[HN Gopher] The perverse policies that fuel wildfires
___________________________________________________________________
The perverse policies that fuel wildfires
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 103 points
Date : 2024-02-06 16:35 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| nazca wrote:
| I'm glad our century+ of gross mismanaging our forests is getting
| more press. But I think we're still fighting deeply entrenched
| mindsets that fire is always bad. Across the west, our forests
| are fire-adapted and need to burn to be healthy, but we're still
| suppressing most fire and not doing nearly enough prescribed
| burning.
|
| We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x natural
| density after logging. Logging can be a useful management tool,
| but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut we're not building
| healthy forests, and we're just increasing fuel loads.
|
| Meanwhile, climate change gets most of the press. Yes it is a
| contributing issue, but it's unfortunately being used to absolve
| the forest managers of accountability.
|
| A good read is "The Big Burn" by Timothy Egan. It details how at
| its founding, the Forest Service knew the fire suppression regime
| they were creating was unhealthy. But it was the only politically
| possible path for them at the time.
| bell-cot wrote:
| > We're also up against a century of planting trees at 2x
| natural density after logging. Logging can be a useful
| management tool, but if we plant 2 trees for everyone we cut
| we're not building healthy forests, and we're just increasing
| fuel loads.
|
| I'm thinking that mother nature generally plants trees at far
| higher than 2X density.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Rather than piling on downvotes, I will respond to the valid
| question implied here.
|
| Nature does plant trees densely. But most of them don't make
| it to maturity when the "natural" rhythm of wildfires is
| allowed to proceed.
|
| Likewise the composition of species in the ecosystem also
| changes when the fire is suppressed.
| sesm wrote:
| It's almost like we live in Elden Ring universe, where we
| didn't let the tree burn when it should, and now we suffer dire
| consequences.
| kurthr wrote:
| Well, once you've allowed hundreds of thousands of people to
| build houses there, which ones are you going to burn?
| Seriously, do something and they won't burn today. Do nothing
| and they burn. All over the pacific northwest there are
| millions of people who live in forested areas, which will burn
| without fire control.
|
| You can do burns when things are wetter, but how many $Bs are
| you going to be liable for? Or you can just make the insurance
| unattainable.
| kayfox wrote:
| Paul Hessberg did a talk at TEDxBend a few years bask that helps
| sum it up visually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edDZNkm8Mas
|
| There are a lot of reasons fires are more and more common and
| more and more devastating, but the number one reason is build up
| of vegetation on the forest floor that contributes to a ladder
| effect moving the fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.
|
| A lot more effort needs to be undertaken to build fire breaks and
| conduct controlled burns in the forests of North America to
| mitigate this problem and provide the fire the ecosystem evolved
| around and nutrients for new trees. It would also help beat back
| the various fungal and beetle pandemics in the western forests.
| We can't simply blame it all on PG&E and move on, a spark from a
| PG&E power line would not turn into a devastating megafire if the
| forest was healthy.
| graemep wrote:
| The same around the world. Happening in Europe from Scotland to
| Greece.
|
| The media attribute it to global warming which means noting
| gets done about it.
| mjhay wrote:
| It isn't mutually exclusive. Warming is a major cause of
| increased wildfires, and poor land use and overgrowth due to
| fire suppression make it worse.
| graemep wrote:
| The point is that the focus on global warming means no one
| will do anything about poor land management because that
| problem is not made public.
|
| You can see what happens right here in the downvotes I have
| got. Just because I shift blame for something away from
| global warming to another cause, people feel they most
| downvote me.
|
| Global warming is to blame in their minds is equivalent to
| no other cause can be blamed.
|
| I partly made that comment to see how much a rational and
| reasonable comment would get downvoted for that reason. I
| think the experiment proved something.
| davidw wrote:
| The problem is extremely public here in the western US.
| wongarsu wrote:
| It's a matter of framing. We just have to move the
| discussion from "global warming increases wildfires, buy
| more EVs" to "global warming increases wildfires, let's
| improve our forest management to manage the impact (while
| also fighting against climate change)".
| vkou wrote:
| Don't worry, nobody will do anything about global
| warming, either.
|
| We've already blown right past the Paris accord, I'm sure
| we'll soon come up with a new accord that will set a
| target that we will also blow past.
|
| In the meantime, invest in an air conditioner and an air
| purifier for your city home, and try not to own any
| summer dachas in heavily forested areas.
| wk_end wrote:
| The problem is not made public...except in the New
| Yorker? Except by the president of the United States?
