n forestry
“Frankly, these fires are not an act of God.
They’re the result of 100 years of management
decisions in which we didn’t quite understand
the way the forest worked, and we were not
necessarily doing the right thing for it.”
— Malcolm North, research scientist, U.S. Forest Service
recommended in the “California For-
est Carbon Plan,” released in 2018.
The federal government has commit-
ted to the same. This work will be on-
going. “We have some challenges in
what to do with the materials when
we reach large-scale efforts — the
500,000 acres per year,” says Helge
Eng, deputy director of resource
management for Cal Fire. “That’s a
lot of acres and a lot of wood coming
out of the forest.”
Almost immediately after taking
office, Gov. Gavin Newsom indicated
that when it came to the wildfire cri-
sis, he wasn’t messing around. He is-
sued an executive order Jan. 8 to speed
work on prevention projects in at-risk
communities, and called for $105 mil-
lion more in wildfire safety funding.
Cal Fire identified 35 projects in its
“Community Wildfire Prevention &
Mitigation Report” to implement im-
mediately, noting how “[m]ore than
25 million acres of California wild-
lands are classified as under very high
or extreme fire threat, extending that
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risk over half the state.” Projects in-
clude the removal of dead trees, clear-
ing vegetation and the creation of fuel
breaks, among other activities.
“It’s really a matter of using all the
tools at our disposal,” Eng says. “It’s
not just fuel reduction. It’s ingress and
egress to communities so that people
can escape if a catastrophic wildfire
should occur. It’s home hardening —
essentially fireproofing homes — that
could be both existing [homes] and
strengthening the building code for
new homes, and certainly land-use
planning is an essential aspect of it.”
One way to increase the scale of
forest management is to let nature do
some of the work, by allowing fires
to burn in remote wilderness areas
as managed wildfires, then con-
centrate mechanical thinning and
controlled burns where wildland
and development intersect, where
people live. North says Yosemite
National Park has had let-burn ar-
eas for several decades, and when
the Rim Fire burned into Yosemite’s
Aspen Valley in 2013, “The wildfire
burned in there, and in many places
it actually dropped out of the tops of
the trees, burned along the ground
and did what it was supposed to do.
So there’s pretty good evidence that
when you restore these fire systems,
you can get fire back as a beneficial
force into the forest. But you have to
deal with the fuel problem you had
from decades of putting out all the
fires first.”
California’s forests are going to
burn, North says. “The one thing
we do know ... is even though we’ve
gotten better with aircraft and
techniques, you cannot control
fire in the system,” he says. “You’re
going to get fire eventually. So we
really have to make the decision:
Do we always want to be doing fire
suppression, and then we’re deal-
ing with triage all the time, or do
we want to start being proactive
and being the agent that sometimes
puts fire out on the landscape, but
in conditions that we want?”