Comstock's magazine 0619 - June 2019 | Page 59

“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