|
| Shifting blame towards land management practices - not
| necessarily by you, but for example by that particular
| POTUS - is often an attempt to downplay global warming
| and the urgent need to do take steps to stave it off,
| rather than a good-faith attempt to reform land
| management practices. If people detect a whiff of _that_
| , that's what makes them downvote; given the present and
| future consequences of downplaying global warming and the
| urgent need to take steps to stave it off, and the push
| that's been behind that for the past, oh, fifty-to-
| seventy years or so, can you blame them? No one's against
| reforming land management to prevent forest fires.
| adrianN wrote:
| The forest ecosystems in Europe have not evolved in the
| presence of regular fires afaik. Large parts of Germany for
| example used to be an impassable swamp before they were clear
| cut and drained for agriculture a few hundred years ago.
| polski-g wrote:
| Climate change is the skeleton key of doing nothing. "Climate
| change means there is a drought" Nothing we can do about it,
| not build desalination plants, or raise the cost of water, or
| eminent domain farmers' property who refuse to relinquish
| their century old "water rights". Literally just complain
| about climate change is all we can do.
| XorNot wrote:
| All those things are incredibly expensive and/or unpopular.
|
| That's why no one does them.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| It's infuriating to me that Native Americans who lived here for
| thousands of years before they were colonized had this figured
| out, and we, hundreds of years later with the entire industrial
| revolutions and information ages worth of innovations, still
| can't meaningfully tackle this.
|
| Which is to say, we absolutely can, we just choose not to.
| Absolutely goddamn infuriating how so many problems in our
| world have such catastrophically obvious solutions and we just
| don't, usually because of money.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > for thousands of years before they were colonized had this
| figured out
|
| Yes, it is outrageous that we can't directly apply the same
| policies and methods considering we have the same level of
| urbanization, population, industrial and economic
| requirements and private property laws /s
| davidw wrote:
| IDK about 'outrageous', but it _is_ kind of frustrating it
| has taken us so long to figure out that the people who
| lived here knew what they were doing, and adapting their
| methods to our current society.
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| On the ranking of frustrations regarding wildfires and
| climate change, not doing controlled burns (like the
| native peoples were doing) is really really low for me,
| especially considering all the things I just listed.
| davidw wrote:
| I live in a place with a huge national forest just to the
| west, so for me it is a real concern.
|
| The speed with which this fire ripped through was no
| joke, as an example:
|
| https://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/awbrey-hall-
| fire-20-...
|
| And the city got lucky because the wind was out of the
| NW, rather than from the west, which might have driven it
| straight into the city.
| drone wrote:
| It hasn't "taken us this long to figure out..." the
| issues around prescribed burning are fairly modern and
| related to overreacting/incorrectly responding to some
| major wildfires that killed lots of people in the late
| 19th and early 20th century. (See the formation of the
| USFS and the policies promoted by them, Smoky the Bear,
| etc.)
|
| Fire was a regular tool in everyone in North America's
| toolkit, indigenous or otherwise, and not something white
| people were too stupid to figure out.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| If our industrial and economic requirements and private
| property laws prevent us from maintaining a planet we can
| live on, what fucking good are they? Oh yeah I'm so happy I
| get to own my own little 0.25 acre kingdom upon which I'm
| legally allowed to do anything, the libertarian fantasy,
| then whoops the biosphere collapsed guess I'm dead now, oh
| well at least we created a lot of value for shareholders!
| maximinus_thrax wrote:
| > If our industrial and economic requirements and private
| property laws prevent us from maintaining a planet we can
| live on, what fucking good are they?
|
| I share the same view with you. But we are the minority,
| just FYI. I've expressed these sentiments in public and
| every single time I've been labeled a tree hugging
| commie.
|
| This event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Western_Nor
| th_America_hea... radicalized me.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| I genuinely live for all the people who get pissy at me
| for challenging the base assumptions of things like
| property rights and have no rebuttal apart from screaming
| "communist" at me.
|
| If property rights cause us to kill the planet we're on
| because we're too stubborn to revisit that set of
| assumptions and maybe tweak them so we can save all of
| our lives, then IMO we rightly deserve the incredibly
| stupid demise we will suffer.
| cameldrv wrote:
| This is very true, but also the Native Americans didn't build
| their houses in the forest (for this reason). The white man
| likes to have his cabin in the woods. This is perfectly fine
| in northern Europe and the NE U.S., because due to the
| different climate, wildfires aren't so common, and wood on
| the forest floor there is more prone to rot instead of burn.
