[HN Gopher] Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations ...
___________________________________________________________________
Controlled burns can prevent wildfires; regulations make them
nearly impossible
Author : mooreds
Score : 365 points
Date : 2023-05-17 15:30 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (boulderbeat.news)
(TXT) w3m dump (boulderbeat.news)
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Sounds like this is the issue:
|
| > "Also included in the prescription are optimal weather
| conditions, including a minimum temperature for burns in grass
| and brush of 30 degrees and a maximum of 80 degrees; relative
| humidity between 5% and 40%; and wind speed between 2 mph and 15
| mph. Such conditions are becoming rarer."
|
| If you broaden the acceptable range of conditions, you risk more
| prescribed burns going out of control, and you generate more air
| quality issues - and Colorado, like the California Central
| Valley, has some pretty bad air quality already:
|
| https://www.cpr.org/2022/04/12/front-range-air-quality-ozone...
|
| Note that prescribed fires aren't the only way of removing excess
| vegetation, there's mechanized mowing and goat herds for example.
| petsfed wrote:
| >Note that prescribed fires aren't the only way of removing
| excess vegetation, there's mechanized mowing and goat herds for
| example.
|
| Which works fine for the areas east of the Flatirons (that is,
| the plains), but that's only half the county. A real problem
| for wildfire management is that they often happen in areas that
| we consider undevelopable, which is to say, difficult to get
| into and out of.
|
| I recall going climbing in Boulder Canyon some decades ago,
| looking up at some burn scars and thinking "it would be several
| hundred feet of technical climbing to even reach where that
| fire occurred". Fighting it would be simply out of the
| question, and prevention without controlled burns would be just
| as difficult.
| tikkun wrote:
| I like controlled burns as an analogy, too.
|
| The US economy needed more controlled burns and small "fires" -
| eg restricting spending back a long time ago when that could've
| been done without major consequences, unlike now.
|
| Similarly, as a parent, allowing your child to experience small
| failures so that they are less at risk of big failures.
|
| Small failures that don't cause ruin = increased strength.
| Reminds me of the antifragility concepts.
| agentultra wrote:
| Along the North Eastern coastal regions of North America the
| predominant biome before European settlers began colonizing the
| region in earnest was the _oak savanna_ : an ecological system
| dependent on fires. After those settlers arrived they took steps
| to prevent those fires from affecting their towns and
| inadvertently by clearing land for farming. The result are
| forests that are choked with under brush, mass migrations of
| animals, the spread of parasitic insects, etc. Completely changed
| the character of the region.
| hedgehog wrote:
| I spent some time talking about this with a family member that
| works in forestry. My takeaway was that the core issues are 1)
| it's labor intensive and expensive to manage the burns, beyond
| what we have budget for now, 2) there's a liability+harm issue to
| work through (e.g. when a burn will necessarily put a lot of
| smoke into an inhabited area how do you manage that), and 3) the
| combination of climate change and many years of fire suppression
| mean that doing the burns safely is harder than it was say 50
| years ago. It's really a political issue, that is to get broad
| support to spend more and have worse quality of life for a while
| in order to get the situation under control and in much better
| shape a decade down the line. Tough sell.
| dmfdmf wrote:
| Way back in the 90's in college I took some elective class (I
| forget the topic) and the prof had a lecture on how controlled
| burns prevent wildfires. He also said that govt policy was
| already limiting controlled burns even then and he predicted that
| in 20 years, unless the policies changed, that we'd be having
| giant wildfires and here we are.
| fwungy wrote:
| Try cutting down trees on your forested property in California.
| Environmental regulations can make that really tricky.
|
| California should have regular wildfires. It's part of the
| ecosystem. Government regulations that prevent fires have created
| the tinder box we have now.
| foxyv wrote:
| I think the most frustrating aspect of California is the
| capricious interpretation of laws. There isn't a clear way to
| ensure compliance. Louis Rossmann did a pretty good job
| demonstrating a similar issue with New York and the LeadsOnline
| reporting requirements. Often the people responsible for
| enforcing the laws, don't even know what the laws are and will
| often err on the side of fining people.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi8_9WGk3Ok&pp=ygUjbG91aXMgc...
| sosodev wrote:
| Living in Southern California is frustrating in that way. It's
| obvious that the plants here are adapted for regular fires. The
| native people of this area knew the importance of controlled
| burns and had incorporated them into their tradition. They
| likely were doing controlled burns for thousands of years
| before their lives were disrupted.
| foxyv wrote:
| I wonder how much of the wildfires are caused by lack of
| wildlife. The city I grew up in used livestock to manage brush
| every year. There were herds of goats and sheep that would go
| through in the spring and summer to make sure that brush growth
| was trimmed to the roots.
|
| I wonder if we stopped killing wildlife wholesale if we would see
| reductions in this overgrowth. Although I wonder if any native
| species would be able to handle the insane numbers of Russian
| Thistle/Tumbleweeds.
| ListenLinda wrote:
| A few years back CA had serious wild fire issues. PG&E was just
| the scapegoat. There are multiple factors but the main issue is
| that it's nearly impossible to get the environmental
| documentation (Environmental Impact Statements or EISs) prepared
| and approved for prescribed burns on federal land due to legal
| challenges from environmental groups that really have no idea
| what they are doing.
|
| The system is broken.
| thecosas wrote:
| Original article on ProPublica:
| https://www.propublica.org/article/colorado-wildfires-contro...
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| Reading the actual article, it seems like the problem isn't
| regulation, it is complaints from locals.
| wcarron wrote:
| Here in Flagstaff and NAZ we've been getting hit hard by huge
| wildfires. The amount of fuel in these forests is mindblowing,
| and terrain is often a big challenge, too.
|
| Luckily, we had a heavy monsoon season last year and a brutal
| winter. So much water that roads/levees have broken and lakes
| that are normally dry beds were overflowing. This has abated the
| normally horrible winds of April/May. This wet and abnormally
| calm weather has allowed for some action and I'm beyond pleased
| to have seen numerous prescribed burns in the forests around town
| this year. I really hope they can keep it up and treat a few
| thousand more acres before conditions turn.
|
| The forest service seems like it does a good job here with fuel
| and flood management. There are still pockets of land that are
| _wayyyy_ overladen /undertreated but much of the area, especially
| near town has been treated with thinning and slash and burn
| piles.
|
| Unfortunately, the logging industry here is deteriorating and one
| of the longest-running operators closed shop. A few factors
| contributed to this, including the failure to open an OSB plant
| in Winslow, and the closure of a local mill just before the turn
| of the millenium. A damn shame, as logging ops really bolster the
| ability of the FS to manage fires.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Interestingly enough, a large water event before doesn't mean a
| mild fire season.
|
| In more northern areas, a lot of snow and water means a lot of
| grass, and that grass will dry out by August.
|
| It's not kindling, but it's the paper.
| wcarron wrote:
| Yeah, we're all pretty concerned about that. We'll see if we
| get another heavy monsoon season to dampen the potential for
| big fires midsummer. Fingers crossed.
|
| Unfortunately, we've got a bunch of events coming up that are
| going to draw big numbers of off-roaders and 'overlanders'
| who are, imo, some of the worst and least responsible
| recreators. Some of us are bracing for fires being started by
| them.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Just this week, there was a post here about an invasive plant
| in the Sonoma desert that has taken off this season because
| of the extra rain, and this is one of their concerns outside
| of it being invasive. It's just going to be fuel for any
| fires that might start.
| variant wrote:
| Far bigger contributor to wildfires than "climate change."
| pvaldes wrote:
| We should put in the air as many CO2 as possible, yep. What could
| go wrong?. This valuable fertile soil that need 200 years to
| build and all the CO2 accumulated must be released... because
| religious thinking.
|
| Or we could try something different and jail the arsonists.
| Respect the soil and let the forest accumulate water and include
| thousands of new species.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Make no mistake about just how much money is involved here.
|
| I got to work on a helicopter used for fire. It was a 1980s
| French something or another. It took an RPG in Afganistan and was
| refurbed to live in the pacific northwest.
|
| The crew makes an insane amount of money. They are tickled with
| how many fires there are a year and how they "have" to be put
| out. I'm talking areas so far away from houses that it takes an
| hour to get there by helo, dump a few buckets, then an hour back.
| MAYBE in a 9 hour shift you get 12 buckets dumped.
|
| This vehicle has only one turbine engine and goes through about
| 300 gallons an hour. There were two blackhawks in the same area
| that burn twice that, two engines.
