Over the weekend, President Trump tweeted that California’s multiplying wildfires are “being magnified & made so much worse by the bad environmental laws…“Must also tree clear to stop fire spreading!”
There’s just one problem. The Trump administration’s own budget request for the current fiscal year and the coming one proposed slashing tens of millions of dollars from the Department of Interior and U.S. Forest Service budgets dedicated to the kind of tree clearing and other forest management work experts say is needed. And it’s just one example of how the federal government is still not prioritizing fire mitigation to the scale that is needed, according to forestry experts.
Environmentalists are not even the main drag on controlled burning. Why do people automatically jump to that conclusion? And it’s not a new policy from Obama either.
The conflict of controlled burn policy in the United States has roots in the historical campaigns to combat wildfires and to the eventual acceptance of fire as a necessary ecological phenomenon. The notion of fire as a tool had somewhat evolved by the late 1970’s as the National Park Service authorized and administered controlled burns.[24] While the methodology was still relatively emergent the Yellowstone fires of 1988 struck, which significantly politicized fire management. The ensuing media coverage was a spectacle that was vulnerable to misinformation. Reports drastically inflated the scale of the fires which stigmatized politicians in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana to believe that all fires represented a loss of revenue from tourism.[24] Partially as a result of millions of dollars lost in estimates, stricter data recording was enforced and thresholds were established for determining which fires must be suppressed.[25] Paramount to the new action plans is the suppression of fires that threaten the loss of human life with leniency toward areas of historic, scientific, or special ecological interest.[26] Since 1988, many states have made progress toward controlled burns but with a proclivity toward forgetfulness between fire events. Senators Ron Wyden and Mike Crapo of Oregon and Idaho have been moving to reduce the shifting of capital from fire prevention to fire suppression following the harsh fires of 2017 in both states.[27]
It’s mostly fake science that prevents more controlled burns. Another big factor is urban sprawl. There are plenty of fires in Nevada as well but we don’t hear about them because they are burned in wide open space. In CA though we have people living deep in the woods, so we have power lines, roads etc cutting thru the forests. The Carr Fire last year was started by a downed power line. One of the SoCal fires this year was started by a semi blowing a tire.
If you allow enough fuel to accumulate something will ignite it whether people live there or not. If not a downed power line than a lightening strike. It’s only a matter of time. In AZ much of the forest lands are federally owned as well but the difference between here and CA in terms of management is night and day. Thinning and clearing of ladder fuels is plainly visible everywhere you go. We had the driest winter in centuries last season and no CA-style infernos - which have now become a regular fall event. Several dozen low-intensity fires but no conflagrations.
No. We need to pay more taxes to keep afloat our 10 aircraft carriers and send all of them to the South China Sea to demonstrate America’s military prowess.
This is also true. This is the hottest / driest October I remember in SF in the past 20 years. Normally we would have had more fog / precipitation by now.
Global Warming + not enough natural burning + society has been building homes in more fire-prone areas because its cheaper ----- because NIMBYs have been preventing building in the urban core.