|
| Now that there are so many cabins in the woods, there's
| probably an opportunity for a startup that makes robots to
| clear out the forest floor. The only problem is that the
| forest ecosystem has evolved to have periodic fires, but
| perhaps this is still the best of a series of bad options.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| All joking aside, there are tons of mitigation options for
| this, most of which wouldn't even require robots or
| startups, they just require the political will to allocate
| money to do a thing we know needs to be done. We don't need
| a company to do this. We can just say "to protect both our
| environment and tons of people who live in the forested
| areas most at risk, we need to implement a set of
| protection measures to mitigate the probability of
| disastrous fires." These can be some combination of
| clearing forest floors, probably revisiting construction
| guidelines for homes/businesses in these areas, and
| controlled burns in areas where that's required or
| necessary.
|
| But no. We do nothing, and people's homes continue to burn,
| and we dump yet more masses of CO2 into the atmosphere and
| waste thousands of trees, and of course a requisite number
| of human casualties. Ridiculous.
| callalex wrote:
| > These can be some combination of clearing forest
| floors, probably revisiting construction guidelines for
| homes/businesses in these areas, and controlled burns in
| areas where that's required or necessary.
|
| But that's communism! You bureaucrats can't tell me what
| to do! (You may think I am straw-manning but this is
| based on real, actual conversations that I have had with
| real, actual people in rural California. There is a
| terrible brain rot that has ossified in "conservative"
| culture in rural America and at this point I don't think
| anything can actually be done about it. These people will
| happily burn to death with an ignorant smile on their
| face.
| cameldrv wrote:
| The only problem is that then their heirs will sue PG&E
| and before long I'll have a $3000 electric bill.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| Honestly calling American conservatives conservatives at
| all is an insult to an ideology that, while I do oppose
| _most_ things held by, is at least a coherent ethos that
| does have valid points on occasion. Mainstream
| "conservatism" in the United States however was utterly
| hollowed out by the likes of Rush Limbaugh's EIB network,
| Fox News, etc. to at this point be merely an entire
| ideology who's sole tenet is "Fuck liberals."
|
| That's the entire thing now. Just fuck liberals. No
| matter what the issue is, fuck liberals. If liberals want
| sensible regulations, they will be opposed. If
| conservatives suggest the exact same ones, they'll be
| fine with it. If the Liberals cave and give the
| Conservatives exactly what they want, they'll still
| oppose it because it'll be signed by a Liberal president,
| which is a Liberal accomplishing something, and therefore
| conflicts with "Fuck Liberals." They will fuck Liberals
| if it costs them freedoms, the lives of their children,
| the stability of their government, and the habitability
| of their biosphere.
|
| That's all mainstream conservatism is anymore here and
| frankly it should be roundly mocked and derided at every
| opportunity for that. This complete non-ideology is why
| political issues here can comprehensively not be
| resolved, because one side's entire driving force is
| fucking over the other.
| nick7376182 wrote:
| The last thing I want to be scared of is a self-driving
| brush hog.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| When Fern Gully came out, were you hiding under the
| couch?
| caseysoftware wrote:
| > _It 's infuriating to me that Native Americans who lived
| here for thousands of years before they were colonized had
| this figured out_
|
| Which tribes do you mean? Some were in the plains, some were
| in the forests, and many more were nomadic over vast areas.
| There were - and still are - many peoples with wildly
| different lives, cultures, and understanding encompassing the
| millions of square miles that make up North America. Don't
| call us "colonized" as you imagine we're all the same.
|
| To address your specific point, the "figured out" part was
| the fact that fires could only be detected by sight (or smell
| if close enough) so they burned regularly without a massive
| build up of fuel. In present times, we detect and stop fires
| until we can't and then catastrophe occurs.
| gorwell wrote:
| It's infuriating how people spread that racist meme.
| jeffbee wrote:
| What are we to make of the photographs taken from fire lookouts
| that are used as evidence in this talk? Consider the Thorp
| Mountain photo from the 1930s. Prior to that, loggers had come
| in and largely wrecked that forest. The USFS GIS indicates that
| the area around Thorp Mountain is between 20-30% old growth, is
| mostly mature replacement forest. So a photo from the 1930s
| showing patchy forests would have been a reflection of the fact
| that industrial era Americans had already come through and
| taken most of the trees.
| davidw wrote:
| What's your source on even high, rugged country like that
| being logged out by the 1930ies at an industrial scale?
| jeffbee wrote:
| I am looking at the USDA Old Growth and Mature Forests GIS.
