Donald Trump is right… in part… that land management and forest clean-ups are an essential part of wildfire management and prevention. That one of the worst offenders of overgrown dry detritus in large forests is the federal government itself might be lost on Mr. Trump. You cannot have one large forest that is well-managed next to a large fire-trap forest and expect wildfires that breakout across both to be easily contained. Cleaning out millions of acres of forest land is profoundly expensive as well. It is highly labor intensive, and there is only so much access possible with large pieces of equipment that can remove the kindling. Dead trees, dying branches, pile of needles and leaves plus other fallen detritus have to be taken out. Human labor is required.
Donald Trump is equally right that a huge national emphasis now on reversing global warming simply wouldn’t make the slightest difference to the wildfires we are experiencing today. He’s wrong, however, global warming absolutely accelerates the drying out of woodlands, but to be effective today, extremely effective climate change policies would have had to have been implemented starting decades ago. We need to stop and reverse the damage ASAP anyway, but there will unlikely be any serious reversal in global warming for decades no matter what we do. If we don’t act now, however, we can pretty much rest assured that the future for climate-related damage, especially wildfires, is beyond bleak.
Smoke from West Coast fires has reached the east coast and has been measured as far away as Europe. Millions of acres have been and are being destroyed from the recent spate of blazes. Entire towns are gone. Thousands of homes are gone. Wildlife has been decimated. Livelihoods have been ended. Thousands are homeless. The cycle just keeps repeating itself, here in the West and in places around the world, most notably Australia. We know what has to be done, but no one is stepping up to the solution. Money. Priorities. Distractions. Now that brown and unbreathable air is making city life untenable, maybe someone will begin to fix this horrific situation. Being reactive does not seem to be the cheaper alternative.
In addition to addressing climate change for a longer-view, Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment Director, Michael Wara (writing for the September 17th Los Angeles Times) is a pragmatist with basic answers and observations that could be deployed in California as a model for other at-risk states: “The underlying causes are complex and varied. Climate change is a big one, of course. But so are more than a century of land-use practices that allowed communities to be built in harm’s way, and the flawed view that wildfires should be ‘fought’ rather than lived with, managed and used.
“We all need to support communities that are suffering and the firefighters struggling to contain wildfires across the state. But we also need to address the root causes of this crisis. We cannot firefight our way out of it… California and the West need immediate investment in two areas. We need to make our communities more resistant to burning, and we need a more effective approach to land management, one that welcomes low-intensity, ‘good’ fire as a means of preventing catastrophic megafires. This is not news. Federal and state land managers and firefighters have been saying this for at least 50 years, to little avail.
“When we know what to do but haven’t done it, often it helps to make the task someone’s principal mission. It’s time to seriously evaluate whether our firefighting and disaster agencies — Cal Fire, the California Office of Emergency Services, the U.S. Forest Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency — have the bandwidth to adequately prepare and defend our communities, given the increasing magnitude and frequency of climate-fueled disasters. Perhaps, instead, we need a new state agency altogether, one whose express purpose is to reduce wildfire risks to Californians.
“Successful wildfire preparedness begins with a clear strategy and accountability for outcomes. As it stands, California has neither. We have outsourced preparedness to our emergency response agencies, whose main priority is fire suppression and disaster recovery, not risk reduction. It’s not a shock that we aren’t getting the results we so urgently need.
“A new state agency could set annual and long-term goals on several key fronts: fire hardening individual homes in high-risk areas, safeguarding communities as a whole, and reintroducing prescribed burns in wildlands. Targets need to be established at a scale large enough to have an impact, not according to political judgments based on how much money is available.
“For fire hardening homes, a reasonable goal would be 100,000 homes per year, selected from the roughly 1million that are currently located in the highest-risk zones. Homeowners who can afford it should pay for their share of costs, while those who cannot should be eligible for financial assistance.” Indeed, when it comes to containing fires, we are no stronger than our weakest links.
And like coastal communities that face coastal erosion from rising oceans and more intense storm surges, there has to be a reassessment against allowing people to rebuild where we know it is only a matter of time before homes and businesses are destroyed by the next disaster. That we grant federally guaranteed flood and fire insurance to homes we know are living on borrowed time is unfair both to the owners of these structures but also to the taxpayers asked to subsidize the associated hubris.
Not only is a big fix absolutely necessary to preserve our natural resources, but at a time when this economy is suffering from massive job loss, this labor-intensive effort creates new, year-round sustainable employment. California is considering legislation to enable prisoners who have worked on fire lines to qualify as firefighters after they’ve served their sentence. We just need to stop watching the news footage, shake our heads and just forget about the problem when the weather clears up. We need to assign responsibility, fund and staff it accordingly, and do the obvious.
I’m Peter Dekom, and this cannot be a political issue tied to left- or right-wing factions; these resources belong to all Americans and should receive the attention that they deserve.
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