Wildfire, drought and chainsaws: California’s iconic trees are casualties in the war on fire
California’s forests are in trouble. Wildfire and drought have ravaged millions of trees. Scientists say, perhaps surprisingly, the answer is more frequent fire.
Humans are largely to blame. Researchers say climate change underpins the devastation, while a century of aggressive logging and fire suppression has left timberlands choked with younger, thirsty trees primed by drought for destructive conflagrations.
The health of these exalted landscapes has for the last century taken a backseat to human interests and militarized firefighting forces. But a tipping point has been reached. Fires have become overwhelmingly explosive.
Why top California fire expert is so worried about Caldor Fire as it approaches Tahoe
The thing that’s surprising this year is the spot fires. Almost 90% of embers that are dropping on unburned fuel have the potential to start a new fire this year because it’s so dry after two years of drought. That’s very extreme and just really enables these fires to move ahead of the fire lines.
Can ‘active forest management’ really reduce wildfire risk?
Mitigating wildfire impacts by reducing home losses is one area where scientists and politicians find common ground. Programs like FireWise USA, which helps individuals and communities protect against structure loss by assessing ignition potential and working with property owners to decrease it, enjoy widespread support in both policy and research circles. But when it comes to active forest management, the farther from a community a proposed logging, thinning or burning project is, the more controversial it becomes.
Lightning, wildfire, and bureaucracy: The Woods Creek story
Mike Beasley, a retired National Forest chief from California who co-founded an organization called Foresters (sic) United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, began posting on Aug. 8 on the Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest web page, calling the Needle Fire “an arson fire,” asking, “Why was it so important to eliminate records of this fire?” and saying, “A lot of folks would like to know what happened on the Galt Ranch.”
Fighting fire with fire: Native American burning practices spark interest in a year of historic wildfires
“The fires are much more dangerous than ever before, because we have interrupted that long-standing practice of cultural burning by Native peoples, which kept things in check,” said Kari Norgaard, a sociologist at the University of Oregon who has been working with the Karuk Tribe for the last 15 years. “I think there’s no question that what we’re seeing now has to do with the changing climate, as well as a combination of [the] failed management of fire suppression.”
Attacking fires by air often does no good, expert says
More than three-quarters of air attacks on wildfires are ineffective, according to internal data from the fire command in the autonomous Spanish region of Catalonia, whose head researcher is calling for major changes in how the warming world battles its blazes.
The science of how wildfires got so hellish
Two factors have collided to turn “good” fires into “bad” ones: climate change and, ironically enough, a history of fire suppression. Climate change means that vegetation is drier and primed to burn catastrophically. Extinguishing burns, especially those that threaten lives and structures, means that mountains of that fuel have built up.
Wildfires are ravaging forests set aside to soak up greenhouse gases
“The worst fire season in Western U.S. history is going on,” said Danny Cullenward, the policy director of CarbonPlan. “That story is just crashing headfirst into some of the big bets that policymakers and private companies have made about the role of forest carbon as a climate solution. What we are seeing is, a bunch of projects are on fire.”
The burning debate: manage forest fires suppress them?
Fire suppression will not alter this unsettling dynamic. We paradoxically need more fire, not less — targeted, site-specific reintroductions designed to restore ecosystem health. This may seem counterintuitive, but as forest ranger and firefighter Allen Calbrick advised Pinchot in 1940, fire is “nature’s way of cleaning up her backyard” and providing “good clean ground on which to grow.”
How Napa's Cakebread winery absolved itself of starting one of California's most destructive fires
If Cakebread’s vineyard fence were found to have sparked the Glass Fire, and if the winery were found guilty of negligence or another statutory violation, it would have been vulnerable to lawsuits from Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, as well as the owners of 650 destroyed homes.
As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management
“There’s no way to keep fire out of forests,” Bauer said. “If you do it then the fuels conditions just become worse and worse until you get a really bad fire on a really bad weather day and it burns then. All putting fire out does really is defer the risk to a future fire.”
Documenting a wildfire when it’s in your backyard
I’ve photographed wildfires for The New York Times and other news outlets for 20 years. I covered the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa in 2017 and the Camp fire in Paradise in 2018. Seeing the aftermath of the Tubbs fire was the real eye-opener. It jumped six lanes of Highway 101, burning through strip malls and destroying the Coffey Park neighborhood. To me, it showed that nowhere in the West is truly safe from wildfire.
‘Tired, exhausted’ California firefighters stretched thin as they battle unprecedented wildfires
The incredible speed and ferocity of wildfires in recent years has also changed the methods that crews use to fight the blazes, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who is now executive director of the wildfire prevention organization Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
“Unlike years past, where with a large fire, the crews can settle in for a long siege, this is kind of run-and-gun,” he said. “But at a cost to other incidents — other wildfires — because the crews are just beat up, and burned out, with battle fatigue, if you will.”
An obsession with suppression
And yet, 20 years later, the Forest Service keeps going back to treating fire as the enemy. Timothy Ingalsbee, head of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, told me he’s seen it over and again: “It’s almost a chronic knee-jerk reaction to fall back on this retrograde policy,” he said.
Welcome to the Pyrocene
The planet’s current unhinged pyrogeography has also been shaped by fires that should have been present and weren’t. These are the fires historically set by nature or people to which landscapes had adapted. Now those fires are mostly gone, and the land has responded by degrading ecologically while building up combustibles to stoke more savage wildfires. The Earth’s fire crisis, that is, is not just about the bad burns that trash countrysides and crash into towns. It is equally about the good fires that have vanished because they were extinguished or no longer lit. The Earth’s biota is disintegrating as much by tame fire’s absence as by feral fire’s outbreaks.
Forest management not so clear cut
An analysis by Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology of last year’s Labor Day fires found that plantation forests in Holiday Farm Fire along the McKenzie River burned more intensely than nearby federally managed lands.
“Climate change is causing fires to grow so big and so fast that what they are burning through is the legacy of industrial forestry,” said Ingalsbee.
California can either make fire part of its cultural identity, or it can watch its heritage go up in smoke
In the early 1900s, this practice of cultural burning was criminalized when federal and state officials initiated an era of fire suppression. The stated goal was to save trees — to protect forests from the very process that had shaped and maintained them through time. Yet we know now those losses weren’t avoided; rather, by removing fire, the losses were stalled, accentuated. It’s clear that the fires that burn now are making up for generations of missed fire. The more we’ve rejected fire as the natural — and human — process that it is, the more volatile it has become.
Welcome to ‘Trump world,’ the climate future scientists fear
“These politicians don’t dispute that the climate is changing, but they are absolutely in denial about what curbing it would entail,” wrote Kate Aronoff of the New Republic. “The report has made clear that the climate in which this country became a superpower no longer exists. So why are politicians stuck on twentieth-century answers to the twenty-first century’s problems?”
Climate change is only one driver of explosive wildfire seasons — don't forget land management
Welcome to a new era of wildfire in the American West — and increasingly, in other parts of the world. The fire seasons that have been scorching huge areas and wiping entire towns from the map are not anomalies — they appear to be the future. To meet that future, a response could be based on an understanding that wildfire is not going away, wildfire will be a part of the ecosystem moving forward and fire management systems should be modernized to meet the moment.