| Why do you doubt it? The Northern Pacific Railroad went
| right through that area, and Congress granted them lands 40
| miles on either side of their route.
| davidw wrote:
| They could have easily stripped the lower areas fairly
| thoroughly, and left higher peaks alone. I'm not saying
| "I doubt it happened", just that I'm not convinced either
| way.
| callalex wrote:
| What is there to be convinced of? The loggers weren't
| hiding their practices as they weren't doing anything
| illegal. This is well documented and studied.
| mtnGoat wrote:
| In addition to logging grazing was also happening throughout
| California, even in the high country for hundreds of years.
| This also decreased fire risk by eliminating fuel.
| davidw wrote:
| His research looks pretty interesting:
|
| https://www.fs.usda.gov/research/about/people/phessburg
| Izkata wrote:
| > but the number one reason is build up of vegetation on the
| forest floor that contributes to a ladder effect moving the
| fire from a ground fire to a canopy fire.
|
| So to go off on a bit of a tangent, in a fantasy book from
| 1998* there was a fire mage who had been preventing wildfires
| for decades. When green mage (plants/trees/etc) finds out about
| this she chews him out about the dangerous conditions he's
| creating by not letting the buildup on the ground burn away. By
| the end of the book the wildfires have reached the forest and
| the fire mage dies trying to stop the resulting firestorm.
|
| Now yes it's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in this
| series plus the way the whole situation was presented I just
| kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's been
| weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps coming up.
|
| * _Circle of Magic_ #3, _Daja 's Book_
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> Now yes it 's fantasy but the way ambient magic works in
| this series plus the way the whole situation was presented I
| just kinda figured this risk was well-enough known, so it's
| been weird to me over the past decade or so how it keeps
| coming up._
|
| It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo
| Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed burns
| to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th century it was
| officially part of US Forest Service management practices.
| The problem has always been the people who live in and around
| fire prone areas. They've used public pressure, bureaucracy,
| and litigation to prevent State and Federal agencies from
| properly managing the forests since the post-war boom.
|
| In California, for example, permits are managed by 35
| different "Air Districts" created in 1947 each with their own
| local leadership that are easily lobbied. Residents can
| trivially grind any project to a halt because controlled
| burns are practically impossible, given California's
| pollution standards, without these permits and exceptions
| from the state Air Resources Board.
|
| It's coming up now because the situation is so dire we need a
| concerted effort to sway public opinion towards the realistic
| solution. Now that insurance companies are giving up on these
| fire prone markets, the residents have no choice but to get
| with the program.
| fakedang wrote:
| >It's been a well known risk for at least a century. Aldo
| Leopold began popularizing the idea of using prescribed
| burns to manage forests in the 1920s and by mid-20th
| century it was officially part of US Forest Service
| management practices.
|
| Actually, the Native Americans historically started the
| practice.
| throwup238 wrote:
| That's why I said "at least." Those practices inspired
| Aldo Leopold (among others) but he was the one to do most
| of the work to convince US government agencies of their
| merit.
| DiscourseFan wrote:
| Is there a way to build permanent housing in parts of
| California that are prone to fires even with controlled
| burns? Even controlled fires pose a risk to habitation; if
| you were a semi-nomadic tribe (like the former residents
| before Americans brought western "Reason" and domestication
| to the west coast), you could move everyone out of the area
| to be burned, and then come back X many months/years later
| when wildlife and vegetation returned.
|
| If, on the other hand, the area to be burned has "invested
| capital" and houses and land on it--essentially, private
| property, which has this strange quality of fixity even in
| the face of something as destructive as the earth (which
| never fails to dissolve it), how would you guarantee,
| without _incredibly_ high insurance premiums, that people
| 's houses wouldn't burn down.
|
| And even if people are willing to pay the premiums, they
| would do so knowing that the government might decide,
| almost randomly (to them), to burn a chunk of forest _right
| next to their house_. They 'd get fair warning, sure, but
| who wants to own a house that might burn down in 10 years
| because the state decides that its too much of a risk to
| have that patch of land burn naturally?
| Arrath wrote:
| > Is there a way to build permanent housing in parts of
| California that are prone to fires even with controlled
| burns?
|
| Absolutely. A good starting point is to look to
| Australia's regulations for construction materials,
| methods, water storage and setback/firebreak
| requirements, etc. for fire safety in bushfire prone
| areas.
|
| While it may be picturesque to have your house or cabin
| nestled in amongst the forest, your fire survivability is
| Zero.
| taneq wrote:
| Even so, we lose plenty of houses because people want to
| live 'out in the bush' but don't want to do all of these
| things.
