Re: What I'd really like to see go!


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Posted by David Sherman on Monday, January 12, 2009 at 12:39:29 :

In Reply to: What I'd really like to see go! posted by cfarther on Monday, January 12, 2009 at 03:25:32 :

I agree about the political appointees, and I'd add most of the mid-level bureaucrats to the list. When it comes time for government "budget cuts", they always cut the very bottom level (where the money actually gets spent on something that's arguably for the public good) before they cut any of the career seat-warmers who slowly push paper around.

As for the forests, northern California is different from southern California, and the wet side of Northern California is different from the dry side. In SoCal, the reason they have such horrific brush fires that wipe out all the houses in their path is that they never let the chaparral burn. They have just as much flammable brush in Mexico, but they don't have devastating fires because they let it burn whenever it wants to, which is usually just as soon as it's thick enough to carry a fire. In the north, you have pine forests on the east side that are about like our forests in Idaho -- lodgepole pine used to burn about every 20-30 years until people started putting the fires out, whereas the big Ponderosa pine forests were kept open by frequent ground fires that killed the brush and small trees without hurting the P-pines. If lightning didn't do the job, the Indians used to burn them to make for better deer, habitat, easier travel, and more berry bushes. On the coast, on the other hand, you have either redwoods that are basically fireproof once they get big, or mixed forests that are so wet that some of them haven't burned for thousands of years. They're all different. The trouble is nobody will tolerate living with the natural cycles any more. Forests of big fireproof trees widely spaced are not productive timber plantations, but when you log off and replant such a forest, you end up with small trees closely spaced that are all wiped out by the next fire to come through. Down south, people want to live in the chapparal with shake-roofed wood-framed houses and landscaping right up to the door, but then expect the government to keep their houses from burning. The Spaniards built adobe houses with tile roofs for a reason, and it wasn't just because they couldn't get OSB at the Home Depot.

I guess all I'm trying to say is that there's no one simple answer. Logging isn't even really an answer to making northern forests fireproof. In areas where forests naturally burn, the best thing to do, for forest health, would be to do some through pre-commercial thinning and brush cutting, and then do light burning regularly to keep the shade-tolerant species out. There's too much liability concern to do the light burning anywhere near houses, though, so the best we get is labor-intensive "fire mitigation" projects where they hand-cut and pile the slash, burn it in piles in the fall after a hard rain, and then the brush and small trees grow right back in. You basically can't have a fire-resistant forest that's a productive commercial log-growing forest at the same time, and you also can't have houses nestled in the forest (or in the chaparral) without them burning up along with the forest. It's been proven by experiment that even a hot crown fire won't ignite a wood-framed house that's 200' or more away, so the easy way to "fire-proof" houses is to clear all combustibles away from them for 200'. Any homeowner could do that, but people don't always want to live in an the middle of a big clearing like that.

Basically, people have to start treating wildfire like any natural storm -- it happens, we try our best to protect our property, and then we repair the damage -- rather than as a military adversary to be utterly defeated.

Gifford Pinchot did a lot of good as the "father of modern forestry", but he and Smokey Bear did one lasting harm, which was to convince everyone that every wildfire should always be attacked and extinguished immediately. It took 50 years of military-style battle against fire for the forests to build up to the level of flammability they have now, and I really don't see how we're ever going to get back to a natural system, except in a few carefully-managed preserves. Every year, nature adds more carbon to every forest and brush-field. Some of it rots and bugs eat some of it, but there's a net gain year after year. It's like if you threw a cup-full of gasoline into a room in your house once every hour. Eventually there will be enough gasoline to burn, and eventually, when there's enough, something will ignite it. The problem isn't the source of ignition. The problem is the accumulating gasoline.

One very easy and free thing that government agencies could do, but won't, is let everybody cut all the dead timber they want for free, for firewood, poles, or even saw logs, so long as they can get it out without damaging the green timber. Even just free firewood cutting of dead and down timber would help a lot.



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