San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
California is not a phoenix
Rising from the ashes isn’t always such a good idea
By noon of Sept. 5, 2020, the cloud rising into the stratosphere above the Creek Fire looked like the spawn of a nuclear detonation’s mushroom and an enormous angry Boltzmann brain. The experts called it pyrocumulonimbus. To those of us who could see it from our road, it was the burning breath of wildfire, the dragon in the land.
Just two days later, that dragon would take my home in Pine Ridge, most of our forest and most of our community.
When you know a sleeping dragon lives in your neighborhood, you learn its lore and take precautions against its waking. Over the years we lived in Pine Ridge, we learned about how the millions of trees killed by bark beetles during drought serve to feed the beast. We learned about forest management issues involving fire suppression ( Smokey the Bear) and “too many stems per acre.” We learned about California’s overstretched firefighting resources, drought and climate change (though this last was too often dismissed as a hoax by many of our neighbors).
Our community prided itself on lessening such risks, through its enduring efforts to reduce and mitigate fire hazards. These efforts ranged from fuel breaks and defensible space, to house hardening, to the formation of our own volunteer fire department. My wife and I labored to remove the beetle-killed trees from our property. Most of our neighbors did the same.
Perhaps in the back of our minds we all believed that the wildfires we knew were coming would somehow always be someone else’s catastrophe. After all, our forest hadn’t burned in recorded memory. It was so historically resistant to wildfire that a local U.S. Forest Service officer called the area “the Asbestos Forest” (after the notoriously carcinogenic but undeniably effective flame retardant).
Yet the Creek Fire was so extreme, so unprecedented in its behavior — flames of 100 to 200 feet, 60 mph winds, firebrands big as basketballs able to leap 400-foot wide fire lines in a single bound — that it overwhelmed all our defenses.
The Asbestos Forest burned. And our homes burned along with it.
We took solace in the fact that no firefighters or civilians died in the carnage. The devastation the fire left behind, however, made more than a few of us question the broader utility of our many efforts to make our area “fire safe.” Some like myself even came to doubt the feasibility of continuing to reside in the wildland-urban interface.
Raising such questions did not make me or others of similar mind popular. Throughout the burn scar, displaced residents planted American flags on the ruins of their homes, perhaps to symbolize that, though they were down, they weren’t out.
In areas that did not burn, we saw many homemade signs thanking first responders (which, as long-time volunteer firefighters, my wife and I much appreciated). We also saw waves of slickly produced #MountainStrong banners and signs on which “Resilience” and “Rebuild” were the most commonly recurring words.
But what does that actually mean? “Rebuilding” certainly means money for the building trades, resort property developers, real estate agents and other local businesses. “Resilience” means salvage-logging thousands of acres of burned but merchantable trees, as well as additional tree-thinning and replanting work, for the timber industry. Making a fortune out of other people’s misfortunes is a situation as old as that classic proverb, “It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good.”
Overall, though, the clear majority in our community brought up resilience and rebuilding from a place of openheartedness, kindness and compassion. They were devastated. They were willing to do whatever it took to make their community as close as they could to what it was before. Anything less was to admit defeat.
Yet, no matter how kindly meant, the rhetoric of resilience as “bouncing back” — as adapting the new situation to fit the old system — functions viscerally and emotionally to shut down discussion and debate. Sometimes, when some things change, there’s no going back, no matter how hard you try. Even if you don’t want to talk about it.
Filling the silence where those conversations should be, the science is clear: warmer, drier post-fire climate and more frequent reburning of the landscape by high-severity wildfire is altering what grows back.
Throughout the American West, ponderosa pine forests are giving way to oak scrub (which also burns). Our landscapes are transforming, with some uncontrollable impacts to local economies, wildlife and watersheds. The forests as we once knew them will not bounce back to the way they were. Not as they were before the Creek Fire in our modest community of Pine Ridge, not as they were before the Caldor Fire, as it rips through the more affluent tourist destination of Lake Tahoe.
As Parul Sehgal once wrote of the Phoenix myth: “Why rise from the ashes without asking why you had to burn?”
The dragon too easily leaps the fuel breaks now. Homes burn. More and more of the owners – lowballed by insurance adjusters or having discovered that their policy’s inflation rider didn’t ride far enough — cannot rebuild on their ashes. Their pockets just aren’t deep enough. In the longrun that decrease in fire country housing may prove a good thing. But it’s unarguably tragic now.
Real resilience, however, requires honest discussion about the transformational changes under way in our forests. Only in that way can people — especially would-be rebuilders whose time and money are often in short supply — make informed and transformative decisions about the future, rather than reflexive and emotional ones.
Fantasies about the dragon of wildfire and the phoenix of resilience are more powerful than ever. But it’s time to demythologize both of them and live in reality.