| Arrath wrote:
| Oh its certainly not foolproof, but better than what we
| usually do here in the states.
| taneq wrote:
| Yeah, hopefully the forestry people over there realise
| that hazard reduction burns aren't optional if you're
| gonna build houses in the forest and then expect it to
| not burn down.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| The fact that people can go build a house in the middle
| of bush that's renowned, sometimes even evolved for, for
| fire, strikes me as nuts.
|
| Especially when volunteer firefighters then have to risk
| their lives to save people with the lovely view. (Ditto
| California...)
| mtnGoat wrote:
| I don't know anyone working on wildfires in the United
| States for free. Not saying there is no risk, but they
| are paid and understand the risks. Some nice neighbors
| have their own contract fire crews, which are not cheap.
| toast0 wrote:
| I live in a wooded area in Washington state, and I'm not
| too worried about my buildings, because I have a
| relatively huge clearing around my house and garage. And
| I don't live in my outbuilding that's kind of too close
| to the forest. But I'd still need to evacuate, somehow,
| if there were a forest fire. The smoke would be
| dangerous, I imagine utility power would be lost, and my
| generator is actually a couple trees into the woods.
|
| Insurance companies could presumably do inspections of
| clearings and cancel or charge more if you don't have
| sufficient clearing, but municipalities aren't going to
| like the tree cutting that results.
| devilbunny wrote:
| Build it out of concrete blocks with a metal roof. The
| contents are almost certainly flammable, but the
| structure isn't.
| pvaldes wrote:
| More than 90% of forests are provoked by humans. Some are
| accidents. Other not. Starting in multiple locations at the
| same time; at night. The same pattern seen again and again and
| again In Chile, Canada, USA, Spain, Portugal, Greece...
| Coordinated and deliberated.
|
| > the _number one reason_ is build up of vegetation on the
| forest floor
|
| Yeah, sure man.
|
| 123 killed in Chile and everybody is avoiding to see the huge
| elephant in the middle of the room painted with the word
| terrorism in uppercase letters.
|
| We could remove every single leaf in the soil of the forest,
| and gasoline cans would still grow in the trees.
| runarberg wrote:
| I'm not an expert, so I could be wrong about this, but this
| sounds like a case of not addressing the elephant in the room.
| Isn't the number one reason the changing climates as a result
| of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
|
| Sure there are bad forest management, alien species, build up
| of vegetation on the forest floor etc. But are these actually
| the number one reason when the climate is a whole degree warmer
| on average, with prolonged droughts, with native species dying
| from said heat and droughts, etc.
|
| This feels like another clear case of climate denialism.
| unnamed76ri wrote:
| What is the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
| and how much has that changed in the past 100 years?
| Something worth looking into.
| runarberg wrote:
| I can look it up (and so can you) but it is irrelevant for
| this conversation.
|
| This matters if you are a climate scientist and are
| constructing a model to make predictions or shape policy.
| But for this conversation, all we need to know is that the
| percentage has increased because of human activity
| (specifically as a result of fossil fuel extraction and
| usage for energy consumption) and this increase is enough
| to cause significant warming, shaping the climate, and
| escalating wild fire intensity and frequency.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| We probably need different solutions for the pacific northwest
| and the southwest. From everything I've read, Chaparral tends
| to turn into grasslands if it burns too often. And Chaparral is
| the wildfire problem in the LA region.
| andrei_says_ wrote:
| Going back in time and not clear cutting all old forest on a
| whole continent would be a big improvement, too.
|
| The new growth is much more likely to be devastated by fires.
| Trees are smaller, branches are lower, brush is thicker etc.
| plorg wrote:
| And in many places the trees that grow back are not the same
| species that were cut to begin with, and don't necessarily
| function in the same fire ecology, either because they have
| evolutionary advantages in clean cut environments or because
| they were planted for their supposely greater economic value.
| sbohacek wrote:
| The 2022 Calf Canyon/Hermits Peak Fire in New Mexico was caused
| by controlled burns that got out of control. One part of the
| fire was from a controlled burn that was completed in January
| and then "reignited" in April!
|
| In any case, some regions might have frequent episodes that are
| hot, dry, and/or windy so that techniques that easily worked a
| hundred years ago are no longer useful.
| gadders wrote:
| Lot another dollar in the Trump was right jar.
|
| https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/...
| andybak wrote:
| I'm confused. I first read an article along these lines over 20
| years ago and it seemed a fairly intuitively solid argument with
| lots of evidential support.
|
| Has it still not become official policy?
