“The 49er Fire was for the folks before me, my
predecessors, my mentors, my captains that I
worked for, that was their fire of a lifetime. But
now I’m having one of those every year.”
— Sean Griffis, battalion chief, Cal Fire
gime of fire suppression: extin-
guishing all f lames as quickly as
possible. Now California’s forests
are overgrown tinderboxes-in-wait-
ing. They’re also stocked with mil-
lions of dead trees from drought and
bark beetle infestations. Addition-
ally, the old practice of clear-cutting
has led to evenly aged forests, which
burn more severely once lit.
“Frankly, these fires are not an
act of God,” says Malcolm North, a re-
search scientist with the U.S. Forest
Service and an affiliate professor of
forest ecology at UC Davis. “They’re
the result of 100 years of manage-
ment decisions in which we didn’t
quite understand the way the forest
worked, and we were not necessarily
doing the right thing for it.”
In order to get a grip on these
crazy fires, experts say California
needs to do more controlled burning
and vegetation thinning, after years
of putting every fire out and letting
the landscape become dangerously
overgrown. The state is ramping up
these efforts, but it controls a small
percentage of forested land and can
only make so much of a dent. Of Cal-
ifornia’s 33 million acres of forest,
federal agencies own 57 percent;
families, Native American tribes and
companies own 40 percent; and state
and local agencies own 3 percent.
California also lacks the infra-
structure to effectively process the
waste from some of these forest
management activities because the
majority of its timber mills have
closed in recent decades. Private
industry might play a critical role,
too, in preventing devastating fires,
if it can do so without taking the
state back to an era of rampant de-
struction of forests.
LET IT BURN
Despite what Smokey Bear has
taught the public since 1944, not all
fire is bad. In fact, periodic low-in-
tensity fire that creeps along the
ground prevents vegetation build-
up, makes water more available for
the big trees and aids in biodiversity.
Most experts agree some combina-
tion of controlled fire and thinning
is needed to reduce the vegetation
buildup in California forests. How-
ever, things get sticky when it comes
to how to do this, who is going to pay
and how to do enough to make a sig-
nificant difference.
There’s a lot of work to do. In a
2012 study, North determined that
historically — in the 1840s, before Eu-
ropean arrival — about 500,000 acres
burned on Forest Service land in the
Sierra Nevada each year; in 2012, it
was about 33,000 per year. “It’s like
almost nothing,” he says. Griffis says
Cal Fire’s Vegetation Management
Program has only averaged about
13,000 acres annually.
In fall 2018, the Legislature allo-
cated $200 million a year for the next
five years for forest management,
and Cal Fire has committed to a goal
of managing 500,000 acres — pri-
marily with controlled burning and
thinning — per year eventually, as
June 2019 | comstocksmag.com
59