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California Wildfire Devastation Was Entirely Preventable Through Proper Land Management
The Federalist ^ | 09/04/2021 | Tristan Justice

Posted on 09/04/2021 10:10:52 PM PDT by SeekAndFind

President Joe Biden declared the Caldor Fire threatening communities at Lake Tahoe, California an emergency Wednesday night to dispatch federal resources to the relief effort.

That blaze, only 25 percent contained as of this writing, has already burned more than 200,000 acres with roughly 32,300 structures in the path of destruction, according to a local California news outlet.

Meanwhile, the Dixie Fire 120 miles north of the area scorched half of Lassen Volcanic National Park and remains only 52 percent contained. Billed as one of the largest in modern California history, the inferno has already engulfed 1,300 structures and continues to spread, presenting a nightmare to the 12,000 people who live within a five-mile radius, as calculated by The New York Times.

The pair of mega wildfires mark another tragic summer on the heels of a record-setting season last year, in which more than 10 million acres burned in the highest yearly total since modern-day tracking began in 1983. It’s not just that 10 million acres burned, but also that many acres burned as a consequence of high-intensity fires. The latter claimed more than 17,500 structures with damages totaling $16.5 billion, according to the Yale Center for Environmental Communication. Last year’s fires ranked the third costliest on record, behind 2017 at $24 billion and 2018 at $22 billion.

None of this had to happen. The apocalyptic carnage across California each year is entirely preventable. While Democrats perpetuate the manufactured narrative by legacy media that climate change is the sole culprit for this charred devastation, western states are burning primarily as a consequence of bad land management.

A quick examination of the map for nearly every major forest fire to make national headlines will reveal the deadly blazes either start or grow on federally mismanaged land.

“I don’t think you can call it a coincidence,” said Jonathan Wood, the vice president of policy and law at the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC), adding that two-thirds of fires start on federal property. “If it were one, maybe it would be a coincidence, but when you’ve got a series, you’ve got a trend.”

Wood told The Federalist the outbreak of current forest fires was entirely predictable, raising alarm in a report published in April that the U.S. Forest Service confronted a backlog of 63 million acres with a “high risk or very high risk of wildfire” and another 80 million acres in need of restoration.

The build-up of fuel to follow 100 years of fire suppression has led to the creation of massive tinder boxes ripe to go up in the conflagrations seen today. According to ProPublica, between 4 and 12 million acres burned in prehistoric California every year. Between 1989 and 1998, however, state bureaucrats only burned an average of 30,000 acres a year. That number fell to 13,000 acres between 1999 and 2017.

Yet the Forest Service remains behind, now devoting resources to immediate crises presented by the fires of today as opposed to preventing the fires of tomorrow with thinning and prescribed burns. That includes selective forest logging and low-intensity fires to reduce excess wood fuel. According to Wood’s report, co-authored with PERC Research Fellow Holly Fretwell, the Forest Service only has plans for fuel reduction projects dealing with 1.4 million acres per year.

“At that pace, it would take decades to treat the areas at risk of catastrophic fire,” they wrote.

In his interview with The Federalist, Wood agreed climate change was in part to blame for the accelerating growth of wildfires, but emphasized proper land management that addressed fuel reduction was the “only realistic way” to deal with what’s become routine crises. Several studies have also discounted the importance of climate change in the intensity of wildfires gripping western states.

In one paper cited by Wood and Fretwell, a team of researchers who examined four factors in wildfire severity found live fuel “was the most important” in contributing to fire growth, with 53 percent of relative influence as opposed to climate change at 14 percent. Fire weather was rated with a 23 percent average relative influence and topography with 10 percent.

Another study authored by a team of scientists from the Conservation Biology Institute, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the University of California Los Angeles concluded human presence diminished the importance of climate in the growth of wildfires.

“In regions where human presence is more important, the importance of climate is lower on average,” they wrote. “This suggests that, not only can humans influence fire regimes, as has been documented, but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effect of climate.”

Michael Shellenberger, the president of Environmental Progress and author of “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” called this year’s megawildfires burning California “100 percent” preventable if adequate prescribed burns and trimming around powerlines had been conducted by government land managers.

Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom however, who faces a recall election in less than two weeks, cut the state’s budget for wildfire prevention and resource management from $355 million in 2019 to $203 million last year, a more than 40 percent decrease.

“Everybody knew we were going to have them,” Shellenberger told The Federalist of this year’s fires. He went on to place greater blame on negligent land management than on climate change.

“Climate change causes warmer temperatures. Warmer temperatures means that more of the year is warmer, so it extends the fire season,” Shellenberger explained, but qualified the statement with, “high fuel load is a necessary and sufficient cause of high-intensity fires. Climate change is a neither necessary nor sufficient cause.”

In other words, while climate change may extend the fire season, high fuel loads in the nation’s forests are the culprit for the eruption of fires of this size. And negligent land management made that happen.



TOPICS: Science; Society; Weather
KEYWORDS: california; landmanagement; wildfire
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1 posted on 09/04/2021 10:10:52 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
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To: SeekAndFind

Only in California do people complain about fires in an area that is arid to semi arid. Further this is the same state that build a high rise condo on landfill in an earthquake zone and is shocked the buidling was not properly set into the bedrock.


2 posted on 09/04/2021 10:39:51 PM PDT by LukeL
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Imagine how wonderful the World would be without Rats.


3 posted on 09/04/2021 10:43:51 PM PDT by Gene Eric (Don't be a statist!)
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To: SeekAndFind

Why arent the towns allowed to create sufficient buffer zones?

Because the enviros are anthrophobes and want the rural towns eliminated.

And, see tagline.