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Depends where you go. I remember seeing controlled burns in the
| Gila Wilderness circa 1993.
| m0llusk wrote:
| It is never that simple. Some geographies naturally trap smoke
| in ways that make controlled burns disruptive to nearby
| communities. There must also be resources available in case
| controlled burns get out of control. All of this takes
| coordination and costs money. Going from a general agreement to
| a specific implementation is turning out to be difficult in
| many areas.
| legitster wrote:
| > More prescribed burning, more metal roofs, better zoning--
| these are all steps that could make a significant difference at
| a local level.
|
| We basically are, except for the zoning thing. Keeping people
| from living near forests is hard politically.
| taeric wrote:
| The difficulty, as I understand it, is largely that doing these
| actions are not themselves risk free. And the risk is not at
| all easy to insure against, such that people do what they can
| to avoid taking on any actions that could lead to liability on
| them. Which leads to nobody having the courage to do it.
| kibwen wrote:
| In the US, different agencies are responsible for different
| tracts of land. At a federal level, the BLM has understood the
| value of prescribed burns for many years now, although they're
| still wrestling with the result of decades of prior fire-
| suppression policies. Meanwhile, state agencies in fire-prone
| states are beholden to the voters of fire-prone states who
| don't want to be told that they can't have their cake (a year-
| round smoke-free residence in the lovely arboreal countryside)
| and eat it too (not having their house burn down in an
| unstoppable manmade maelstrom), so you can imagine how that's
| going.
| vondur wrote:
| I saw a section of Forest in Yosemite that is being managed
| according to modern forestry practices. The section has far fewer
| trees in it compared to the non managed section. Apparenlty there
| are too many trees in the Western US Forests, which also makes
| fires worse.
| tadfisher wrote:
| This is true. My region (Oregon's Willamette Valley) consisted
| of oak savanna and grassland prairies which were maintained by
| controlled fires set by the native tribes. Since European
| settlement, this ecosystem is 99.5% gone, having been lost to
| thick woodlands consisting mostly of Douglas fir and maple.
|
| Visiting the region, you'd think that dense evergreen forests
| are the "natural" state of the ecosystem, but this is largely
| an artifact of 150+ years of fire suppression.
| njarboe wrote:
| The oak savanna was a highly constructed world managed by
| humans for acorn production and other reasons. What is
| "natural" and why do we desire it?
| jmcqk6 wrote:
| In this case "natural" might be better described as
| "sustainable". Of course it was natural, we are all part of
| nature.
|
| The issue is the sustainability of these ecosystems and the
| impact on life around it. The indigenous peoples lived a
| much tighter connection to the land, with a give and take,
| recognizing the fundamental interdependence.
|
| The theme for the last hundreds years has not been
| sustainability, but value extraction. Value extraction
| without regards to sustainability is a classic trade giving
| away long term success while gaining short term rewards.
| hector_vasquez wrote:
| Why would tribal land management be "natural" but not more
| recent land management? It seems more like we just need to
| decide how we want the land to be and burn or not burn to
| achieve our goals.
| tadfisher wrote:
| That was why I used air-quotes. What is "natural" isn't
| always healthy, and I'd argue leaving ecosystems to nature
| is impossible these days. I'm advocating for responsible
| stewardship.
| h0l0cube wrote:
| Maybe it's not "natural", but a _matured_ land management
| practice. It's 1000s of years of fire culture vs a couple
| of hundred.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| I get what you're saying, but "native tribes" were just part
| of the ecosystem as much as we are. The is nothing magical or
| pure about them.
|
| The "true" natural state of a region is one without any
| management or intervention from anyone.
|
| We are not "invasive" species and contrary to what the rocket
| man says, Earth is our home and we will not be anywhere else,
| so the only solution is to use our brains and judgment.
| tadfisher wrote:
| You may have misread my statement. Dense evergreen forests
| in the valley weren't natural even before tribal
| settlement. The tribes innovated by practicing controlled
| burns, and part of this was due to wanting to survive;
| fires caused by lightning and other non-human causes are
| rare in the valley, so the "natural" state was catastrophic
| fires every decade or so as forests encroached and provided
| tinder.
| legitster wrote:
| Or you know, we could actually log the lands like these agencies
| were supposed to enable in the first place.
|
| There's a lot of healthy logging that can exist on the spectrum
| between clear cutting and total preservation. So for
| conservationists to advocate literally letting the forests burn
| before considering even a bit of actual forest management is
| insanity. We're sitting on one of the largest reserves of
| renewable resources in the world, and we would literally rather
| let it burn to the ground.
