebuilt from the grasses upwards, forests
| don't spring up out of nowhere they build up from
| precursors.
| mandelbrotwurst wrote:
| Thanks, I was imagining the smaller stuff as being part
| of the forest but I suppose maybe the plants that arise
| first don't necessarily stick around for the entirety of
| the forest lifecycle?
| masklinn wrote:
| Exactly. I don't remember the exact cycle but basically
| you first get grass type colonisers, then you might get
| shrubs, then possibly trees densifying to a forest. Even
| the tree presence would change as the forest builds up as
| some essences don't like being crowded (so won't replace
| themselves once the forest densifies) while others prefer
| shade (so won't appear until there's a canopy proper).
| mulmen wrote:
| Are we? Since the 1990s as a school child I thought we already
| came around on this. But in recent years I am hearing that is
| not the case, or that we are only _now_ coming around. Did we
| do a 360?
| maxerickson wrote:
| Traditional nature conservation came around years ago and
| hasn't changed.
|
| Popular conservation, which tends towards absolute
| preservation, has not come around.
| evilduck wrote:
| Communities living next to or within forests also tend to
| prefer we put fires out.
| [deleted]
| TheCondor wrote:
| I think the national park service fully accepted the idea
| that we should let fires burn around the lsat great
| Yellowstone fire, maybe 1990ish.
|
| I don't know that they speak for the US Forest Service
| though. Between the different national level parks and forest
| services and then the state level ones, I wouldn't be at all
| surprised if there are still a lot in the active suppression
| camp. Then there are municipalities where people can
| basically live in the WUI and the idea of preserving only
| structures is further complicated.
| almost_usual wrote:
| It's less about the US Forest Service and more about local
| jurisdictions and smoke from prescribed burns being a
| 'nuisance'.
|
| This talk is by someone who works for the US Forest
| Service.
|
| https://youtu.be/O6Vayv9FCLM
| notatoad wrote:
| We've known since the 60s that letting forests burn is
| healthier for forest ecosystems. But we've known about a lot
| of good environmental practices since the 60s and just
| ignored them.
|
| All it takes is one person building a cabin in the middle of
| a forest, and all of a sudden it's a fire that threatens
| property and can't be allowed to burn. We can let remote
| areas of the national parks burn, but it's going to take a
| lot of political and social change before it becomes
| acceptable to let people's vacation properties burn, Or to
| prevent development of large regions of forest so it can be
| allowed to burn.
| spfzero wrote:
| There are a lot of small private holdings within public
| lands. They should receive some property tax relief, in
| exchange for understanding that the forest around them is
| going to be managed naturally.
|
| That doesn't mean that their property won't be defended as
| much as possible, just that stopping the entire fire itself
| won't be the goal.
| texuf wrote:
| The way I've heard it described is that other priorities that
| are also important, like spare the air days or budget
| concerns, kinda edged out control burns in the recent past.
| mulmen wrote:
| Yeah I have heard the same. And it makes sense with
| communities burning. They will always be the hardest places
| to coordinate controlled burns because of the concentration
| of interests.
|
| It would be interesting to correlate forestry management
| practices and population density.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Perhaps we just need constant awareness. Smokey Bear's
| website also includes a small section regarding the Benefits
| of Fire: https://smokeybear.com/en/about-wildland-
| fire/benefits-of-fi...
|
| The Longleaf Pine episode on Smarter Every Day was also
| educational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJWG7raBlT8
| walkedaway wrote:
| "Only you can prevent forest fires" lays the wrong mindset
| that humans are the only causes of forest fires. I grew up
| with that mindset, took some education to realize that nature
| (lightning) creates fires as well, and that fires have
| occurred throughout history for the benefit of the ecosystem.
| mulmen wrote:
| Exactly. Said another way, since fire is inevitable the
| ecosystem adapted to it, and the species that survived are
| those that actually _benefit_ from it.
| tclancy wrote:
| I think it varies by region at this point.
