It is amazing to me that the view count for this (and other) threads is now so high. I keep wondering how much of this is people actually reading what is posted versus how much of it is for other reasons (bots, headline skimmers, etc,). At any rate, what I came here to post:
California's Forever Fire
by Elizabeth Weil
January 3, 2022
https://www.propublica.org/article/cali ... rever-fire
Extract:
(ProPublica) How did our (California’s) fire problem get to this point? …
One, California has a Mediterranean climate. Much of its landscape evolved with fire as a natural part of the cycle. Which is to say, it needs to burn.
Two, colonizers stole the land from Indigenous Californians, who knew how to live well with the ecology and burned vegetation at specific times of the year in part to maintain the health of the landscape and keep themselves safe. Then settlers, with government help, killed native Californians. Now very few people continue those Indigenous practices, and we have not returned land to the tribes. “I truly know almost everybody who has a cultural knowledge of fire, and I could probably count them, including myself, on my two hands,” Don Hankins, a Plains Miwok geography and planning professor at California State University, Chico, told me. This was the same conversation in which he noted that places near him that haven’t burned are just waiting. “In Butte County, we talk about the three remaining green ridges: the ridge I live on, the ridge to the north of me and the one just north of that. Those are the last three places where fire hasn’t been.”
Three, the United States Forest Service ...has… engaged in a forever war with fire….In 1947, Smokey Bear started exhorting citizens, “Only YOU can prevent forest fires!” sounding remarkably like Uncle Sam recruiting YOU to fight for the United States Army. The USFS owns more than half of forested California. (The state owns about 3%.) For the last 116 years, the agency has practiced an exuberant form of fire suppression, in part because it’s mandated to protect the nation’s forests and rangelands for multiple, sometimes conflicting uses: recreation, watershed health, propping up rural economies. A result is that California’s forests are now stuffed like a hoarder’s garage, with 300 to 400 trees per acre. Pre-USFS, the number was 30 to 70. You can think of the excess biomass as a huge fire debt. That debt will be paid off, willingly or not.
Those three factors lay the basic groundwork. The dangers continued compounding from there.
Don't mourn, organize.
-Joe Hill