|
| Most of these forests in question (USFS and related agencies)
| shut down logging on these lands decades ago, mostly as an act of
| conservation hubris. And the irony is they are now spending more
| money on replanting and thinning than they ever did when they
| were getting paid to do it by logging companies.
|
| Managed logging not only thins out the forests so that burns are
| less damaging. And trees being logged instead of burned not only
| reduce the carbon, they act as a store of it!
| WheatMillington wrote:
| This comment is being downvoted, however it seems sensible to
| me? Can someone who is downvoting offer a counter argument
| instead?
| kurthr wrote:
| Much of the land is not commercially profitable to log due to
| competition with much larger, less steep, and more uniform
| forests. Also, there would be significant externalities to
| those living there (you can argue with them, but there are
| millions), including wildlife disruption/movement, surface
| water contamination/flooding/landslide, road
| obstruction/damage.
|
| Once you allow a significant number of people to live there,
| the easiest political thing is just to make the costs of
| insurance/rebuilding/maintenance so high that people move
| out.
| legitster wrote:
| From the official CRS report on the NFS lands
| (https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R45688.pdf):
|
| > Numerous interrelated factors, including statutory,
| administrative, biological, and market influences, may have
| contributed to the decline in timber harvesting on NFS
| lands. The effect of each individual factor is not settled,
| as is the effect of each factor over time. These factors
| occurred at varying points in time and may not coincide
| directly with observed harvest level changes. Some sources
| have noted that statutory changes added complexity to
| forest management and increasing litigation frequency,
| while also increasing transparency and public
| participation.48 Other sources have noted changing
| management priorities. Others have noted decreasing
| domestic demand, volatile prices, and the prevalence of
| less valuable timber due to high harvest levels in previous
| decades. The listing of the northern spotted owl (Strix
| occidentalis caurina) under the Endangered Species Act in
| 1990 is often discussed in regard to declining timber
| harvest levels.
|
| So, the declining demand for wood probably means the
| industry is probably pretty happy to use the tree farms
| they have developed over the years. But it still seems like
| they would be happy to log public lands if it was made more
| convenient.
| dbrueck wrote:
| Yeah, it is in fact very sensible.
|
| The following is an uncharitable take but here goes: the
| stereotypical social media conservationist will be 100% anti-
| logging because there's no room for nuance - you either love
| the planet or you're a corporate money grubber - while people
| who recognize that complex problems typically aren't black
| and white and who genuinely care enough about the environment
| to become informed on the topic generally agree that some
| amount of controlled logging is a very good thing.
| legitster wrote:
| I will be even more specific - most modern conservationists
| are generally pro-logging! It's a renewals resource that's
| carbon negative!
|
| Anti-logging activism is a holdover from a specific time in
| the 80s when we had no other environmental concerns other
| than to superficially preserve the beauty of nature.
|
| Anyone who tied themselves to a tree to stop a logger is
| now in their 50s and 60s. A minority, but at a peak age to
| influence policy.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > Anyone who tied themselves to a tree to stop a logger
| is now in their 50s and 60s. A minority, but at a peak
| age to influence policy.
|
| Here in Germany, it's routine. 2021 had the Forst Kasten
| in Munich occupied to protest against a gravel strip-
| mining operation [1], and the Hambacher Forst adjacent to
| a lignite strip-mining operation is still occupied [2].
|
| [1] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/muenchen-forst-
| kasten-k...
|
| [2] https://hambacherforst.org/besetzung/waldbesetzung/
| doikor wrote:
| Problem is that you would have to do the logging in a very
| uneconomic way.
|
| Basically you would want to leave the most profitable trees
| (big/old ones) and cut down all the small ones. This is
| because big trees don't really burn down and survive the
| fires for the most part. After a fire they provide a canopy
| stopping the forest from growing to be as dense in the
| future. With the less dense forest the fires after that won't
| be as intense.
| legitster wrote:
| Determining trees for cutting is usually determined by the
| forester, not the logger. If the forest manager wants to
| leave the big trees, that's on them and their management
| plan.
|
| All the more reason to have logging happen on publicly
| managed lands than private ones where "controlled wildfire
| burns" might not be a consideration.
| PedroBatista wrote:
| True but let's not pretend the logging industry has a long and
| rich history of good conservationism.