|
| Think of the money to make it not only profitable, but
| exceptionally so, to run vehicles that burn 300 gallons an hour
| for 8-12 hours a day, per helo, per engine, with crew, and the
| millions it costs to upkeep, cert, logistics, insurance, etc.
|
| This is business now. And that's just one annecdote about helos.
| When you see people and machinery it takes to run firecrews, it's
| a wonder there aren't even more firecrew arsonists than there
| already are.
| porkbeer wrote:
| Many plants also need fires to repopulate. Its a huge issue.
| goda90 wrote:
| Or they need fire to kill off trees that shade them out.
| undersuit wrote:
| Ahh but replacing old growth forest with burnt out scrub land
| is not what we necessarily want. Old trees dying and falling
| naturally creates openings in the canopy to permit new growth
| without resetting the forest to a grassland like a forest
| fire would do.
|
| A prescribed burn should burn out annual plant growth and
| leaf litter not perennial plant trunks.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Pine barrens, and specifically the short leaf pine.
|
| https://www.fs.usda.gov/features/shortleaf-pine-future-requi...
|
| And if you're into delicious mushrooms, Morels.
| masklinn wrote:
| Unless it's eucalypts, then they'll eventually get it don't you
| worry.
| grumpy-de-sre wrote:
| Australia's revenge for all the invasive species.
| anonporridge wrote:
| This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system.
|
| When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists,
| we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability
| for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the
| negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what
| would happen doing nothing.
|
| We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause
| unintended damage and harm, there's a person to institution to
| blame, so no one wants to take on that liability. So instead, we
| let brush grow out of control and eventually a mega fire hits
| that creates orders of magnitude more destruction and health
| hazard than the sum of all prescribed burns ever would have.
|
| Another example is medical treatment. If you develop cancer and
| die because you get no treatment, there's no person to blame and
| no one to sue. It's just an "act of god" so people accept the
| outcome and move on. But if you get treatment and the doctors
| make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then
| there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical
| outcome was drastically improved by their intervention.
|
| The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate
| change. Positive actions to reverse the problem _will_ create
| negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing
| will be drastically worse.
|
| I don't know how we solve this problem. To me, the root of the
| problem seems to be a weakness of the constitution of our society
| and/or leaders.
|
| Collectively, we need to figure out how to balance diffuse
| statistical risk against acute, dramatic risk, or else we all
| risk being the frog slowly boiled alive.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal
| system.
|
| I feel that this better illustrates the downsides of
| centralized power: centralized decision making won't be as
| efficient as decision making done at the nodes, closer to the
| actual problem because of missing context and data; and maybe
| even indifference
|
| For the record, I am not saying that there are no benefits to
| centralized planning and control. This is just one of its
| weaknesses besides corruption
| ncallaway wrote:
| I think this is a good diagnosis of some of our issues, but
| it's a really hard problem.
|
| When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people,
| we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall...
| extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to
| bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those
| harms.
|
| I think, as the other poster noted it really comes down to the
| individualistic nature in which we try and address some of
| these collective action problems. We need to acknowledge that
| the solutions will cause less overall harm than not
| implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the
| solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the
| damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on
| the powerless.
| wswope wrote:
| Totally agreed. I was 100% in the pro-controlled-burn camp
| until I happened to stumble upon the consequences of rubber
| hitting the road.
|
| A few months back I was visiting family in New Mexico and
| chatting with some locals. I asked offhandedly about if they
| did controlled burns out where we were... and boy did I
| immediately realize it was a sore subject. Last year, the US
| Forest Service set off the biggest wildfires in the state's
| history doing controlled burns, by irresponsibly starting
| them in the windy season and not monitoring appropriately.
|
| "Only" a hundred or so homes were destroyed, but imagine if
| the federal government were to burn down your home,
| livestock, and property only to abdicate any responsibility
| and fail to have any modicum of transparency or
| accountability. The nominal monetary damages do not nearly
| capture the social harm caused by the incident, and there's
| been little trace of accountability when it comes to the
| policy makers who approved the burn, living thousands of
| miles away and suffering none of the impact.
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-mexico-wildfire-
| prescribed-...
|
| https://www.fs.usda.gov/news/releases/statement-chief-
| randy-...
| samtho wrote:
| This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You
| said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS.
| If anything this should highlight the importance of doing
| controlled burns so that there is minimal chance of these
| raging infernos cropping up. Rather than blaming the burn,
| maybe people need to be held responsible instead.
| XorNot wrote:
| > Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be
| held responsible instead.
|
| Wherein you've created the same problem in the opposite
| direction. Who's going to volunteer to do controlled
| burns if they can be held personally liable for failures?
|
| Starting from "prove you didn't cause the problem" with
| such a dynamic and hard to control activity is setting up
| the same issue.
| wswope wrote:
| Agreed; I don't mean to imply I'm firmly against
| controlled burns now.
|
| I am disenchanted with our current system for executing
| them in the US, however. Like you say, we need a system
| for accountability to deal with the externalities.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm
| people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms
| to fall... extremely disproportionately on those with the
| least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be
| compensated for those harms.
|
| I don't think this is true, or at least it is nonobvious. Are
| prescribed-burns-gone-wrong _more likely_ to harm the most
| vulnerable, as compared to unprescribed burns? If not, then
| this objection doesn 't really apply.
| evo wrote:
| I suspect that they would, if for no other reason that if
| the direct action is indiscriminate in whom it harms, then
| the well-heeled will have the resources necessary to seek
| compensation via litigation while the marginalized will be
| out of luck.
| somenameforme wrote:
| In general I'd be in agreement with you, but I think this
| is one case where the typical argument is quite clearly
| true. I've lived in regions with slash and burn
| agriculture, which uses seasonal controlled burns. It is
| horrible. Air quality levels spike into the hundreds for a
| period of weeks to months, depending on the specifics of
| the season. It's difficult to tolerate in my hoity toity
| life with indoor work, air conditioning, and multiple air
| purifiers [barely] managing to keep the air breathable.
|
| At the same time this is happening, there are countless
| people working outdoors or in other sorts of conditions
| where they don't have such luxuries. And the cost is masked
| because, somewhat like smoking, many of the consequences
| happen over many years if not decades. And even when you do
| hit a climax, it may be argued that the bad air
| contributed, but did not provably cause, e.g. some
| cardiovascular event.
|
| Of course, if you don't burn - then a lightning strike, or
| a firebug, means you're going to _really_ burn. Clearly we
| need an army of sheep. Gah, then people would complain
| about the methane and massive marbled mutton fests. Cripes
| things are tricky.
| vkou wrote:
| > I don't think this is true, or at least it is nonobvious.
|
| Texas capped medical malpractice damages, because surely,
| all the frivilous lawsuits were the reason for driving up
| medical costs. This resulted in gems like this guy maiming
| dozens of people[1].
|
| You couldn't sue him, because lawyers aren't going to front
| their own money to take on a case like this, when the
| likely awards will exceed legal costs. Hospitals wouldn't
| fire him, because he'd sue them, and because they get a
| share of the business he brings in. Other surgeons couldn't
| pooh-pooh him, because he'd sue them.
|
| Presumably, if he maimed someone who had enough out-of-
| pocket money to pay a lawyer, and then vindictively pursue
| litigation against him, this could have been resolved
| earlier. That's a lot of 'if's. In practice, he just...
| Kept on maiming people, shielded by protection from
| financial liability.
|
| [1] https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2016/
| novem...
| ummonk wrote:
| Another example is how many people advocated for (and how many
| countries essentially adopted) letting covid spread throughout
| the population (either like wildfire or via "flatten the
| curve") to get natural herd immunity because letting a poorly
| understood (but known to be quite deadly) virus spread through
| the population was doable but giving out vaccines that hadn't
| been through phase 2 trials wasn't.
| goatlover wrote:
| Was preventing the spread of covid throughout the population
| possible once China failed to contain the virus? Can you name
| one country that managed to do that? Even China eventually
| gave up.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Was preventing the spread of covid throughout the
| population possible once China failed to contain the
| virus?_
|
| It's not about _preventing_ the spread, but about
| _controlling the rate_ so that hospitals don 't / didn't
| get overwhelmed.
|
| One of the early countries to get hit was Italy, and the
| army had to be called in to help with the logistics of
| taking away the body bags / coffins. A year after the
| pandemic started there were still refrigeration trucks
| outside of some morgues because of capacity issues:
|
| * https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/07/us/new-york-coronavirus-
| victi...
|
| Everyone on the planet will _eventually_ probably get
| COVID, but as long as it 's not at the same time, there are
| chances for treatment for those more heavily effected (some
| folks are fortunate enough that it's no worse than the flu;
| others suffer for months (e.g., Physics Girl)).
