Comstock's magazine 0619 - June 2019 | Page 60

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 60 comstocksmag.com | June 2019 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?”