| https://www.outsideonline.com/podcast/future-fire/
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Yeah I learned about this forever ago, but as usual, its
| money that talks. People don't like their houses burned, and
| so fire suppression policy is dominant. Only now that we are
| having super-fires that people are opening up to it.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Wildfire management organizations' budgets have been so
| skewed to remedial action from preventative that indigenous
| "Cultural Burners" in British Columbia have complained that
| when they've sought agreement to do controlled burns in
| spring and autumn they are met with plans for batteries of
| firefighting equipment on standby. It is a colossal
| mismatch of scale, since the Cultural burners tend to limit
| their focus on their own local, ancestral territories.
| Thankfully the B.C. authorities are now doing a rethink in
| favour of the Cultural burner concept.
| olivermarks wrote:
| Academic environmentalists have a lot to answer for imo
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/wildfire-pre...
| curuinor wrote:
| the academic environmentalists have been advocating for the
| controlled burns for half a century now - the folks you wanna
| be pissed off at are the homeowners
| olivermarks wrote:
| Not what I've experienced at all, in fact quite the opposite.
| davidw wrote:
| > For millennia, wildfires sparked by lightning, or lit by Native
| American tribes, regularly shaped the landscape of the western
| U.S.
|
| It'd be interesting to learn more about the differences between
| the two. There are places that don't get a lot of lightning and
| would probably not burn that regularly on their own. So in those
| places a truly 'natural' state would look different from a
| 'managed by native peoples' state.
| smallerfish wrote:
| The early european colonists & explorers reported vast pristine
| forests covering the land. There's some evidence to suggest
| that these were very recent second growth, the diseases from
| the europeans having wiped out 50-90% of the native american
| population, and having spread much faster through the continent
| than the europeans did. Without the native americans
| maintaining the land with controlled burns and rotations,
| forests quickly regrew over their pastures and plains. Of
| course, by the late 1700s, colonists were themselves clearing
| forests and converting them to farmland.
| lazide wrote:
| Pretty much all of California matches this description.
| Lightning, outside of a few areas, is rare. Precipitation
| varies heavily, from short but wet winters to months of zero
| precipitation.
|
| When europeans arrived, the state had regular fall wildfires
| (smoke was constant during this time) from natives setting
| regular fires to burn out undesirable plants and keep things
| useful for them. In Yosemite for instance, this allowed the
| land to support them with acorns from the black oaks there.
| Trees were monstrously huge compared to areas now, and
| relatively sparse and manageable. No known mega fires, although
| it probably still happened from time to time.
|
| Now in most areas, it's tangled brush and super dense and
| diseased trees (or just tangled brush where it is too dry for
| trees), with large scale mega fires and tree mortality due to
| disease.
|
| Cutting down the old growth didn't help of course - but even in
| places where trees have regained nearly the same sizes or were
| kept intact, the brush growth is a big problem. It's natural
| for regrown forests to be dense, and the weaker trees die as
| they get crowded out. It isn't normal for nearly every forest
| to be doing this all at the same time in a region due to
| suppression of the fires that normally clean out the junk
| and/or reset the clock in small areas.
|
| Big Basin state park for instance was not logged, and it burned
| to the ground during the CZU complex fires due to all the built
| up fuel. If burned every year, it would have died out before
| being able to do much if any damage.
| [deleted]
| robbedpeter wrote:
| Where does evidence of tribes starting burns for plant
| management come from? All I've ever heard of is fires used in
| hunting and buffalo runs/ jumps. Anything beyond that implies
| a level of sophistication in planning and environmental
| knowledge that seems far fetched at best.
| soperj wrote:
| They literally domesticated many of the fruits and
| vegetables that feed you. Corn, Tomatoes, Peppers, Avocado,
| Beans, Cocoa, Peanuts, Potatoes, Squash, Quinoa, Sweet
| Potato, list goes on... Clearly had a lot of info on plant
| management.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| It shocked me when I learned a couple of years ago that
| common vegetables like potatoes actually originated in
| the Americas. I always thought of them as European foods
| because of their popularity there and stuff like the
| Irish potatoe famine.