| goatlover wrote:
| Yeah I was responding the comment that said it was
| possible to prevent the spread, not control the rate
| which most countries did to varying degrees of success.
| ummonk wrote:
| China was one of many Asian countries that prevented the
| spread until they had widespread vaccination available. Now
| thanks to a culture of filial piety and a particularly
| stubborn set of boomer elderly, China failed to achieve
| anywhere close to universal vaccination / boosting of its
| most vulnerable, but that wasn't due to failure to stop the
| spread.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Yes, it was possible, but like all collective action
| problems it involves people organizing for the general good
| at a cost to themselves.
|
| Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks),
| distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices
| _edit to add, because I forgot - for two months_ , and a
| few with immune compromises spending some more months
| isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all
| contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped
| this single one from spreading.
|
| But it's not going to happen because a significant fraction
| of the population: 1) don't care (either from the get go or
| after a period of time), 2) think spreading the disease is
| a positive ('builds immunity'), or 3) make 'statistical
| decisions' that fail at points.
|
| Edit to add: I hope the downvotes are because I forgot to
| add the "for two months" to paragraph two. This could all
| have been over and done with between April and June of 2020
| (or maybe a few months later to give time to ramp up mask
| production). Oh well, at least big Pharma made big bucks.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks),
| distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices
| edit to add, because I forgot - for two months, and a few
| with immune compromises spending some more months
| isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all
| contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped
| this single one from spreading.
|
| This is delusional. China did far more than this and
| still was not able to control Covid. And even in a
| fantasy world where you could actually stop all human-to-
| human contagion, many respiratory viruses have animal
| reservoirs, making the entire exercise pointless.
|
| It's comforting to think that it's all just a collective
| action problem and if people could be a little more self-
| sacrificing, we could make it go away, but it's simply
| not the case.
| cbsmith wrote:
| That's not entirely accurate. The case for letting covid
| spread hinges on whether you have the medical infrastructure
| to manage the pandemic. If you can handle a "more than flu
| season" chunk of your population needing medical care then
| there's no real pandemic threat. Unfortunately, many
| countries in the developed world reduced the size of their
| medical infrastructure because they could rely on flu
| vaccines to minimize the demands of flu season. Sure, you can
| _try_ to flatten the curve, but COVID-19 proved to be
| difficult to contain, and initially we had little
| understanding of how transmissible it was, and what it would
| take to contain it. This meant you had to plan for a worse
| that was almost certainly worse than we 'd actually face.
|
| The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2
| trials can potentially make a pandemic _worse_. That 's why
| you have to wait for them to resolve.
| ummonk wrote:
| > The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2
| trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why
| you have to wait for them to resolve.
|
| You can do challenge trials. Especially if you're going to
| let the virus spread through the population anyway.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Isn't a challenge trial really just another way of doing
| a phase 2 trial?
|
| Whether you let it run through the population anyway
| really doesn't matter though. If you push the untested
| vaccine out to the population, you might turn a
| manageable problem into an unmanageable problem.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| Yah how's sweden doing are they dead yet?
| slaw wrote:
| Sweden's Covid death rate among lowest in Europe, despite
| avoiding strict lockdowns
|
| https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-
| diseas...
| throwaway22032 wrote:
| I mean, if anything, it was the other way around.
|
| We could point to death statistics and say "hey, that's
| provable harm".
|
| But quantifying the loss of quality of life from spending a
| year indoors, screwing the labour market and supply chain,
| messing up kids' socialization etc was harder, so we mostly
| just kind of ignored it.
| cbsmith wrote:
| Basically, the legal equivalent to the trolley problem. Worth
| noting that there are solutions in our legal code for this.
| Good Samaritan laws would be a good example.
|
| However, even in a world without such countermeasures, if the
| negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than
| what would happen doing nothing, it stands to reason that
| simply paying the price for the negative externalities would
| still be logical _and_ it would have the advantage that those
| negatively impacted by those externalities would not feel like
| they are disproportionately bearing the burden of the action.
|
| > But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and
| their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone
| to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was
| drastically improved by their intervention.
|
| Doctors still have a lot of cover, even if they make a mistake,
| for exactly that reason. The real challenge for doctors is the
| difficulty preventing the litigation itself. Even if they win
| in court, the consequences of being subject to so many lawsuits
| are dramatic.
|
| > The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate
| change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create
| negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing
| will be drastically worse.
|
| I think the bigger problem is that mitigating climate change
| will necessarily change the winners and losers, and the current
| winners have more power than the current losers.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There is a strong, mostly unstated, assumption in this era that
| doing nothing is always safe.
|
| I don't know how to fight that.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's right. The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics is baked
| into our legal framework.
| Symmetry wrote:
| The original "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics" blog post:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220705105128/https://blog.jaib.
| ..
|
| It's nice to have a handy phrase for this effect.
| shagie wrote:
| https://www.boisestatepublicradio.org/science-research/2021-...
|
| > Heather Heward is a senior instructor at the University of
| Idaho who teaches about forests and fires. She said it's not
| just federal land we need to be thinning and burning, it's
| private land, too.
|
| > "We have a real lack of (prescribed burn) practitioners,
| specifically on the private land side, that are able to do this
| work because - we're scared, honestly. We are scared that
| something will go wrong and that someone will sue us. I'm
| scared of that," she said.
| NumberWangMan wrote:
| Haha, it was me, Moloch!
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
|
| In other words, these are situations where the incentives for
| individuals are not aligned with incentives for the group.
| reaperducer wrote:
| While you're not wrong, the issue from the article is about a
| local issue, not necessarily with the legal system.
|
| In some places, proscribed burns are routine. Just not in the
| place that the article is about.
|
| Heck, the Chicago Parks District does proscribed burns in
| Lincoln Park, which is a very urban location.
| robohoe wrote:
| Yep. We have them outside of Chicago in IL as well. Pretty
| common to see them happen every year around here.
| theptip wrote:
| Yep, in Ethics this is known as the Act / Omission distinction.
| (Even if they result in the same consequences, you're ethically
| responsible for your acts, and rarely to the same extent your
| omissions.)
|
| It's common to the main deontological ethical frameworks
| including the Judeo-Christian models that underpin "western
| values.
|
| The "solution" is to take a Consequentialist approach, though
| most people fail the trolley problem and find consequentialism
| repugnant, so I don't think we will solve this problem any time
| soon.
|
| (Most people are familiar with Mills' hedonic utilitarianism,
| but it's quite simplistic; I'm a big fan of Eudaimonia as your
| value function, and richer systems like two-level
| utilitarianism as a way of getting round the "calculate
| everything all the time" problem with some utilitarian
| systems.)
| m463 wrote:
| It's been said that if the automobile or airplane was invented
| in the present day, regulations would prevent them from coming
| to market.
| jetrink wrote:
| I have another specific example of this to offer: Active vs.
| passive flood control. One passive control mechanism is the
| retention basin. This is just a pond connected to a water
| system. When it rains and the water begins to rise, some water
| flows into the pond instead of flowing downstream, reducing the
| effect of the storm.
|
| You can improve the retention basin by adding a pump to
| actively manage the basin's capacity. When there is rain in the
| forecast, you pump water out of the basin, reducing its water
| level. When the rain arrives, you turn off the pump and let the
| basin refill. This increases the amount of water that the basin
| is able to divert during the storm.
|
| I worked with a company that designed such a system and we even
| installed a demonstration unit for a municipality. It worked as
| intended and the city engineer advocated for expanding the
| project to all suitable basins. However, when the
| municipality's lawyers looked at the project, they argued that
| if the system failed to activate prior to a storm, the city
| might be liable any flooding that occurred afterward. Of
| course, the scenario where the system failed to function was
| identical to one in which it had never been built in the first
| place*, but that was not a convincing argument and the project
| was killed.
|
| * I like escalators because an escalator can never break, it
| can only become stairs. - Mitch Hedberg
| modriano wrote:
| I think the root of the problem is that we set erroneously low
| prices for some behaviors.
|
| Actuaries should be able to figure out reasonable values for
| the probability of some costly outcome (e.g., a massive,
| uncontrollable wild fire) given specific behaviors or
| conditions (e.g., letting property grow into being a wildfire
| risk, vs reducing that risk by clearing overgrowth), and for
| risks with costs that a person/company can't ever cover (e.g.,
| a massive wildfire), those responsible entities should have to
| carry insurance, who can incentivize or implement cost-reducing
| preventative actions in the places with greatest risk.
