Capital Region Cares Capital Region Cares 2018-2019 | Page 35

n
Opinion
fire as a friend
STEVE FRISCH, PRESIDENT, SIERRA BUSINESS COUNCIL
C
alifornia has seen seven of its 10 most destructive fires in
the last 10 years, with the last two years of blazes culminat-
ing in a dramatic increase in number of acres burned, cost
of fighting fire, greenhouse gases emitted, and a tragic loss of life
and property. These fires are clearly driven by a changing cli-
mate, but they are also the result of civic and community leaders
waiting too long to find and implement the solutions necessary
to reduce the risk.
This is not a new problem. For years we have known that
California forests are in drastically increased risk of catastroph-
ic fire. Former Gov. Jerry Brown called it “the new normal,” and
today, state agencies, emergency responders, forested commu-
nities, social sector organizations and utilities are doing more
than ever before in an attempt to address this problem. The
question is: Will they finally settle on a successful approach?
The core problem that we need to address relates to our past.
Before European settlement, California forests were unevenly
aged, diverse in species composition and fire adapted. We had
periodic low-intensity fires, both naturally occurring and in-
troduced by native residents. Intervention in our forests for re-
source extraction, which led to fire suppression for more than
125 years, created a forest that is poorly adapted to fire. Our for-
ests today are densely grown or overstocked, more evenly aged,
and when it burns, it burns at a much higher intensity and scale
than the pre-European norm.
We need to get back to fire being the friend of forest man-
agement, a tool to reduce risk through prescribed and managed
fire. Controlled fire is by far the most ecologically friendly and
cost-effective means of managing our forests. Getting there is
going to be a long road and will require addressing two key chal-
lenges.
The first is that the cost of forest management is high. Ac-
cording to the California Forest Carbon Plan, in the Sierra Ne-
vada alone, we need to manage roughly 1 million acres per year
of forest on public and private lands with some combination of
forest thinning, prescribed fire and restoration, at an average
cost of about $2,000 per acre, or $2 billion a year. If we are going
to meet this goal, we need to create permanent public and pri-
vate funding streams to do the work. That means some combi-
nation of state and federal funding through grants and subsidies
and private-sector funding through creating markets for wood
byproducts like bio-power generation and value-added wood
products.
The second challenge is that we are still struggling to create
the political will to do what is necessary, largely because there
are significant environmental and public health issues that we
have not reached societal consensus on yet. Most notable are
the fears that forest management can be perceived as a proxy
for timber harvest to achieve commercial rather than ecological
restoration goals, and that bioenergy and prescribed burning
poses a threat to public health. Yet biomass feedstock supply
analysis conducted across the state clearly shows that forest
thinning for ecological restoration provides ample supply for
bioenergy. Analysis of avoided emissions from bioenergy, as op-
posed to open burning or decomposition, shows very significant
reductions in criteria air pollutants and a significant decrease in
GHG emissions.
For both of these issues to be addressed, we are going to
need to broaden our perspective on forests and the impact cli-
mate change is having on forested ecosystems. Our goal should
be ecological in the long run — returning to a pre-European for-
est composition — but pragmatic in the short run. We need to
recognize that getting to the ecological goal will require human
intervention in the forest to gradually return to normalcy. To do
that we must agree on the environmental protections necessary
and vigorously enforce them in order to build trust in the long-
term outcome.
Frankly, Californians have fought over forest management
policy for too long. The fight over environmental standards, tim-
ber policy, bioenergy production and recreational access have
masked a desire to do nothing as a means of avoiding making
the tough decisions. It is absolutely possible to create a strategy
that improves the environment and intervenes in the ways we
need to reduce risk to forested communities, and we should be
holding our civic leaders to a higher standard of collaboration
and compromise to meet both goals.
At Sierra Business Council, we are committed to working
across diverse interests to find pragmatic solutions to the fire
risk problem. We cannot afford to wait. n

comstocksmag.com | 2018-19 CAPITAL REGION CARES
35