|
| I do remember learning in elementary school how the
| natives would plant plants in groups (tall corn shading
| shorter plants like squash and beans that don't need as
| much sunlight and to keep away weeds, etc.). But somehow
| I never connected that these were fundamentally American
| foods.
| lazide wrote:
| They weren't dumb? And even if they were, it doesn't take a
| genius to notice that where fires have been the land is
| more accessible, and certain plants and animals thrive -
| and where a fire hasn't been for awhile the opposite
| happens
|
| Here is the National Park Service page, but there are
| hundreds of papers on it I'm sure
| [https://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/nature/firehistory.htm].
| There is extensive archaeological evidence of frequent
| small scale fires in the Sierras.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| Here you go: https://www.sierraforestlegacy.org/Resources/C
| onservation/Fi...
|
| There are many other sources as well but this can get you
| started.
|
| It's a mistake to underestimate the sophistication of other
| civilizations. Native Americans depended on the forests and
| grasslands for food. They were very well-informed in
| matters of land management. The US Forest Service and other
| have begun (belatedly) to try to understand and incorporate
| these practices in their own forest management.
| [deleted]
| salt-thrower wrote:
| It only seems far fetched if you have a preconceived idea
| of Native peoples being uneducated simpletons, which
| unfortunately is the prevailing myth. They did indeed have
| environmental knowledge and planning abilities that allowed
| them to prosper in a completely different model of land
| management than what we think of today.
|
| The Wiki article about Native fire management cites a
| variety of reputable sources. It's a good read: https://en.
| wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_use_of_fire_in...
| cf100clunk wrote:
| This site offers a Global Lightning Map of events in progress:
|
| https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=oss;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=;...
|
| I don't know of a resource that overlays histories of such
| events with indigenous cultural burning activities, but maybe
| the data is out there somewhere.
| amacneil wrote:
| You might find this book interesting - Native American
| management of land via fire is a central theme:
|
| Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management
| of California's Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson
| cf100clunk wrote:
| The topic of "cultural burning" is now being taken very
| seriously amongst non-indigenous wildfire response
| organizations worldwide:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28087406
|
| Smokey The Bear needs to be retired.
| tclancy wrote:
| Well, I dunno about Smokey. Here's there to remind people
| drinking around a campfire to be careful about it. I can't
| imagine people sitting around a campfire drinking is a recipe
| for controlled, limited burns.
| jefftechentin wrote:
| > the current fuel density in much of the Sierra, mixed with the
| hotter, drier conditions already triggered by climate change, has
| made managing wildfire even riskier than it was when forest
| managers started allowing fires to burn in Yosemite in 1972.
|
| So if fire fighters and politicians do not want to start a burn
| policy now that there is so much fuel, why not log an area for a
| while then start burning? Is there something I am missing about
| the nature of the problem?
| spfzero wrote:
| Logging takes the healthiest and largest trees. The ones most
| likely to survive a fire. While leaving behind all of the fuel.
| Doesn't seem like it would help much.
| fiftyfifty wrote:
| Prescribed burns are probably a better tool:
|
| https://www.fs.usda.gov/managing-land/prescribed-fire
|
| Doing prescribed burns outside of the normal fire season allows
| them to reduce the fuel load and restore more natural
| conditions without the risk of creating giant runaway fires.
| geekles wrote:
| They should have been doing this, but California is currently
| mis-governed.
| aplummer wrote:
| Seriously, California does this
| https://ssl.arb.ca.gov/pfirs/cb3/cb3.php?id=16
|
| In the middle of a drought it's mostly too dangerous even
| in winter. To an extent it's also a pollution issue.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Most of the Californian land in question is owned and
| managed by the federal government. See eg. this map of land
| ownership in CA - green, orange, and pink are various
| federal agencies, while brown is CA state/county lands and
| yellow is private:
|
| https://ucanr.edu/sites/forestry/California_forests/
|
| Land management in the west is different from the east. On
| the east coast almost everything is private, then divided
| up into municipal, county, and state governments. In the
| West large chunks of land are still owned by the federal
| government. Private ownership under state authority is only
| about 40% in CA and less than 20% in NV.