|
| In the climate change context, the price of dumping GHGs into
| the atmosphere is nowhere near the cost. If we priced that in,
| economics would rapidly make renewable | nuclear power
| projects, public transit projects, shifts away from concrete in
| construction, etc economically obvious choices. But we've
| messed up the prices, and these messed up prices incentivize
| people to ignore problems or worse, spend societal quantities
| of money and labor on growing the problems.
| stainablesteel wrote:
| yeah there's no nuance allowed in liability
|
| kids grow up without taking enough risks and it affects their
| brain development
|
| we've sacrificed healthy risks for unhealthy fear
| derefr wrote:
| The medical analogy here is the DNR order. Doctors don't want
| to create liability by explicitly assisting in a patient's
| death, even of someone in a vegetative state. So instead, they
| avoid this liability while still "accomplishing death", by
| following an order to intentionally _avoid_ explicitly
| _reversing_ any sudden "act of god" event that would cause the
| patient to die without active intervention.
|
| Or, to put that another way: instead of controlled burns where
| you're _actively setting the fire_ , why not just build (and
| maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside
| the burn zone, and then just _refuse to put it out_?
| dllthomas wrote:
| > why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for
| a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just
| refuse to put it out?
|
| Per my understanding, part of performing a controlled burn is
| mustering more resources near the burn (spatially and
| temporally) than you could reasonably maintain near every
| possible burn site all the time.
| derefr wrote:
| The interesting thing about controlled burns is that by
| doing them, you end up with fewer possible burn sites. So
| such an approach would get easier over time.
| toast0 wrote:
| Under the prepare the firebreaks ahead of time doctrine,
| you'd still be on the hook for mustering resources in
| response to an unscheduled fire as is the case today, but
| if the firebreaks are already in place and appropriate for
| the conditions at the time, the response would be watch and
| wait, and if all goes well, let it burn out without much
| additional effort.
|
| If conditions aren't appropriate, then you're back to
| status quo of containing a wildfire; but maybe the
| firebreaks help somewhat?
|
| (Would need the opinion of someone knowledgable in wildfire
| fighting rather than random internet peeps to know if this
| approaches a reasonable idea at all though; I'd wonder if
| it's reasonable to build and maintain general purpose
| firebreaks in large forests at all; and what effect that
| would have on the habitability of the forest for its flora
| and fauna)
| robertlagrant wrote:
| The trolley problem[0] is instructive.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
| jackphilson wrote:
| And this just generalizes to the recurring problem of
| individualism vs collectivism. Government regulation is the
| answer, but it's not being applied efficiently here
| vuln wrote:
| > Government regulation is the answer, but it's not being
| applied efficiently here
|
| Do you have any examples of Government Regulations that are
| applied efficiently and do not cause harm to any individuals?
| c54 wrote:
| Social security (has flaws but basically solved the
| widespread pre social security problem of poverty amongst
| the elderly)
|
| Food safety, leaded gas and paint, restricted chemicals
| lists (for safety reason, less of a fan of drug bans).
|
| Bank deposit reserve requirements. Obamacare. Antitrust
| legislation.
|
| Seat belts (extremely controversial at the time, people
| protested the loss of their freedoms etc etc).
|
| Alaska's Permanent Fund. Norway's government pension fund.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| You are demonstrating the exact problem the OP is
| complaining about. "Does not cause harm to any individuals"
| is an impossible standard to meet, and should not be
| weighed against "do nothing, and eventually cause a
| catastrophe for which there is no clear agent to blame".
| l33t233372 wrote:
| I'm not sure where you make the leap to "do not cause harm
| to any individuals."
|
| This thread is about managing and reducing harm in places
| where having "no harm" (whatever that means) isn't an
| option.
| ncallaway wrote:
| > and do not cause harm to any individuals
|
| Your bar for a government regulation is really "not a
| single individual is harmed"? That's insane, and almost
| exactly the problem anonporridge was describing.
|
| Almost every government regulation harms someone, in that
| it almost always is limiting the actions available to
| someone.
|
| To answer your question: no, there is no such regulation,
| but it's not relevant, because I think your metric is
| atrocious.
| foxyv wrote:
| > and do not cause harm to any individuals
|
| You're moving the bar a little there. There will always be
| harm to individuals due to the law of unintended
| consequences. However, government regulation is really good
| at preventing a "Tragedy of the Commons."
|
| For instance, regulations on CFC emissions hurt a lot of
| individuals. However, they prevented a much greater
| tragedy.
|
| Removing lead from car exhaust marginally hurt an entire
| generation, while improving the lives of the next by orders
| of magnitude.
|
| Other examples: Building codes, Car Safety, Fair Labor
| Standards Act, Food and Drug Regulations.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I'm assuming that taxes, fees, and other standardized costs
| are not considered harm, as well as other such incidental
| costs, otherwise no, nothing can be done by _anyone_ that
| does not cause harm to someone else at the margin.
|
| Mandating that the US postal service deliver to every
| address at a single price. This results in an efficient
| single price, efficiencies of scale that private carriers
| don't even have, and does not harm anyone outside of the
| externalities that would already exist for mail delivery
| regardless of who was doing the delivering.
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I don't think that's it. I think it's more a consequence of
| democracy versus autocracy. An autocracy could make these
| trade-offs without political consequence. Of course,
| autocracies come with other profound challenges. Most I think
| agree that a benevolent dictator produces the best outcomes.
| The problem is that human benevolence is fickle, and subject
| to interpretation -- invariably leading to violence.
| vkou wrote:
| Democracies also make these tradeoffs without political
| consequences, if the people who are subject to the negative
| externalities are sufficiently disenfranchised, or are
| simply a powerless minority that we can run over, or are
| ones whose concerns are sidelined for the benefit of a
| larger umbrella movement.
|
| I completely agree with the parent poster. This is not a
| democracy vs autocracy question. This is entirely an
| individualism[1] versus a collectivism[2] question.
|
| [1] Which prioritizes 'do not _actively_ harm any
| individual. ' [3]
|
| [2] Which prioritizes 'do what is best for the group as a
| whole.' [3]
|
| [3] While some societies are pretty clearly democratic, and
| some are pretty clearly autocratic (and some are a mix of
| both), _every_ society is, to a mixture of degrees,
| individualistic, and to a mixture of degrees, collectivist.
| Where they differ is in where the line gets drawn, and on
| which questions.
| anonporridge wrote:
| I think this does hit something.
|
| There's a reason by China is having no problem rolling out
| high speed rail across the entire country on the order of a
| decade while California can't even roll out a single line
| in the same time.
|
| China can just bulldoze entire villages while the little
| people have no recourse to resist. That power is incredibly
| useful for getting things done, but the big problem of
| succession makes that level of power incredibly dangerous,
| fickle, and fragile.
| rgmerk wrote:
| California HSR is a dumb project, as are some of the more
| marginal Chinese HSR lines (and many of the HSR lines
| built in Europe, undoubtedly).
|
| By the time California HSR runs from LA to SF electric
| short-haul airliners will make the environmental benefits
| moot.
| lazide wrote:
| 1) it's all good until you're one of the 'little people'
|
| 2) succession/plan B is always the problem with
| dictators/dictatorships.
|
| If you're lucky, the interests of those in power are
| genuinely aligned with your best interests and they're
| competent - (Singapore/PAP, at least historically), but
| nothing lasts forever.
| username7282919 wrote:
| Most people in China actually want to be one of the
| "little people". They get compensated way more than what
| they could make in their lifetime.
|
| Doing the same in California would be 10-100x more
| expensive though, people are just cheaper there.
| lazide wrote:
| It's way easier to tie everyone up in manipulative
| bullshit court proceedings in the US, and no one has the
| incentive/interest in stopping it right now.
|
| It isn't even about 10-100x cost, if it was
| straightforward cash. It would be resolved in weeks if
| that was the case. In many of these equivalent
| situations, it drags out for _decades_. At that point,
| it's a toss up if the project even makes sense anymore,
| since everyone who needed it when it was voted in
| /started has moved on (by necessity) to something else.
|
| In China, the courts basically just say 'which way does
| the CCP want this to go?' and voila, that happens. For
| better or worse.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Don't forget in China these little people have way higher
| attachment to their homes. They are often ancestral
| homes. The people that would be happy to be 'forced to
| move' have already moved to the city in most cases, with
| only those with high connections to their home remaining.
| In the USA we don't really have the same sort of
| attachment to ancestral homes and would be more receptive
| to paid relocation and view it way differently. Those
| that celebrate China's way and say the relocated people
| are happy to be moved from their ancestral homes and
| communities to concrete block apartments don't understand
| Chinese culture and provide cover to how soul crushing
| relocation is for those impacted.
