Retired professor will study Portugal fires
She will make connection with fire danger in Paradise area
Most residents of this area are undoubtedly at least somewhat familiar with the effects of the Camp Fire of November 2018, as that conflagration flattened most of the town of Paradise.
However, there is a region with a similar dynamic as it relates to fire, and despite the fact it’s about 5,500 miles away, a retired Chico State professor seeks to bring the two together for comparison through a prestigious research award.
Jacque Chase, who retired from the Chico State Department of Geography and Planning in May 2022 following a 22-year career there, received a Fulbright Scholarship for 2023-24 for her research on fire in Portugal.
Chase’s research proposal title is “Rural Revitalization and Thriving With Fire in Portugal,” and her research will take place in central Portugal, an area of repeated devastating fires, but also an area where many families are settling the land to farm in sustainable ways. This complements her research in Paradise, where she has looked at displacement after the Camp Fire.
The Fulbright Scholarship is part of a U.S. cultural exchange program which offers grants to U.S. citizens to — among other things — conduct research projects abroad in an effort to promote intercultural understanding and better international relations.
Portugal and Paradise are comparable places, Chase said, due to the Mediterranean climate they share — featuring wet winters and hot summers.
“The difference is when it comes to settlement and human occupation,” she explained. “The forests are very different. Portugal is notorious for its forests being overtaken by eucalyptus plantations and some pine plantations.
“My research is dealing with how Portugal is dealing with bad decisions from decades ago. Fire pops up where it’s not supposed to be.”
Portugal suffered from a major wildfire in 2017 — the result of four smaller fires that merged — that killed 66 people. Paradise’s Camp Fire killed 85 people and flattened most of the town. Recovery is moving along in Paradise but the fire’s scars are still obvious.
Portugal, Chase said, “has a lot of brushy, abandoned land” which is more hospitable to fire. Farming families with older members, along with children who choose not to continue the family activities, have sometimes abandoned farms while others have planted eucalyptus trees, which are not native to the environment.
By contrast, areas of the Western United States have experienced a problem of development encroaching on the wildland-urban interface, where people build into areas which have never hosted permanent human populations. It results in forest fires burning to and into urbanized areas, increasing loss of life and property.
“Especially in the West, settlement is more recent. It’s urban encroachment,” Chase said. “Paradise is not a new development, but it has kind of overgrown its boundaries. Bigger towns end up burning due to their proximity to the wildlands.
“Here, it’s more like, ‘How do we stop so many people from moving into areas not suitable for building?’ “
Chase is interviewing people in Paradise as a part of the Rebuild Paradise Foundation, a group which provides resources and advocacy toward efforts to rebuild and repopulate the Paradise ridge.
“I’m going to try to finish my interview in spring,” she said. “Rebuild Paradise has some interest in the results.”
Chase is interviewing people who have connections to Paradise in some fashion, whether as newcomers who’ve discovered the area since the fire, and people who grew up or lived there but moved away for a long time and are now returning.
Many of the newcomers, Chase said, are people who are “reviving some of the agricultural landscapes” and who “might cut back on some of the invasive plants that make it hard to fight fires.”
Chase does not seek to influence public policy with her research and results.
“I’ve given up on policy regarding land use. I don’t see it happening in the U.S. as much as in Portugal,” she said. “It’s private property owners who are pretty much deciding how they occupy the land.” However, “there’s more and more acceptance on guidelines on landscaping properties” here.
As an example: “People in Paradise know they’ll get fined if they don’t take care of landscaping,” Chase said. “(Land-use) policy is sort of intertwined with personal choices. When people ignore common-sense landscaping, they realize there will be consequences. People are gaining an awareness of landscaping as well as home hardening, and what it means to built in the wildland-urban interface.”
Changes do seem to be occurring in Paradise with those seeking to build or rebuild.
“I keep hearing about people in Paradise wanting bigger lots, planting edibles, going back to the land. I’m doing research on this now,” Chase said. “A lot of people are buying adjoining lots, making their property so they have control and don’t have to worry about neighbors.” This buffering helps reduce fire risk because there isn’t as much potentially combustible construction so close together.
Chase said there may be an unintended consequence from the fire, which is that there may be more building than before, and continued encroachment into the WUI. She said she does not see “a lot of political will” to alter building practices.
“There has never really been a location, a municipality, saying ‘we’re not going to build here anymore.’ Sometimes you get more building than you had before,” Chase said. “The vision now is that ‘Everything has burned; there won’t be any more fires like that again,’” she said. “Well, there’s probably not going to be a conflagration like (the 2018 fire) for a few decades.”
Chase will head to Portugal in August and return to California in December, allowing her to witness at least part of the fire season there. “That could be a good thing, and it could be disruptive,” she said.