| amalcon wrote:
| California is not the problem here. A policy of controlled
| burns is not tenable anywhere in the United States right
| now, because we've spent so long fighting wildfires in
| order to protect the logging industry. The problem is that
| we've had almost eighty years of Smokey Bear telling people
| that wildfires are always bad.
|
| It took the catastrophic Yellowstone fires of 1988 to even
| make the current Yellowstone policy possible. That policy
| is to allow a naturally caused fire to continue until it
| threatens humans or buildings, but to stamp out human
| caused fires with extreme prejudice. This obviously makes
| no sense -- the forest does not care a bit whether the fire
| was started by a lightning strike or by a campfire -- but
| it's the only thing that is politically tenable.
|
| Yellowstone is mostly in Wyoming. It's not a California
| problem; the problem is a national population that's been
| misled about what constitutes good forest management. We
| need controlled burns, building bans in large areas of
| forest, and judicious use of eminent domain to purchase
| properties in forest areas so that they can be permitted to
| burn.
| jartelt wrote:
| Much of the forest in CA is managed by the US Forest
| Service, so you can't blame CA officials for everything.
| Plus, you can only safely do controlled burns in certain
| weather windows (not super hot, rain likely coming, etc.).
| Given we are in the middle of a historic drought, the dry
| fuel levels are likely much too high to safely start
| controlled burns.
| yencabulator wrote:
| Almost all of the relevant land is federal.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Logging is only one tool in the big preventative wildfire kit,
| and is quite difficult if not impossible in many geographic
| areas.
| laurent92 wrote:
| And controlled burns, like the Aboriginals did in Australia
| until they were forbidden 10 years ago.
| cf100clunk wrote:
| Indigenous cultural burning is now gaining a resurgence in
| Australia and Canada. It is about time.
| kaikai wrote:
| Logging increases fire risk in the short term, because it
| leaves behind a lot of slash fuels and stimulated brushy
| undergrowth. It is not analogous to a burn.
| mwint wrote:
| Could we place some requirements on the logging companies to
| leave the ground in a certain state? Or would hauling off the
| undesirable material make logging unprofitable?
| salt-thrower wrote:
| You'd likely run into the same problem of politicians and
| local companies lobbying against such a rule, in the name
| of "don't hurt businesses" etc.
| pacifist wrote:
| This needs to change.
| frozenlettuce wrote:
| I love the effort on spinning "wildfires" as a good thing - even
| calling them "wildfires" hides the human factor behind them. If a
| fire happens on North America on Europe, it's a "wildfire", if it
| happens on a developing country in the southern hemisphere, it's
| a reason for international intervention. (I'm not claming that
| the former form of fire is good, but the hipocrisy on this is
| huge)
| space_fountain wrote:
| Different places have different expected rates of fire. Some
| fire is natural and expected in many ecosystems. This article
| is basically arguing that the ecosystems in the west would be
| healthier with more frequent smaller fires, that is
| dramatically different than the intentional burning to clear
| agricultural land that's happening in south america. No one's
| saying the massive hot fires happening in CA now are healthy
| and good
| mastax wrote:
| Additionally, there's a difference between a burned area
| being allowed to regrow, and a burned area being plowed and
| replaced with soybeans.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| There is international intervention in wildfires in North
| America and Europe _every year_. You don 't hear about it
| because it's boring that rich countries work together.
| eidyeydedieyude wrote:
| The vegetation native to the western portion of the north
| american continent is adapted to fire. It's a necessary part of
| the natural life-cycle of many plants.
|
| https://www.coastal.ca.gov/fire/ucsbfire.html
|
| https://www.nps.gov/articles/wildland-fire-lodgepole-pine.ht...
| systemvoltage wrote:
| > "I think climate change is no more than 20 to 25% responsible
| for our current fire problems in the state, and most of it is due
| to the way our forests are," Stephens said.
|
| Directly in contrast with Gavin Newsom vs. Trump argument last
| year. I'm not aligned with Trump _at all_ , but I have qualms
| about how we as liberals are easily strapped down by the media.
| Trump said "Mostly due to forest mismanagement" while Newsom said
| "With all due respect, Climate Change is the _fundamental reason_
| for forest fires". I clearly remember how the _entire_ media
| pounced on Trump. Not good.
|
| We ought to isolate character from facts. If you challenged
| Newsom in any way last year, you would have been labeled a right-
| wing Trumper instantly.
