In 2017, wildfires burned about 1.4 million acres of California, and at least 1.5 million acres have burned thus far in 2018. This is an immense amount: Almost 3 percent of the total land area of the state has been devastated by fire in the past two years alone. Destruction on this scale is more normally associated with the consequences of war.
Some of the wildfire burns in bushes and scrub, but most of it is in forested areas, particularly in northern California. Forests cover 33 million acres in California, about one-third of the state. Almost 20 million of these forested acres are in national forests managed by the U.S. Forest Service (or other federal agencies). The federal government is thus the most responsible for (mis)managing California forests.
Management of the national forests in California and other western states began to come under growing criticism in the 1990s. A century of ardent fire suppression (cheered on by Smokey Bear et al.) had led to the accumulation of unnatural volumes of wood—“excess fuels”—in national forests that provide kindling when a fire breaks out.
As long ago as 1998, the Government Accountability Office warned, “the increasing number of large, intense, uncontrollable, and catastrophically destructive wildfires is the most extensive and serious national forest health-related problem in the interior West.” It was due mainly to past Forest Service management practices, under which “vegetation accumulated, creating high levels of fuels for catastrophic wildfires and transforming much of the region into a tinderbox.” It sounds all too familiar today.
Despite such warnings, few corrective actions were forthcoming. In 2002 the Forest Service wrote in The Process Predicament that its decision-making process, like much else in Washington, faced a “costly procedural quagmire.” A complex “statutory, regulatory, and administrative framework . . . has kept the agency from effectively addressing rapid declines in forest health”—including potentially explosive wood buildups such as were occurring in California.
For the next 15 years, although there were some modest efforts to reduce fire dangers, gridlock typically prevailed. The consequences have finally become abundantly clear these last two years in California. A warming climate has significantly aggravated the problem, but it is not the fundamental cause.
In February 2018, the Little Hoover Commission, a California state investigative body, reiterated for the umpteenth time that as “tree canopies fill in, shade-tolerant trees begin to thrive [in the understory] and they are less fire resistant.” This results in “crown fires that burn at and move along tree-tops [and] are the hardest to suppress due to an unlimited supply of fuel.” Although Californians had heard this many times before, it seems that a catastrophic outcome was required to precipitate any strong actions.
In May, California finally released its grand design, the Forest Carbon Plan. It said all the familiar things all over again: The overall goal is to change California forests from their current widespread condition of “many small, closely-spaced, fire-vulnerable trees into a smaller number of resilient larger trees.”
Given the federal ownership of 60 percent of California forests, the Forest Service will have to be a central player. The Forest Service released its own grand design in August—“Toward Shared Stewardship Across Landscapes”—promising to do better in the future. It conceded, however, that “catastrophic wildfires and the corresponding loss of lives, homes, and natural resources have continued to grow, partly because our [Forest Service] treatments have been uncoordinated and not at the right scale. Although locally successful, we have rarely succeeded at the scale needed for lasting impacts across landscapes”—the scale of management also newly prescribed in the California plan.
But it may be wishful thinking to believe that the Forest Service is capable of such a radical redirection. Managing at a landscape scale would involve close coordination among federal, state, and private landowners within a given area. Suffering from a loss of trust that has developed over decades, the Forest Service is ill-equipped to provide such coordination. The better coordinator would be the state of California. And the most straightforward way to achieve such close coordination would be to transfer the most fire-prone lands from federal to state ownership.
There are two large obstacles, however, to California’s successfully addressing its catastrophic fire problem in this way. The first is a strong commitment among Californians to continued federal land ownership as a powerful symbol of progressive rectitude. This commitment seems immune to acknowledgment of the disastrous management record of the U.S. Forest Service in recent decades.
The second obstacle is even more fundamental. Since the enactment of the federal Wilderness Act of 1964, Californians have come increasingly to believe that nature requires protection from human intrusion—that the ideal goal for forests and other parts of nature should be to maintain (or restore if necessary) a “wild” or historically “pristine” condition.
But given the historic suppression of fire over the course of the 20th century, a preference for “wild” forests translates in practice today to the preservation of forests subject to catastrophic fires. California officials are increasingly recognizing that to reduce the risk of catastrophic fire, they will have to actively plan and manage their forests as designed “landscapes.”
A humanly “landscaped” forest is almost by definition the opposite of a “wild” forest. The proper relationship between humans and nature is a central concern of most religions—think only of the story of Adam and Eve. Successfully addressing California’s catastrophic fire problem may thus in the end require no less than a quasi-religious change of convictions on the part of many Californians in their thinking about man and nature.
