Fire and other hazards jeopardize California’s prized forests, some say

KYBURZ, Calif. — On a mountainside where walls of flames torched the forest on their way toward Lake Tahoe in 2021, blackened trees stand against a gray sky.

“If you can find a live tree, point to it,” Hugh Safford, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of California, Davis, said touring damage from the Caldor Fire, one of the past decade’s many massive blazes.

Dead conifers stretch as far as the eye can see. Fire burned so hot that soil was still barren. Granite boulders were charred. Indentations marked fallen logs that vanished in smoke.

Damage in that area of Eldorado National Forest could be permanent — part of a troubling pattern that threatens a defining characteristic of the Sierra Nevada range John Muir once called a “waving sea of evergreens.”

Forest like that is disappearing as increasingly intense fires alter landscapes worldwide threatening wildlife, jeopardizing efforts to capture climate-warming carbon and harming water supplies, studies say.

In the U.S. West, a century of fire suppression, logging of large fireresistant trees, and other practices allowed undergrowth to choke forests. Drought has killed millions of conifers or made them susceptible to disease and pests. And a changing climate has brought more intense fires.

“What’s it’s coming down to is jungles of fuels in forest lands,” Safford said. “You get a big head of steam going behind the fire there, it can burn forever and ever and ever.”

Despite mild wildfire seasons last year and this year, California saw 12 of its largest 20 wildfires in the previous five years. Record rain and snowfall this year that mostly ended a three-year drought could lead to explosive growth of fire fuels.

California has lost more than 1,760 square miles — nearly 7% — of its tree cover since 1985, a recent study found.

A study of the southern Sierra Nevada — home to Yosemite, Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks — found nearly a third of conifer forest had transitioned to other vegetation because of fire, drought or bark beetles in the past decade.

“We’re losing them at a rate … we can’t sustain,” said Brandon Collins, co-author of that report and adjunct forestry professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Not everyone believes forests are disappearing. Some environmentalists, like Chad Hanson of the John Muir Project sponsored by the nonprofit Earth Island Institute, believe there’s a “myth of catastrophic wildfire” to support logging efforts.

Seedlings are rising from ashes in highseverity patches of fire and dead wood provides wildlife habitat, Hanson said. “If everything people are hearing was true, there would be a lot more reason for concern.”

Others are concerned failure to properly manage forests can result in intense fire that could harm habitat, the ability to store climate-warming carbon in trees and the quality of snowmelt for farms and cities.

“Areas where mixed conifer burned at high severity, those are all areas that are vulnerable to total forest loss,” said Christy Brigham, chief of resources management and science at Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Parks.

After wildfires in 2020 and 2021 wiped out up to about a fifth of all giant sequoias — once considered almost fireproof — the National Park Service last week embarked on a controversial project to help the mighty trees recover with its largest planting of seedlings in a single grove.

Before the mid-1800s, fires from lightning or set by Indigenous people kept undergrowth in check. But after settlers drove out Native Americans and logged forests, fighting fires became the mission to protect the valuable trees and homes.

That has allowed forests to become four to seven times more dense than they once were, Safford said.

“John Muir would not recognize any of this,” he said, gesturing at tightly packed dead trees.