Our view: How to respond to California’s wildfires
Rising death tolls. Aerial assaults. Weary ground forces. The charred desolation of thousands of homes. The most apt metaphor about California’s rampaging wildfires is warfare.
And just like in any war, one of the first casualties is truth.
Who or what is to blame for the conflagrations? Whether it’s timber interests on one side complaining about environmental rules, or environmentalists on the other side claiming it’s all about global warming, neither faction has it completely right.
Even as the tragedy was unfolding, President Donald Trump weighed in on the side of lumber interests, threatening “no more fed payments” because of “gross mismanagement of the forests.”
What federal payments he’s tweeting about is anyone’s guess, and 57 percent of California’s forested area is owned by the federal government. If the president has a beef with how those areas are managed, he should take it up with his administration and properly fund forest management programs.
There might, indeed, be a need to make it easier to thin dying or dead trees out of densely forested areas, reducing the fuel for wildfires. But even if dead logs are stripped away, the tinderdry brush acts like kindling.
Even more to the point, dense forests were not a factor in these recent California fires. “They’re using these fires to talk about forest management that has nothing to do with the landscape in which the fires are occurring,” says Char Miller, W.M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis and History at Pomona College in Claremont.
The Camp Fire 90 miles north of Sacramento might have been sparked by a utility transmission line. The fire killed at least 48 people, destroyed nearly 8,000 homes, devastated the city of Paradise and cindered 117,000 acres — making it the state’s most destructive fire ever. It burned through a mix of trees, brush and grassland. And fires that forced evacuations outside Los Angeles fed off of chaparral or brush.
Climate change is making wildfires worse. Erratic weather patterns have created shorter, wetter winters in California, producing a sudden, heavy growth of shrubs, grasses and trees. After winter, the state’s ongoing drought and record-high summer temperatures draw moisture out of the plants, rendering them near-perfect kindling. With the hot and dry Santa Ana winds of fall, fires explode out of control.
Yet these tragedies can’t be blamed solely on global warming. Wildfires are actually a vital part of the state’s ecosystem. Lodgepole pines, for example, thrive in fire-prone areas where millions of structures have been erected in rural areas of California since the 1940s. When they burn, the cost in lives and treasure soars.
The proper response includes placing limits on, and fireproofing, residential expansion into wildlands; better management and removal of dry brush; and relentlessly addressing the growing concern of climate change.
In other words, the solution isn’t either/or. It’s all of the above.