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| This topic is one of the first ones that really took liberal
| academia down a few notches in my eyes.
|
| I grew up with a national forest as my backyard, and my
| grandfather was a logger in the area in the 70s. When I was a
| teenager, he and a bunch of old timers, including the Native
| American ones, were complaining about the forest management
| policies. They literally begged them to allow more thinning of
| the forest, more and larger control burns, etc.
|
| The out of town forest service (etc) PhDs all had a ton of
| reasons why they were wrong, and ignored their advice. At the
| time, I though the old timers just werent hip to science, were
| being curmudgeonly as old timers tend to be, and surely the PhD
| environmentalists knew what was what.
|
| Then, the pine beetle infestation hit, and they could not keep
| up with the needed thinning... and a few years after I left,
| boom, two ~500k acre fires hit, and it was absolutely
| devastating to the forest.
|
| At that point, I had learned how to read scientific papers, and
| started going back and looking at some of the justification
| papers for some of the policies (including wolf reintro) and I
| was astonished at how shoddy and poor the science was from
| these liberal academics.
|
| Not only was the science bad, but they essentially would
| ridicule the locals as a dumb redneck stereotype, given that
| the forest service etc would often cycle in people from across
| the country.
|
| The fires taught me that there is a lot of bad science out
| there, and that the term is often used as a cudgel against the
| lesser educated, so I can emphatically say, despite not being
| pro-Trump at all, that he was right on that one occasion. I
| said the same thing here when it happened and it spurred some
| decent discussion.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It gets a little more nuanced than that; if you want to blame
| forest management, you have to tackle the fact that the
| majority of California's forest is _Federally_ owned.
|
| Quibbling over the degree of culpability and denying the
| existence of climate change entirely - remember, in that
| exchange, Trump said he thought it'd be getting cooler soon -
| are not the same, either.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I didn't see this kind nuanced discussion last year - which
| is my point.
|
| Trump has said some of the most egregious things about
| climate change. I just see those orthogonal to this
| particular incident. I don't think Trump was blaming
| California for it, he was blaming forest mismanagement
| whether federal or state.
|
| Anyhow, I've become extremely suspicious of any traditional
| media or social media driven story these days - the more
| people are aboard, the less I am inclined to believe because
| the machinery for argument no longer exists. Media has a
| conflict of interest with engagement metrics.
|
| Allow space for counter arguments and discussion.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Oh right, Trump was in no way trying to lay blame off on
| California.
|
| "Maybe we're just going to have to make them pay for it
| because they don't listen to us," he added. "I've been
| telling them this now for three years, but they don't want
| to listen," Trump said on Thursday.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Can we critize them both? I mean, Trump could be 100%
| wrong and it still doesn't change what Newsom said which
| was also politically motivated. Newsom was with leaders
| of Forest management agencies and yet wildly exaggerated
| claims that CC is the reason for forest fires.
| 50 wrote:
| Only life is renewable, technology cannot and will not save us.
| mbgerring wrote:
| M. Kat Anderson's _Tending The Wild_ details how the Yosemite
| indians warned Congress more than a century ago that it was a
| mistake to suppress fires in the national park and allow brush to
| build up on the forest floor. I can 't find the exact passage,
| but the entire book is worth reading.
|
| https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520280434/tending-the-wild
| peanut_worm wrote:
| Here in Florida, prescribed burns are a common sight at the
| larger state parks. The burns are required to keep longleaf pine
| trees alive which support a lot of species of animals. Red-
| cockaded Woodpeckers in particular are very picky and prefer to
| live in these trees.
|
| The burns kill all the competing vegetation and burns up some of
| the fuel in the area to prevent larger fires.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| I've always found that the concept of natural parks was turned on
| its head. We basically allow human economic activities everywhere
| it's physical possible, except in natural parks. It should be the
| opposite. All of the world's landmasses should be designated as
| natural parks, except for specially designated "human development
| areas".
|
| Let's stop trying to preserve patches of the natural world. Let's
| start constraining human development in space.
| [deleted]
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Your last point confuses me. The Earth is finite, and space is
| so big we don't even know if it _is_ finite.
