California Forests

In September 2020, five of the ten largest fires ever recorded in California were all burning at once. Throughout the 2020 fire season, California lost thousands of homes and other buildings, hundreds of thousands of residents had to evacuate, and over 3 million acres burned. Disastrous and fatal fires also occurred in 2015, 2017, and 2018 in California. Federal and state agencies spend over $1 billion annually to fight fires, insurance losses exceed tens of billions annually, and smoke-related health costs may exceed hundreds of billions each year. Regulations intended to protect Californians from dangerous forest fires appear not to be working and may need to be fixed. Fortunately, Californians have already identified the cause of the crisis and a way out.

There are a mix of federal, state, and local regulations that influence management of the 33 million acres of forested land in California. The US Forest Service (USFS) controls all federal forests, which account for 57 percent of forests in the state, and is responsible for fire containment in those forests. Ever since the 1910 Great Fire in Idaho, which killed 90 people and burned 3 million acres), the USFS has had a strict suppression policy, attempting to put out all fires by 10 am in the morning they are spotted, in order to secure the public interest in safe habitation. The state agency in charge of responding the fires not within the purview of the USFS, CalFire, has also followed a policy of mostly fire suppression. In addition to regulatory agencies, tort claims against California utilities have established billions of dollars in damage liability for fires sparked by poorly maintained electrical distribution equipment, leading to prevention efforts utilities prioritize to the areas with the highest potential tort liability, which may or may not efficiently target the highest fire risk areas.

The USFS, which is part of the US Department of Agriculture, is also responsible for granting timber harvesting permits. Starting in the 1990s, environmental groups pursuing privately determined interests in environmental protection began to succeed in gaining court rulings halting permits that would endanger forest habitat. This worked against the private interests of the timber industry in California, which suffered strong economic setbacks and job losses. Tension between local workers and environmental activists was high. Each side was pushing for a vision of forest management that did not include the other side — the environmentalists wanted protection to be the prevailing public interest and the timber industry wanted to harvest resources the prevailing public interest. Ironically, it turned out that neither side was protecting the overall health of the forest, despite apparently sharing that intention.

While fire suppression protects both habitat and harvestable timber from loss to fires (when it works), the overall effect of suppression on forest health can be negative. Complete habitat protection halts the thinning that occurs through harvest and can aggravate the problem, as can the timber industry practice of replanting saplings close together after harvest. Overgrowth and crowding create challenging conditions for the survival of mature trees and may leave them susceptible to pest infestation. The excess fuel that small fires would have cleared builds up to conditions conducive to larger, hotter, faster growing “megafires” that destroy all vegetation. In recent years, drought and high temperatures associated with climate change have aggravated the situation further by drying out the excess fuels and further weakening mature trees, now at the mercy of a widespread bark beetle infestation.

The alternative to fire suppression is risk reduction — treating overgrown forests by thinning extra trees and undergrowth, and with prescribed burns that have minimal effect on mature trees. In 2020, the US spent $150 million to treat 235,000 acres in California, and the state spent $200 million treating over 390,000 acres. But these areas account for only a small fraction of the forests that need restoration and treatment, which different experts estimate to cover from 9 to 20 million acres. When battling active fires draws funding into suppression activities, often through funding private contractors, less funding is available for risk reduction.

The Creek fire, one of the 2020 California megafires, started on Sep. 4, 2020, and within days was burning so hot that it had its own pyro-cumulonimbus clouds — the largest ever seen in the US — and was spreading as much as 15 miles per day. However, there was one cut of land around Shaver Lake that escape much of the damage. Years of strategic tree-thinning and prescribed burning on land owned by Southern California Edison protected the area, which burned lightly, causing no lasting damage to mature trees and habitat.

The Dinkey Landscape Restoration Project, which included Shaver Lake, began in 2010 as an attempt to find a collaborative solution in the legal conflict between environmentalists and members of the timber industry, along with utilities companies needing protection from bankruptcy-inducing tort liability. Launched first with several meetings to air grievances, parties then moved on to learning about the new scientific findings of forestry management that would point to a better plan. These “new” ideas rested on the recognition that western forest land has evolved to have fire. Academics estimate that, pre-historically, California forests burned between 4 and 11 million acres annually, a natural condition that continued through human occupation by indigenous populations prior to European colonization. Reclaiming the practice of indigenous residents of the area, a new collaboration of forest management emerged that fostered controlled, prescribed burns, selective thinning and thinner re-planting for timber harvesting. The Dinkey Landscape Restoration Project suffered some of the same climate effects as the rest of the California forests, with drought and beetle infestation. However, the restoration efforts were sufficient to create a healthy forest area that served as the southeastern barrier to the destructive Creek Fire.

Decades of well-intentioned but poor forest management occurred in California, due in part to the fragmented regulatory framework. The prospect of restoring a million acres of forest every year in order to bring the state back into a safe and healthy situation may appear daunting, especially to those closest to the situation who were locked in legal battles within recent memory. However, California entered into a letter of agreement with the federal government in August of 2020 to expend equal amounts of funding targeted at restoration. The success of the Dinkey Landscape Restoration Project at bringing together diverse stakeholders into a collaborative effort can serve as a model for projects throughout the state — each project small, but collectively approaching the level of restoration the state desperately needs.

- Groom, Nichola, “California outpaced Trump’s Forest Service in wildfire prevention work: data,” Reuters, Sep. 23, 2020, https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-wildfires-forests-insight/california-outpaced-trumps-forest-service-in-wildfire-prevention-work-data-idINKCN26E2UQ

- Bliss, Laura, “A Lesson in Learning to Live with Fire, and Each Other,” Bloomberg CityLab, Nov. 5, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-05/fighting-fire-with-fire-in-california-s-forests

- Jovino, Nicholas, “PG&E Ripped for Prioritizing Cleanup in Areas With Low Fire Risk,” Courthouse News Service, Oct. 20, 2020, https://www.courthousenews.com/pge-ripped-for-prioritizing-cleanup-in-areas-with-low-fire-risk/

- Roman, Jesse, et al., “Greetings from the 2020 Wildfire Season,” NFPA Journal, Nov. 1, 2020, https://www.nfpa.org/News-and-Research/Publications-and-media/NFPA-Journal/2020/November-December-2020/Features/Wildfire

- Smyle, Jim, et al., “Rethinking Forest Regulations: Overcoming the challenges of regulatory reform,” MegaFlorestais Briefing Paper April 2016, https://rightsandresources.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/RethinkingForest_final-2.pdf

- Temple, James, “Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead.” MIT Technology Review, Sep. 17, 2020, https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/09/17/1008473/wildfires-california-prescribed-burns-climate-change-forests/

- Weil, Elizabeth, “They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anyone Listen?”, Propublica, Aug. 28, 2020, https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-megafires-why-wont-anybody-listen

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