| lazide wrote:
| At the end of the day, it either happens or it doesn't -
| and that has pros and cons either way.
|
| You're correct on the impact to those folks, but there
| are also a LOT of other folks who benefit from the new
| rail (or should, anyway!).
|
| At the end of the day, their strategy works for the
| majority better.
|
| We're deadlocked trying to not offend anyone (and get
| scammed by the contractors in the process). They say
| 'fuck it' and pave it over, and then tuck the little
| people in a closet and tell them to shut up or else.
|
| But if they didn't, they'd have no rail where they need
| to go, like.... us.
|
| Eventually, without some compromise or balance, either
| system reaches a breaking point. Ours, we'll eventually
| be so mired in shit not working that people will leave to
| somewhere different (if they can) wherever it's really
| bad. Think NYC/Detroit/LA/etc. in the 70's and 80's.
|
| In China, they crack down too hard (or stay too focused
| on 'the plan') that they destroy what they are trying to
| preserve/create. Either Violently (Russia), or by going
| broke/financial crisis (Japan).
| RajT88 wrote:
| My 2 cents is that all 3 of you are right. There's an
| aspect of culture in the US which leads us to being very,
| very litigious. Call it "get rich quick" mentality, or "I
| got mine". The huge numbers of lawyers helps, but I think
| the causal relationship is the other way - that the number
| of lawyers in this country increased to meet demand.
|
| Of course a consequence of democracy is as you way - there
| are political consequences to unpopular (but necessary)
| actions, making such measures unpalatable for any but a
| second term president.
|
| But we surely have navigated politically unpopular
| initiatives before, for the greater good of the nation.
| See: Civil Rights Movement.
|
| https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-martin-luther-
| kin...
| lazide wrote:
| Near as I can tell, there is also a narcissistic
| manipulation element here.
|
| Autocrats often exist because 'no one else can do what
| needs to be done'. They do this by being willing to be
| unphased by the threat of being 'the bad guy', or even
| reveling in it. They know as long as the folks in the
| background get what they need, they'll actually be fine.
|
| Narcissistic manipulation is when someone tells a story
| placing the blame for damage on someone or an institution
| while ignoring the actual context of that person or
| institutions actions so as to displace the blame/damage for
| their own actions (or lack thereof) and their own lack of
| ownership for the outcome. We're awash in it right now.
|
| It's super toxic for everyone, and fighting it is extremely
| difficult to nearly impossible in the legal system because
| of rules designed to STOP this kind of manipulation (which
| is typical), and steady reduction in the consequences for
| 'minor' issues like Perjury and Contempt of Court which
| make failed attempts at this manipulation 'free'.
|
| Rules of evidence, standing, the way court 'happens',
| procedural things that cost time and money, etc. all play
| into it.
|
| And the system inevitably ends up favoring bullshit,
| because anything but bullshit requires individuals take a
| stand and say 'the rules say x, but in totality that's
| bullshit and produces an unjust outcome so we're doing
| something else' is, well, not favored in the way the law
| works. Sometimes for good reasons, but it usually gets
| perverted in the day to day reality.
| allemagne wrote:
| >The problem is that human benevolence is fickle, and
| subject to interpretation
|
| Basically, the "benevolent" half of the "benevolent
| dictatorship" is a long-shot at best and a total fantasy at
| worst. I think this is well-understood by reasonable
| people, but I'd also argue that "dictatorship" in this
| context is even more of a fantasy.
|
| >An autocracy could make these trade-offs without political
| consequence
|
| See, I don't think this is true at all.
|
| Nobody rules alone, every dictator needs enforcers, those
| enforcers need enforcers, all the way down, and suddenly
| the well-oiled autocracy that can cut through red tape like
| butter looks more and more like it requires an endless
| hierarchy of "benevolent" (i.e. compliant) dictators or a
| bureaucracy overburdened by rules that was supposed to be
| democracy's great weakness.
|
| Every decision you make as an autocrat is a gamble that
| your enforcers will carry out your vision faithfully, with
| a bunch of details you haven't even thought of also
| accounted for, while maintaining the facade that you are
| actually all-powerful.
|
| All it takes is a few slip-ups for your underlings to have
| flexible loyalties, where "of course" you're in charge but
| maybe next time leave some wiggle-room for an alternative
| path of implementing your omnipotent decrees.
| Curvature5868 wrote:
| A viable solution might be the creation of an insurance fund to
| compensate for any unintended damage caused by prescribed
| burns. This fund, funded by utility companies especially those
| in wildfire-prone areas, would function similarly to banks'
| contributions to the FDIC. This could alleviate liability
| concerns, thereby encouraging proactive wildfire prevention
| strategies.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Yep. If the benefits are socialized it's a good idea to
| social the costs as well.
| riskable wrote:
| This is a good idea but it doesn't address the pollution
| problem. If a prescribed burn will increase pollution beyond
| the EPA's acceptable limits then the burn will be against the
| law.
|
| We need the EPA's emissions/particulate rules to be adjusted
| to give priority to prescribed burns by certified
| firefighters and foresters. They don't do burns often enough
| that the EPA should be limiting their power to manage fire
| susceptibility. We also need watchdogs to make sure that
| regular polluters don't increase output during prescribed
| burns in order to hide their actual emissions.
| ROTMetro wrote:
| Being the devil's advocate, when my mother was dying of
| cancer there were forest fires here. She had to leave the
| area and stay at a hotel far away at great cost/physical
| discomfort (at that point she had a hospital bed at home).
| There are people who physically can't handle the higher
| particulate amount, what do you propose we do with them?
| Let them suffer/die?
| xyzzyz wrote:
| Filtering particulates in interior spaces is relatively
| easy, and when moving between them, you can wear a mask.
| Of course, this is very inconvenient, but it is so no
| matter whether the fire is a prescribed burn or a
| wildfire. Having to move elsewhere during prescribed burn
| might be highly inconvenient to you, but doing the same
| during wildfire will be highly inconvenient to other
| people. We might decide to favor some people over others,
| or balance the positive and negative externalities, but
| it seems silly to me to choose wildfires over prescribed
| burns just because the former are caused by inaction, and
| latter by action.
| Filligree wrote:
| But the burn will happen anyway. It'll just happen at a
| different time, when it hasn't been prepared for, with
| less control and more particulates as well as destruction
| of communities.
| XorNot wrote:
| No it won't. It _might_ happen. Or it might go years
| before happening in that area. Or you might move away
| before it does.
|
| But you don't get to use your perception of inevitability
| to cause harm and financial damage for someone else.
| hammock wrote:
| We can start by evaluating and updating regulations, improving
| training and safety protocols, engaging with local communities,
| and increasing public awareness about the benefits and risks
| associated with controlled burns.
|
| The goal is to enable the use of controlled burns as a valuable
| tool for land management and wildfire prevention while
| adequately addressing concerns related to potential negative
| externalities.
| motohagiography wrote:
| This 'controlled burn' issue is a general principle in risk
| management as well, where you respond to minor issues so as to
| not let them pile up into a tinderbox inferno.
|
| Risk aversion isn't prudent, ethical, or professional either.
| It's a source of false conflict whose purpose is to centralize
| the objector so that they can direct and manage a proposed
| change. This is from someone who has been working in security for
| longer than most. It's something I find repulsive about some of
| the people who have joined the field, where once it was hackers
| who used elevated competence to judiciously take risks, and now
| it's authoritarian personalities who use affected fear and
| appeals to uncertainty under the guise of safety to position
| themselves as gatekeepers.
|
| The same is true for government policy on controlled burns.
| Nobody ever gets fired over mega wildfires, even though their
| gatekeeping is the direct cause of them.
| eftychis wrote:
| Disagree partly. Here we are preventing actively the natural
| circles of small fires in the lifecycle of a forest. We bring
| up that we need to introduce them at least in a controlled
| manner. Some people say no because xyz. Well these people need
| to cover the incalculable sometime damages that causes.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The difference is accountability. If you start the burn,
| you're responsible. If 100 people build homes that create a
| hazard, nobody is responsible.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think environmental policy people have a lot to learn from
| the philosophy and ideas in preventative medicine (and honestly
| a few ideas could probably flow the other direction as well).
|
| These two groups need to sit down and compare notes.
|
| Stitches suck, but they're better than dying of cancer, or
| gangrene.
| anoncow wrote:
| I think the equivalent analogy here is to prevent a big issue
| from occurring, management creates small issues that it can
| control. Or do I have it wrong?