4 posted on 09/04/2021 10:55:39 PM PDT by Seruzawa ("The Political left is the Garden of Eden of incompetence" - Marx the Smarter (Groucho))
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To: Seruzawa

The only thing wrong with the author’s article is his notion that the fires were “negligence”, when they were really willful. In California, the government is being run by a secret society that is malevolent toward any who threaten it by their living independently in rural areas.

“Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” - Benito Mussolini


5 posted on 09/04/2021 11:01:54 PM PDT by WLusvardi (Drudge Fudges)
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To: SeekAndFind

Who the hell is Tristan Justice?

It’s a bit amusing to read such articles EVERY FIRE SEASON, but the amusement hardly tempers my anger.

He quotes, “At that pace, it would take decades to treat the areas at risk of catastrophic fire.”

I’ve commented in this forum to others complaining about the smoke: “Get used to it.”

The damage was wrought over a century. To assert that the correction would take merely decades is fantasy and the misallocation of resources - primarily funding, but I refer to mental capacity as well pertaining to policy decisions - will assure that there will be MANY more catastrophic and deadly fires in the coming decades...

...all hyped in defense of the clarion call of the century:

‘Climate change’.

In spite of the fact that the ignorant author conflates weather with ‘climate change’, who seriously believes that anything will change when the publicity of these fires serves their propaganda needs???


6 posted on 09/04/2021 11:40:03 PM PDT by logi_cal869 (-cynicus the "concern troll" a/o 10/03/2018 /!i!! &@$%&*(@ -)
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To: SeekAndFind

To clarify, my question, “Who the hell is Tristan Justice?” is rhetorical.

He’s an ignorant boob on almost absolutely everything he wrote.


7 posted on 09/04/2021 11:42:51 PM PDT by logi_cal869 (-cynicus the "concern troll" a/o 10/03/2018 /!i!! &@$%&*(@ -)
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To: SeekAndFind

Born and raised in California. We used to have hundreds of California Conservation Corps Fire Camps. They were all over. Some near cities and towns, others deep in the forest. They would maintain the forest and fire roads, clearing out dead trees and underbrush. Clinton started getting rid of the roads in the 1990s, ‘returning’ the forest to its ‘natural’ state. So, we could not reach the fire since the roads were gone.

Even the Native Americans used to burn out the underbrush.

Now there are not many fire camps.


8 posted on 09/05/2021 1:15:51 AM PDT by Ronaldus Magnus III (Do, or do not, there is no try. )
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To: Ronaldus Magnus III

Seems like we have this discussion every year.


9 posted on 09/05/2021 1:17:49 AM PDT by gitmo (If your theology doesn't become your biography, what good is it?)
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Comment #10 Removed by Moderator

To: SeekAndFind

Forest management is a real science!
There are PhD’s in forestry. It is complicated science, sometimes with no clear answers.
But NO, the “trust the science” people decided instead to dump it all and fight to protect every tree and every slug around! Touchy, feely, replaced the science!
Their fight to save the trees resulted in loss of the whole forest!

Maybe Newsom should once trust the science!


11 posted on 09/05/2021 3:28:53 AM PDT by AZJeep (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0AHGreco RomNQkryIIs)
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To: gitmo

“ Seems like we have this discussion every year.”
************

Yeh, we do. The underbrush will eventually be burned out either by nature or smart managed conservation methods. The Enviro Elites prefer the current wild fires as they allow them to scream climate change, global warming. Idiots…..


12 posted on 09/05/2021 3:50:27 AM PDT by snoringbear (,W,E.oGovernment is the Pimp, )
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To: SeekAndFind

I’m too busy but will someone find where Trump made the exact declaration about forest management and was ridiculed by the moron media?


13 posted on 09/05/2021 4:03:14 AM PDT by rhoda_penmark
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To: rhoda_penmark

Found it. 2018.

“US West Coast fires: Is Trump right to blame forest management? - BBC News” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46183690.amp


14 posted on 09/05/2021 4:06:00 AM PDT by rhoda_penmark
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To: SeekAndFind

Could all this “excess fuel” in the forests be hauled away and used to generate electricity?

Of course the enviros will howl. That’s what they do.


15 posted on 09/05/2021 5:10:38 AM PDT by DNME (... at that awkward stage. Too late to work within the system; too early to shoot the bastards.)
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To: SeekAndFind
since modern-day tracking began in 1983.

Clever use of known data......1927 was a peak year for wild fires which steadily declined until the forests grew back and started burning again in 1983.

Everything burning these last couple of years will grow back then the cycle will repeat itself.......

16 posted on 09/05/2021 5:22:03 AM PDT by Hot Tabasco (Without potatoes, life has no meaning......)
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To: SeekAndFind

Of course. Demos did a deal with treehuggers ages ago. Stop all water storage and forest management activities (among others) and votes will be delivered and riots staged.


17 posted on 09/05/2021 6:35:28 AM PDT by bobbo666 (Baizuo)
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To: Seruzawa

That might help but don’t think it would be enough. These fires are so big they throw embers that start another hotspot a mile out.


18 posted on 09/05/2021 6:44:00 AM PDT by sheana
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To: sheana; Seruzawa

The key is in your own statement.

“These fires are so big they throw embers that start another hotspot a mile out.”

With proper management as Seruzawa notes, the fires burn much much slower and can be contained before they get “so big”.


19 posted on 09/05/2021 7:07:49 AM PDT by Openurmind (The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children. ~ D. Bonhoeffer)
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To: snoringbear
The underbrush will eventually be burned out either by nature or smart managed conservation methods.

Much of the California area is a fire-maintained ecosystem. The trees cannot germinate naturally until a fire scorches the cones. That assures the young trees have no undergrowth to compete against.

Controlled burns are the best approach.

20 posted on 09/05/2021 7:20:00 AM PDT by gitmo (If your theology doesn't become your biography, what good is it?)
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