Postrel: You can’t fight fires with political hot air
The California fires have produced apocalyptic images and rhetoric to match. Instead of talking about how to prevent dangerous conflagrations and limit their damage, loud public voices denounce their favorite sinners: fossil-fuel use or fanatical environmentalism or corporate greed or building houses in the woods or whatever the critic hates about California. These morality tales often contain elements of truth, but they substitute righteous feelings for accurate details and practical solutions. By stoking political division, they may even make future fires more likely.
President Donald Trump is correct, for instance, that better forest management would help. He's wrong about what it would look like, why it isn't in place and who's ultimately in charge. The details don't serve his tribal interests.
The same is true about claims that the problem is naughty Californians living too close to nature. It's as absurd to say that Californians shouldn't have buildings in wooded areas as it would be to say that the foliage should be leveled and replaced with a fire-resistant urban landscape of concrete and steel - or that fire-prone Chicago should have been abandoned in the 19th century and flammable London in the 17th. Human civilization has always required learning to live with fire.
Yes, regulators should make it easier to build in cities, where the demand for housing outstrips supply. But restricting construction on cheap outlying land will only worsen the state's housing crisis. Living near potential fuel is hardly a peculiar California quirk. In fact, about a third of all Americans now live in what's known as the Wildland Urban Interface, or WUI, and those houses aren't going anywhere. Not everyone goes for pricey lots in the concrete jungle.
There are practical ways to limit the damage wrought by wildfires that have been part of the western landscape since time immemorial and that appear to be worsening because of climate change. If everyone would calm down and stop trying to score political points at the expense of wildfire victims, we could significantly ameliorate the problem.
For starters, let's differentiate three types of fires: forest fires, chaparral fires and structure fires. The first two are normal parts of the region's ecology. “An estimated 54 percent of California ecosystems are fire dependent, and most of the rest are fire adapted,” writes fire historian Stephen Pyne. “Only the most parched of Mojave deserts, stony summits, perennial wetlands, and fog-sodden patches of the coast are spared.” Many of the state's native flora and fauna need periodic fires to flourish. The question is how to manage them.
That's where the president's garbled advice comes in.
In the early 20th century, the new U.S. Forest Service debated how to deal with fire in the western woods it controlled. (The federal government owns about 45% of California, almost 46 million acres.) One side advocated periodic “light-burning,” dubbing it “the Indian way of forest management.” These fire supporters lost the argument to those who, Pyne writes, “favored active fire protection by applying the science of the day with the force of government authority to prevent fires, fight fires, exclude fires. The light-burning controversy was a national issue, but it was argued in California.”
For most of the 20th century, professional foresters viewed every woodland fire as undesirable. Smokey Bear, who celebrates his 75th birthday this year, instilled that lesson in the general public.
Like the idea that every microbe is harmful, that view is now obsolete. Since at least the 1990s, the overwhelming scientific consensus has been that suppressing every blaze damages ecosystems and encourages far more dangerous conflagrations. But controlled burns are still rare. “The fact is that less than 1% of Forest Service lands are currently being managed with fire each year,” reports the Nature Conservancy. “It will take some years to build the capacity and social will to manage fire for resource benefits at large scales.”
Meanwhile, Californians and their forests are still living with the consequence of the earlier paradigm: a huge buildup of the brush and small trees that can fuel megafires, particularly in the northern parts of the state. That buildup persists mostly for reasons that are much more quotidian than opposition from intransigent greens. Restoring a healthy forest with tree thinning and prescribed burns takes money and trained personnel, and there's a shortage of both.
Fire is much cheaper per acre than mechanical clearing, but it can't be used everywhere. In some cases, the terrain makes the blaze too hard to control, while in others people live too close. As for thinning, allowing private contractors to do it can reduce costs, by giving them access to potentially salable wood. But the trees and brush that need to go aren't high-value timber, and not every area is easily accessible.
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