|
| If you handle small issues, it's similar to handling small
| fires and not letting the small fires eat away at a certain
| portion of the forest.
| seadan83 wrote:
| The analogy might not fully hold. The risk is that the
| controlled burn gets out of control. IIRC there was a case
| last year in Nevada where a controlled burn turned into an
| extremely large fire. A better analogy might be safety drills
| at Nuclear power plants. Done well, it helps ensure safety
| protocols are in place that can mitigate a big disaster, done
| badly, and you have Chernobyl.
|
| > not letting the small fires eat away at a certain portion
| of the forest
|
| Funny enough, small fires are very healthy for many forests
| and even _necessary_ for some. For example, Some trees do not
| drop seeds until there are fires. EG: "Giant sequoias are the
| largest trees on Earth. They can grow for more than 3,000
| years. But without fire, they cannot reproduce." [1]
|
| Further, the clearing of underbrush can be good for animals
| as they can move around more easily, hunt, gather, etc.. [2]
| Though, what is really not good for them are the mega-fires
| that burn so hot that it burns trees & everything 100% up to
| the top of the tree (killing it) and also several feet
| underground.
|
| So, perhaps another analogy is that every year is like adding
| gunpowder into the forests. Setting this alight every now and
| then is good, but let it build up too long and it becomes a
| bomb. Areas that have burned in the PNW tend to look really
| healthy 1 to 3 years later. On the other hand, areas that
| have "over" burned in California with mega fires are
| drastically impacted, as if a nuclear bomb had went off and
| killed everything.
|
| At the end of the day, prescribed burns is an amazing tool to
| create a defensive patch work of lower-combustion areas that
| help prevent fires from becoming mega-fires that are super-
| impactful to everyone and everything.
|
| [1] https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/giant-sequoia-needs-fire-
| gro... [2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/explainer-
| how-wildfires...
| nradov wrote:
| We had a controlled burn near the SF Bay Area get out of
| control in 2021 which forced some evacuations. Of course
| controlled burns are still needed to reduce overall fire
| risk, but incidents like that naturally make local
| residents a bit leery.
|
| https://www.sfgate.com/california-
| wildfires/article/Estrada-...
| StrangeATractor wrote:
| In many of the burns which I've read about that get out of
| control, it's because the agency doing it (USFS, usually)
| had a plan to do it on that date and they didn't consider
| the actual conditions on the ground before they lit up.
|
| Example: An Oregon sheriff arrested a USFS employee
| supervising a burn that got out of hand and torched private
| property. The FS was crying foul and saying it was an act
| of god, but there were warnings for burning that day
| because they conditions were so unfavorable (the county may
| have had an outright burn ban). The only reason the FS
| employee decided to burn is because that's what he was
| supposed to do that day. And he was legally okay, since it
| was federal property, but then it got onto private property
| next door...
|
| For some reason the FS in particular has this problem. Most
| of them are alright people but the institution and culture
| needs serious reform.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| Right. The small issues are minor outages causing customer
| inconvenience and/or lost revenue. The big issues are major
| pwnage and loss of everything because you were afraid of
| causing small issues while fixing things.
| anoncow wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense. By allowing the teams to fix
| things quickly and break things, management creates an
| environment where people can continuously learn how to
| handle fires and this makes them ready to handle bigger
| fires and also prevent bigger fires.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| There is some middle ground though.
|
| I don't want my {critical infrastructure} to "fix things
| quickly and break things" at a critical moment, where I
| would have really needed that system.
|
| Those things can be scheduled and announced, so I can
| plan ahead and expect outages at that time.
| nordsieck wrote:
| > There is some middle ground though.
|
| Sure.
|
| But the problem is that there are incentives to keep
| pushing the middle ground closer towards eventual system
| collapse.
|
| It's never the right time to see if the backup generators
| can take the building load. But during real emergencies,
| it's amazing how common it is for the backup generators
| to not work for one reason or another.
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "It's never the right time to see if the backup
| generators can take the building load. "
|
| How about a test outside normal working hours?
|
| It is possible, to meassure the power output before and
| then plug in enough stuff, that draws roughly the same.
|
| But yes, it is more convenient to not do it and continue
| buisness as usual and hope for the best.
|
| My point is, that in most cases, you can test and fix
| critical stuff and also fix problems created by your
| fixes, if you make it an important issue and plan
| accordingly. However, I did not say it is necessarily
| easy.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| If only there were some good samaritans who would toss lit
| cigarettes out of their cars in the spring...
| pvaldes wrote:
| ...then we would have a case of environmental terrorism.
|
| Terrorists like Gary Maynard, Alexandra Souverneva, Viola
| Liu...
|
| 800 wildfires in California in 2022 were arsons.
| oatmeal1 wrote:
| Terrorism is used to influence politics. This would be simply
| to achieve a practical result of a healthier forest, so it
| would not be terrorism.
| pvaldes wrote:
| First, why are you sure that this didn't influenced
| elections results?
|
| 100 people killed or still missing. Many killed only in one
| wildfire by the mud floods that came later. Helicopter
| pilots and firefighters killed. More than 13500 homes and
| human structures destroyed only in 2020 and 2021.
|
| Not all fires were deliberated, but _too much_ wildfires
| were deliberated to be statistically random. We 'll never
| know how much of them were attacks. A few people managed to
| spread chaos in entire villages, forced the authorities to
| evacuate tens of thousands of people, nuked the local
| budgets, and introduced a lot of tension in the economy and
| society. And it cost them practically nothing.
|
| And I'm not talking about the people killed and injured, or
| the natural resources lost (like millions of liters of
| freshwater stored in the area that were lost and have some,
| non negligible, economical value).
|
| _" Maynard's fires were placed in the perfect position to
| increase the risk of firefighters being trapped between
| fires"_ [1]
|
| If this is not terrorism, nothing is. Don't fool yourself.
| The only difference between a "non cleaned" and a "cleaned"
| forest (whatever it means), is that the terrorist will
| carry its own can of gas.
|
| [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026700103/former-
| college-pro...
| anoncow wrote:
| Relevant post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35081218
| pkrein wrote:
| Wildfires.org is doing really awesome work on unblocking and
| accelerating environmental review and planning for all kinds of
| wildfire prevention treatments.
| qxxx wrote:
| I was reading "Controlled burps help prevent wildfires"... time
| to go to bed.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| The fundamental problem that controlled burns face today is that
| there has been a huge and irresponsible increase in development
| on "Urban-wildland border". Here in the California Sierras, you
| have a uniform peppering of (often luxury) houses outside of the
| various small urban areas. Those forests naturally burn on a
| regular basis but with this situation, any controlled burn is
| going to threaten some number of houses.
|
| Of course, the regular fires threaten and destroy these areas
| too. We've seen the destruction of Paradise, Berry Creek,
| Greenville, and Grizzly Flats in the last few years (just reading
| from Wikipedia).
|
| Edit: Always need to mention that global-warming/climate-change
| makes this worse even if it was caused by local irresponsible
| behavior. Of course what climate hits first are areas where the
| local ecology already had problems (In before "It's not [Local
| bad behavior], it's climate change" or the opposite).
| runtime_blues wrote:
| That's how development always happened in much of the US.
| Cities expanding into forestland or grassland. The problem
| isn't that the homes are all of sudden luxurious, or that we
| somehow do less planning than in the 1880s or 1960s. It's that
| a mix of well-intentioned environmental policies and activism
| mean there's no fuel reduction happening at all. Controlled
| burns are one way, but logging is another.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Yes but ultimately No and No. US cities have always expanded
| but the current level of "exurban" development is new - a
| continuation of the expansion trend no doubt but still more
| expansiveness, sufficient to be a barrier to fixing the
| problems created by fire suppression forestry.
|
| And logging doesn't fix things the way natural fires fix
| things. Logging companies only want big trees and a
| sustainable forest has big trees that survive fires and
| little tree that are removed by modest fires. Clear cut areas
| tend to burn quite intensely because they're all small tree.
| heywherelogingo wrote:
| [dead]
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| This is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is
| that fires were suppressed for nearly 200 years and now turn
| into raging infernos. Fires were suppressed first for economic
| reasons, and then later for misguided Environmental reasons
|
| Forest fires of a historically typical magnitude would pose
| much less Danger to communities adjacent to wildlands. This is
| further complicated by the fact that any of these communities
| and dwellings were not designed for fire resistance because
| public policy at the time was no fires ever.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It depends how you want to put. Fire suppression is indeed
| the fundamental cause and the shape of development is the
| barrier to fixing it.