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| By space I mean terrestrial space, not outer space.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Is that you Char Aznable?
| aaaxyz wrote:
| That's how it's supposed to work in Canada. Most of the land is
| crown land managed by the government who should carefully
| manage it but in practice lease it to anyone as long as it
| brings in money.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I wish some of the people who down vote this could explain more
| why. Is it just that they don't like the idea of valuing other
| life on this planet that highly or that it's not politically
| feasible because humans are so human-focused?
| [deleted]
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well, it's a nice vision. But we have 7 billion people now.
| How many of them fit into that vision? Sure, I know, we could
| fit them all in Texas, but could we also feed them? Provide
| them with computers? And everything else?
|
| So I think it's being downvoted because it would be anti-
| human in some concrete ways. I like nature, but how many
| people are we willing to let starve to preserve nature? How
| many are we willing to condemn to a life of no economic
| opportunity?
|
| The proposal sounds good, but the actual practicalities of it
| are going to cause a lot of human misery, and even death.
| Fine-sounding "let's do this" proposals that have high human
| costs tend to get downvotes, since the voters are humans.
| space_fountain wrote:
| I did not downvote, but while I too saw this article and
| thought that we should concentrate population more to allow
| more nature to be unmanaged, there's also just something
| incredible impractical about that. Humans aren't just a
| thinly spread collections of houses, farms, water supplies,
| electric transmission need to cover a vast area of earth if
| we're to keep something like our current quality of life and
| honestly I do value humans above all else. I'd go almost as
| far as to say all value flows from people. Nature doesn't I
| think have intrinsic value. Maybe some of the animals that
| live in it, but certainly not the plants and insects.
| 01100011 wrote:
| > "I think climate change is no more than 20 to 25% responsible
| for our current fire problems in the state, and most of it is due
| to the way our forests are,"
|
| It's refreshing to hear that. Human driven climate change is real
| and I'm not denying it, but we have to understand CA's climate
| for what it is.
|
| CA plants are uniquely adapted to fire and they serve as a
| testament to the history of fires in CA. Las Pilitas Nursery,
| which specializes in CA natives, has a nice writeup here:
| https://www.laspilitas.com/advanced/advecology.htm
|
| I find it especially interesting how the droughts typically
| preceding a fire suppress herbivore levels so that post-fire
| seedlings are protected from predators. It's really amazing how
| our ecosystem has adapted to the challenges of our historical
| climate.
| sorethescore wrote:
| 20-25% is an awful lot of influence though. 6 of the last 7
| largest fires in recorded California history have been in the
| last 2 years. That wouldn't be the case if fires were 20-25%
| smaller and less frequent.
| CountDrewku wrote:
| Yep here in CO when I go hiking there are layers and layers of
| downed trees waiting to be lit up like a tinderbox. It WILL
| start on fire, this isn't going to be stopped. The trees aren't
| piling up from climate change, it's from years of stopping
| fires. Unfortunately, now there's going to be a massive fire at
| some point instead of small recurring fires like there should
| be.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I wish the article was desensationalized a bit, but from what's
| written it's a pretty encouraging experiment.
|
| I think the most important part is the virutuous combination that
| comes from allowing regular small fires to burn to help remove
| the conditions and prevent the catastrophes of the huge fires
| we've seen that come about because of the buildup of fuel debris,
| while at the same time providing the different ecological niches
| to reoccur side-by-side, the grasslands, meadows, shrubs, etc.
| instead of just a forest canopy.
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