|
| They are there ( obviously ) for the money, and clear cutting
| everything and "investing" by planting huge areas of mono
| cultures is anything but "less damaging"
|
| Also, most of the timber doesn't actually burn during these
| fires, most get cut and sold as it's perfectly good wood if you
| don't let them rot in 1-2 years.
|
| As always and anything, the virtue is in the middle. A good
| system where these companies can cut tree and be economical
| viable but also rules that keep the biodiversity alive and
| well. A long and not-corrupt department.. That's why these
| things are so difficult.
| legitster wrote:
| Sure, but it's the whole reason this model was set up in the
| first place! It's like we built a school for the kids and
| banned them from it for being uneducated.
|
| There's enough forests in the US west for loggers to log bits
| and pieces of it and not return for a hundred years. Perfect
| for biodiversity. They have been forced onto dense
| monoculture lots out of necessity.
|
| Unless we want to want to go back to the 80s and pretend
| plastic is more environmentally friendly than paper products
| (which was a real argument of the time), we shouldn't be so
| hostile to forestry concerns.
| ysofunny wrote:
| whenever I feel frustrated I think to some of the people involved
| in this debacle for over 30 years
|
| 30 years of the idiocy of public bureaucracy and government
| politics getting in the way of a better world. the people on that
| fight are my personal heroes in withstanding frustration
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20240203231919/https://www.newyor...
| hasty_pudding wrote:
| I'm from the government I'm here to help!
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Is this one of Trump's unlikely broken clock moments[0]? (Ignore
| his, ahem, 'unsophisticated' wording for a second)
|
| [0]
| https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/20/...
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Where I live wild fires are almost certainly the collision of two
| ingredients: drought and alcohol consumption.
| paulorlando wrote:
| The wildfire problem is also a case of the long reach of short-
| term interests. We would be able to put up with short-term
| inconvenience in the form of smoke from smaller fires otherwise.
| Instead we produced a perverse result the opposite of what was
| desired. Attempts to reduce small problems lead to bigger
| problems.
|
| Short post about the morals of that type of problem:
| https://unintendedconsequenc.es/morals-of-the-moment/
| bparsons wrote:
| On thing that is hard for people to conceptualize is the
| difference between old growth forests (which are exceedingly
| rare) and secondary growth forests.
|
| Replanted, secondary forests are what most people are familiar
| with. They tend to have one or two types of tree, maybe some
| scrub brush on the ground, and whatever fell over in previous
| seasons. These forests tend to be very vulnerable to wildfire.
| The ground gets dried out really quickly, the stuff on the ground
| is pretty minimal, and under summer conditions, it is a tinder
| box.
|
| Most people have never actually been into a true old growth
| forest. The ground can have a few feet of wet moss, plants, and
| fungi that overtakes the fallen trees and breaks it down. The
| ground is usually soft, even in the dead of summer. Under really
| extreme conditions these forests can still be vulnerable, but
| they have far more robust defenses against fire than the
| secondary growth.
|
| Water management is also a big piece of this puzzle. Rivers,
| creeks and lakes are supposed to spill their banks every spring
| and soak everything around it. When you divert, contain and
| withdraw trillions of liters of water, you are creating a lot of
| unintended consequences down the road. The soil can hold onto a
| lot of water over long periods of time --- especially if there is
| significant vegetation on top of the soil to protect it.
|
| The discussion about controlled burning is important, but it
| pales in comparison to the broader conditions that are driving
| the trend.
| bmartin13 wrote:
| https://www.newsweek.com/how-bad-2023-wildfires-chart-dramat...
| catherinecodes wrote:
| > Native Americans routinely burned the landscape--to foster the
| growth of useful plants, to clear space for farming, and to
| improve the conditions for hunting. > ... > In addition to
| maintaining parklike conditions, these managed blazes prevented
| fuel from building up, and so staved off larger, potentially
| unmanageable conflagrations.
|
| Much of the world still operates like this. Check out the Chiang
| Mai, Thailand burning season[1].
|
| The US and Canada are some of the only countries where wood is
| the primary building material. In the rest of the world, stone is
| used which doesn't catch fire so easily. That might help explain
| the fear of fires in the US.
|
| 1: https://thaifreu.de/chiang-mai/burning-season/
| punnerud wrote:
| And the Nordic countries (places where they have a lot of
| forest)
| catherinecodes wrote:
| The government of Russia, home to the world's largest forest
| reserves, is trying to subsidize wood-frame buildings. Most
| modern buildings are made from stone, though, because of fire
| regulations[1].
|
| 1: https://nordregioprojects.org/blog/2021/02/02/wood-in-
| constr...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-02-06 23:00 UTC)