| bsder wrote:
| This is true, but even where it's not, the biggest issue in
| doing controlled burns is simply _funding_.
|
| Controlled burns aren't just "light it up". You may need to
| create a firebreak. You may need to cull some trees as too many
| areas have lots of spindly, unhealthy trees that are going to
| make a controlled burn much harder to control. etc.
|
| All of this costs manpower which translates to money.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Controlled burns cost money, no doubt. But just an example,
| California's fire suppression complex is very well funded.
| California has a fleet of 747s and other huge aircraft, just
| for example.
|
| My guess is there's no funding where there's no people and
| where there are people, there's funding but the people's
| arrangement prevents controlled burns.
| onecommentman wrote:
| What everybody (homeowners, forestry types, loggers,
| environmentalists, etc.) can agree to is prescribed burn
| practices should be improved.
|
| At the time, the story told about the Cerro Grande fire was
| an inexperienced Forestry agent started a prescribed burn in
| the heart of the Spring wind season, leading to an inevitable
| wildfire that no local NM understanding local conditions
| would have approved. Probably the most expensive fire in NM
| history.
|
| The story told of the Hermits Peak fire is another outsider
| Forestry agent tried to squeeze a prescribed burn into a very
| narrow "safe" time slot to stay "on schedule". To no one's
| surprise, the fire didn't care much about the narrow slot of
| safety and the largest wildfire in NM history resulted.
|
| I think giving a State powers to selective delay any specific
| prescribed fire _within their borders_ (State, Fed, tribal)
| would have prevented both destructive NM fires. Local wisdom
| counts for something and at least the Feds don't come off
| looking like idiots when things get out hand. Maybe the Feds
| and the State together would look like idiots, but not just
| those outsider Feds.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Do we have understanding of fire frequency naturally? ie. how
| many years, on average, between fires on a given bit of land?
|
| If we do, then it seems to make sense to try to maintain the same
| frequency - that, I assume, would be best for the plants and
| animals which have adapted to that.
| jrs235 wrote:
| We have, what seems like, quartely prescribed burns in the
| Florida panhandle.
| ldom22 wrote:
| I thought only you can prevent wildfires
| bluGill wrote:
| Sure, but I have known for several decades that I shouldn't.
| That slogan was already being questioned when Regan was
| president.
| atomize wrote:
| All controlled burns have to happen with government regulation
| for obvious reasons. Fire ecology and the legislation that
| regulates it in practice (read: research and it's influence on
| controlled burn methods) revolves mainly around constant disputes
| between agriculture and conservation efforts. This even winds all
| the way down to the age-old dispute about grazing cattle on
| public lands out west. Grazing on public lands leads to a
| reduction of fuel for natural wildfires in heavily grazed areas,
| leading to an imbalance in the natural fire cycle, causing the
| need to do controlled burns in the interest of human habitat and
| the economy rather than ecology. This ultimately causes a
| disruption is various parts of the ecosystem. In the high desert
| of Nevada, California, and other fire prone states that also are
| the home of agriculture that depends on grazing livestock, this
| issue is hot, no pun intended, and there is a constant dialogue
| going on between regulators and scientists researching land
| management methods in habitat where wildfire is not only
| necessary, but essential.
| notmypenguin wrote:
| Goats emit less co2 than "controlled burns", and mixed species
| mature forests don't have the undergrowth problem commercial
| cutting cycles entail
| water-your-self wrote:
| With respect to the west coast of the united states this is an
| absurd proposal.
| dboreham wrote:
| First eagles, now goats as a device to get out of an awkward
| plot dead-end.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Forests in the US especially on the west coast evolved
| alongside fire, and burning is how many species propagate in
| these ecosystems.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Let me know when you have a goat that will eat thousands of
| pounds of fallen trees.
|
| No offense, but it's fairly clear you have never stepped in the
| forests that this is a problem. It's not yearly grass. It's 50
| years of buildup. You make a 12ft high and 30ft wide pile of
| this stuff then please tell me about goats.
|
| From experience, had a bone fire that lasted three days before
| it was out.... Goats...
|
| Along the same lines, you have an excellent wolf feeding
| solution, now to find the problem it solves!
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| One approach that I found interesting, and that is gaining
| momentum in British Columbia is the championing of a first
| nations indigenous "fire keeper" "cultural burning" movement:
| https://prescribedfire.ca/cultural-burning/
|
| http://nationnews.ca/community/fire-keepers-bring-back-cultu...
|
| It especially makes sense in the context of BC where pretty much
| the whole province is actually unceded first nations territory;
| the indigenous groups there never signed it away to the Crown
| like they did here in Upper Canada.
| EricE wrote:
| The irony of environmentalist meddling actually harming the
| environment - it's disgusting.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Also see resistance to nuclear fission.
|
| Environmentalists have inadvertently shot civilization in the
| foot and served the interests of the fossil fuel industry by
| blocking expansion of carbon free nuclear.
|
| In exchange, we've spent the last several decades dumping
| drastically more carbon in the atmosphere than was necessary.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| I'm a little annoyed we're 40 years behind on fusion, because
| a vocal group spent 40 years crying about fission. Chernobyl
| was a disaster, that was made possible by the Soviet gov, it
| was far more a knock on communism than it was nuclear energy.
| And yet... Here we are with Harvard grads arguing for the
| former and against the latter.
| squidsoup wrote:
| The Fukushima disaster has the same rating as Chernobyl on
| the Internation Nuclear Event Scale, and occurred in a
| highly regulated developed capitalist nation.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Huh? Its a clean air regulation not an environmentalist one.
| Seems like a poor take.
| masklinn wrote:
| Greens and self-defeat, not sure there's a more iconic duo
| really.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Well I wouldn't go that far to call it disgusting, since the
| vast majority of human actions probably result in unintended,
| mostly negative, consequences.
| everythingfine wrote:
| I'd like to point out that this problem can _technically_ be
| solved by a well-meaning arsonist who 's willing to break the
| law. Simply send a public message to fire departments naming the
| date and location that a forest fire will start, let the fire
| departments prepare like they would for a controlled burn, and
| then set off the blaze. There's some difficulty involved with
| establishing sufficient credibility for this to work, but it's a
| weird case where illegal action can accomplish things that
| operating within the legal system cannot.
| pvaldes wrote:
| This is the general message, and is extremely poisonous and
| insidious. "Arsonists are heros"
|
| Thousands of puppets ear-whispered to break the laws. Then
| there came the consequences, the dry, the mud flood, the people
| killed and the houses burnt. The best joke is to blame the
| green and the hippies.
| markusde wrote:
| An extremely brief google search tells me that controlled burns
| require firebreaks, knowledge of the wind patterns (something
| called a downwind backfire?) and presumably continued
| monitoring/support from firefighters to actually be a
| controlled burn over the area that needs it.
|
| I think what you're describing is a total fantasy.
| bluGill wrote:
| The only controlled burn is one that happens regularly. You
| cannot start with a controlled burn after years of
| suppression as there is too much fuel. You have to "rip the
| band-aid off". That is evacuate the whole state, and then
| start the whole state on fire at once. If you want your house
| to survive, then you use the warning to clear all the
| trees/bush around your house so it isn't close to the fire
| (this is easy to say, impossible to pull off).
| undersuit wrote:
| We had a small fire that had to be fought last year on the
| mountain that shadows the city by a teenager. I was hiking
| through the area affected recently and there were burn piles
| being created in the parts that didn't burn last year, so I
| guess that the arsonist at least created the impetus to prevent
| future burns closer to the city.
| [deleted]
| Maciek416 wrote:
| This is not really true, and if you'd like to learn more than
| you ever wanted to know about this topic then you should start
| following Zeke Lunder from The Lookout and review some of his
| wildfire analysis videos on YouTube. He often talks about the
| idea of "good fire". Not all fire is "good fire". A lot of
| megafires, the kind that might be sparked by an arson technique
| ignorant of modern wildfire management practices, do not
| necessarily lead to "good fire". They may at certain stages
| (especially when wind dies down) exhibit some traits of "good
| fire", but for the most part, these are forests that are the
| way they are due to too much suppression for too long, and now
| require "good fire" if our goal is to _still have a healthy
| forest after the fire_. An arson that starts a megafire is
| going to potentially transition to a very different type of
| forest, or an un-forested wasteland, as seen in various places
| in the Sierra foothills and SoCal.
| exabrial wrote:
| They also destroy invasive species: plants, animals, bugs. Native
| species evolved long ago to deal with fire.
