By Jim Geraghty
Monday, July 26, 2021
Terribly large and destructive wildfires
in the West are now a summer ritual — and with it, the insistence that the
fires are further evidence of climate change.
But the fires are also a consequence of
bad forest management policies – specifically, the longtime erroneous belief
that humans should never clear out flammable underbrush and other potential
fire fuel, and that controlled burns are destructive and always inherently
bad.
Thankfully, the longstanding conventional
wisdom is rapidly eroding. Oregon’s Democratic governor Kate Brown said on Jake
Tapper’s program yesterday, “it’s incredibly important, with climate change,
that we get into these forests and start doing the thinning and harvest and
prescriptive burning, so that we can create healthier landscapes, landscapes
that are more resilient to wildfire.”
Some left-of-center
publications that focus more specifically on environmental issues emphasize that deliberate policy choices in forest management can
mitigate the effects of fires.
“We have
overwhelming evidence that when we treat forests by removing fuels, it
generally — not always, you can never say always, but generally — moderates
fire behavior,” said Maureen Kennedy, a professor who studies forest fires at
the University of Washington, Tacoma.
…Forest
treatments like this work by spacing out fuel, Kennedy said. When there is a
continuous ladder of branches and small trees from the ground to the canopy, it
allows fire to rise up into the treetops. And when trees are close together,
fires move from one to the next, growing hotter and hotter. Trees that are farther
apart, however, encourage fires to fall to the ground. It makes sense,
intuitively, but it’s still surprising when a wall of flame settles down and
begins creeping across the forest floor, Kennedy said.
“No matter
how many times I study it, no matter how much sense it makes in theory, it’s
still amazing,” she said. “When you look at photographs from the Wallow Fire,
that landscape was nuked, it was burning so hot that there were only blackened
sticks that used to be trees left behind. Then, as you move into the treatment
area the trees are brown, and then further in, they are green.”
The financial cost of controlled burns is
actually surprisingly inexpensive; “in the southeastern U.S., where prescribed fire is a common
management practice, the average cost is about $32 per acre.” One estimate of
the 2018 California wildfires put the economic cost
at more than $148 billion.
But finding a potential solution and
implementing it are two different tasks. It’s difficult to treat every corner
of a forest that is at risk of a fire. And unfortunately, almost all of
the legal and political incentives are for local, state, and national officials
to not perform any controlled burns. In other words, one of the reasons our
forests in the West are so flammable and full of kindling is that the people who
claim to love those forests the most won’t allow measures to prevent the
worst-case forest-fire scenarios.
There is little to no sign that global carbon
emissions will decrease anytime soon. We are going to have to learn to adapt to a more carbon-heavy
atmosphere.
Cities at risk
of flooding would find investments in flood mitigation a much more cost-effective approach than wild-eyed dreams of
decarbonization or banning the internal-combustion engine. But those approaches
are practical, not idealistic – and thus, they get much less attention.
No comments:
Post a Comment