Cut politics, tackle climate change
Visiting the property where our home stood before it was destroyed in the Creek Fire of September 2020, my wife and I notice something unexpected in what is now a wasteland of charred stumps left behind after the salvage logging of our torched forest. Without the trees to soften the scenery, the landscape looks smaller, starker and steeper. The blasted remains of our neighbors’ houses seem closer together, the topography more rumpled, divided, fragmented.
The wildfire that took our home in Pine Ridge didn’t only lay bare the land. It also laid bare the politics of the land. Specifically, how the political arguments of our day, like the burnt-over remains of our former community in Fresno County, have been stripped of nuance, depth, complexity, reality — and just plain context.
Consider the sign my wife and I recently spotted on Caltrans property at the corner of Highway 168 and Cressman Road, the street where we used to live. It shows a photo of the Creek Fire’s pyrocumulonimbus cloud, juxtaposed with a shot of smoking, burnt-over, devastated forest. The sign’s caption reads, “Brought To You By ... inept shortsighted environmentalists and the greedy politicians they’ve bought since 1973 — Sierra Club Hike To Hell!”
That sign, exploiting our neighborhood’s tragedy for political brinkmanship, appeared nearly a full year after our disaster. It conjures up the usual logging industry bugaboos: clueless environmentalists, greedy politicians, the Sierra Club and “1973” (presumably a reference to the passage of the Endangered Species Act, though the context is unspecified). In other ways, that sign doesn’t so much “miss” the context as purposely distort it.
So, some context.
Given the big burns ongoing in California’s and America’s forests, there is plenty of room to play the blame game. In the wake of wildfires, the answer too often shouted up is “Cut down more trees!” As if that will solve all problems.
The real problem is that neither chainsaws nor prescribed fire nor protective legislation are time machines. There is no going back to that benchmark pre-1850 past — before California became a state, when the forest ecosystem (nostalgically) “was as it should be.”
That past is dead and buried.
The future is upon us. Characteristic of this future is what we might call the “pyrological cycle.” That cycle is interacting problematically with its hydrological and forest carbon cycle cousins.
Certainly there were lightning strikes and dry summers and overcrowded forests under the old fire regime. As emissions from fossil fuel combustion have accumulated in the atmosphere, however, we have blown up the atmospheric carbon cycle (and the role of forests in it) that prevailed for millions of years.
Increases in levels of atmospheric carbon, among other things, are forcing the hydrological cycle in California toward hotter, drier conditions. That forces trees to compete for less and less water, through longer and longer hours, days and weeks of heat. More drought, heat and overall competition mean more stress on the trees, which makes the trees and the forests less healthy.
The ill-health of the trees encourages the explosion of pine beetle populations, which are evolutionarily geared toward exploiting weak or diseased trees. That beetle population explosion, in its turn, ratchets up tree mortality numbers.
At the far end of our new pyrological cycle, climate change also increases the likelihood of dry lightning strikes. More fuel (beetle-killed trees) and more spark (lightning strikes) means more wildfires of higher severity and intensity. The post-fire climate grows still warmer and drier, with more stressed trees more prone to fire. The current unprecedented fire regime — our unbalanced pyrological cycle — will continue so long as we fail to address the imbalance in greenhouse-gas carbon.
Yes, there is a place for chainsaws. More trees per acre, an “overstocked” forest, also contributes to unhealthy competition. To make our forests and forest communities truly more resilient, however, will require more than just chainsaws and prescribed fire. More than hand crews and mechanical thinning to reduce the fuel buildups in our landscape — before we can reintroduce fire in a controlled fashion. More than the hardening of homes and other structures against embers and brands for those of us who live or wish to live in the wildland-urban interface.
What it will require most of all is full recognition of the reality of human-caused climate change — and a deep transition from a mindset of “dominion over” to “stewardship of” the land.
Any attempt to address our new pyrological reality without also addressing the current climate emergency is missing the forest for the trees and is doomed to failure. In the context of the Creek Fire, blaming the Sierra Club for everything that happened to our forest clearly misses the point. Please, if you didn’t lose home and forest in that fire, stop long
enough to get your facts straight before you go putting up signs and appropriating our disaster to score political points.
It’s not 1849 anymore. We don’t have the time to act as if it were.