|
| Research has also shown its net carbon negative.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Intuitively I'd guess the carbon is net negative because so
| many forests require fire in order to differentiate strong,
| durable trees from weaker ones, which then opens the canopy,
| returns nutrients to the soil, and creates conditions more like
| we see in old growth forests which are able to store absolutely
| massive amounts of carbon compared to young (even very dense)
| forests.
|
| Not only that but they store water better, too. They're less
| likely to burn as they stay wetter later in the dry season and
| hold onto rain and atmospheric moisture far better.
|
| Cutting down old forests was a much worse idea than anyone
| would have guessed.
| exabrial wrote:
| > Cutting down old forests was a much worse idea than anyone
| would have guessed.
|
| It's species dependent.. Cutting down trees that take 250
| years to mature probably isn't sustainable for example.
|
| However, logging can be a carbon negative practice if done
| with correct practices and the correct species. You're
| literally taking the mass of the air and turning it into a
| useful building material.
|
| I'll try to find a source
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| Why wouldn't non-native species also be adapted for fire?
| prvc wrote:
| Did not the current wildfires in Alberta, Canada start with an
| attempted "controlled burn" gone awry?
| DannyBee wrote:
| So? Just because a process sometimes fails does not mean the
| solution is to change the process, and if you do, it doesn't
| mean the result will end up better overall.
|
| Expected value and all that.
| prvc wrote:
| Also, it's not clear why burning should be used instead of,
| say, selective logging, or some other manual method of moving
| the material somewhere other than into the atmosphere.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| It's time to regulate all these regulations!
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| Controlled burns and prescriptive cullings of deer do wonders.
|
| Honestly, the fools that prevent these end up suffering when
| fires and deer accidents jump up.
| mrangle wrote:
| Controlled burns are a single example of the uncountable things
| that humans have always had to do to maintain what is good for
| everyone and animals, but which come to be targeted by loud
| people who see a path to personal gain by making them a political
| issue. Presenting solutions as problems is explained as being
| more civilized, but it is less. Animal population management is
| another example.
| paulorlando wrote:
| The US Forest Service was started in 1905 in part to reduce
| forest fires. The result of that policy was forests with a much
| higher tree density than naturally occurred otherwise.
|
| Other changes include that around 1900 settlers of the western US
| introduced livestock that ate grass, which in turn removed
| potential fuel for smaller fires, and enabled smaller trees to
| grow.
|
| After a hundred years of fire prevention, you end up with very
| different forest density. As the fire manager of Santa Fe
| National Forest noted: "On this forest, it's averaging about 900
| trees per acre. Historically it was probably about 40." The
| result is a much bigger fire risk than previously.
| https://unintendedconsequenc.es/morals-of-the-moment/
| fooker wrote:
| > Regulations make them nearly impossible
|
| That is equivalent to saying sulphuric acid kills cancer.
|
| While true, it does other things too like kill normal cells.
|
| Likewise, broadly scoped regulation can hamper freedom and
| prevent people from doing otherwise harmless activities. Worse,
| it paves the way for selective enforcement. Think about federally
| mandated drugs regulation and how that is abused by biased
| authorities.
| kyleblarson wrote:
| I live in a remote area in Washington State and we have many
| controlled burns every spring and fall.
| https://methowvalleynews.com/2023/03/29/methow-valley-ranger...
| stcroixx wrote:
| The only federal regulation I saw referenced in the article were
| clean air regulations. Otherwise, it appears states and their
| residents are imposing additional barriers. And public opinion is
| a local issue of course as well. I don't know if it's really
| possible to change public ignorance, particularly if the strong
| opinions are political, so this might be a case where it makes
| sense for the federal government to step in. We can't just let CO
| decide to burn themselves to the ground without that decision
| putting other states at risk.
|
| Controlled burns happen regularly in NC on state and federal
| land.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it appears states and their residents are imposing
| additional barriers_
|
| As long as the states imposing the barriers are bearing their
| own costs, I don't see reason for federal intervention. The
| situation gets complicated in the West, because a lot of the
| forest is federal.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > I don't know if it's really possible to change public
| ignorance,
|
| Let me clear that up for you, no, it is not possible. Society
| is suffering willful ignorance in so many aspects of day-to-day
| life that this is not going to change in our lifetimes if ever.
| D13Fd wrote:
| This was my first thought as well. The title should be
| "Regulations make them nearly impossible [in Colorado]"
| putnambr wrote:
| It's not Colorado's land to burn, though. Most of the issue
| is fuels load on federally-managed land.
| jwie wrote:
| This quirk of the west should really be addressed. The feds
| "own" far too much of the western US.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| Yeah, for example, the federal government owns around 50%
| of all land in California.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| At least with the states imposing regulations it's limited to
| that state. I don't see how Colorado effects neighboring states
| that presumably are doing what they are supposed to do. If
| Wyoming is running controlled burns but Colorado is not, then
| (admittedly in this very simple thought) the fires will be more
| easily contained because they have done their diligence.
|
| The citizens of that state should step in and make the changes,
| not the federal government.
| tristanbvk wrote:
| Good state enjoyer. Thank you for acknowledging the role of
| the states over the feds.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| It's something even more fundamental than all that.
|
| If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government),
| and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns
| down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of
| blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But
| if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable
| wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck.
| That's just an unlucky act of god.
| h2odragon wrote:
| Most of the land West of the Mississippi is Federally owned.
| You wanna do fire abatement on BLM land, you got a long hard
| fight ahead of you, before you ever get to a written regulation
| you can cite. Much less laws voted on by Congress.
| kibwen wrote:
| Source for obsctruction from the BLM? As far as I can tell,
| they carry out controlled burns all the time (what they call
| "prescribed burning"): https://www.nifc.gov/sites/default/fil
| es/blm/documents/BLMFi...
| h2odragon wrote:
| Thanks for the update, I was near some of the early
| lawsuits against the BLM to allow controlled burns back in
| the 90s; and haven't kept up with it much since then.
| njarboe wrote:
| One of the big problems is that controlled burns can and do
| become uncontrolled burns. The largest ever wildfire in New
| Mexico was started as a planned burn (more honest label) just
| last year. [1]
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...
| eunoia wrote:
| This unfortunately has happened more than once in NM. The Cerro
| Grande fire started in similar circumstances and almost burned
| down LANL.
|
| IIRC they actually had to temporarily displace the radioactive
| glass from the original Trinity tests as it was in danger from
| the fire.
| DannyBee wrote:
| Yes, and this is (at least today) unsolvable.
|
| It's still got a _much_ higher expected value to do prescribed
| burns have some of them turn uncontrolled than do nothing, or
| do what is happening now (pretend we can control for every
| variable).
| askvictor wrote:
| Weather forecasting is pretty amazing these days, along with
| modelling, has changed the equations compared to decades
| past. It becomes a question of how much risk are you prepared
| to take vs how often you want to do a prescribed burn
| (sometimes favourable conditions (still, humid, not raining)
| don't show up for months or years.
| BobbyJo wrote:
| I'd rather experience frequent uncontrolled burns in areas that
| do regular controlled burns than even a single uncontrolled
| burn in an area that doesn't.
| putnambr wrote:
| Without prescribed burns it's only a matter of time until we
| experience another 'Big Blow Up' -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fire_of_1910
| m00x wrote:
| Canada recently had a "controlled burn" that was made by an
| international association. They weren't trained on Canadian
| forests properly, now it's a huge wildfire.
| spicymapotofu wrote:
| Which was this? The Banff one [may 4] doesn't seem related to
| this, and if anything seems to defend the practice by example
| - 31 hectares burned, 28 of which were planned, and only
| three horse stables were damaged despite weather changing
| suddenly and spreading the fire.
| m00x wrote:
| If you think 24,000 people evacuated and 3 extra hectares
| burned in an populated area isn't a failure, I don't know
| what to tell you.
|
| It also caused other fires in the area, which weren't
| announced since it would make them look bad.
|
| If you look at the wildfire map, it doesn't seem to be
| noted: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/3ffcc2d0ef3e4
| e0999b0c...
|
| AB governance is terrible right now.
| bo1024 wrote:
| Of course, this is discussed in the article.
| benatkin wrote:
| It should be addressed in the headline. Controlled burns
| _can_ prevent wildfires. There, I fixed it.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've canned the title above. Thanks!
| brodouevencode wrote:
| How often do they get out of hand? Like in terms of percentage?
| lenocinor wrote:
| The article cites a link and claims 1 in a 1000.
| WhatsTheBigIdea wrote:
| All of the Rangers and CalFire people I know never call them
| "controlled burns". Rather they call then "prescribed burns"...
| for exactly this reason.
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