The fundamental problem that controlled burns face today is that there has been a huge and irresponsible increase in development on "Urban-wildland border". Here in the California Sierras, you have a uniform peppering of (often luxury) houses outside of the various small urban areas. Those forests naturally burn on a regular basis but with this situation, any controlled burn is going to threaten some number of houses.
Of course, the regular fires threaten and destroy these areas too. We've seen the destruction of Paradise, Berry Creek, Greenville, and Grizzly Flats in the last few years (just reading from Wikipedia).
Edit: Always need to mention that global-warming/climate-change makes this worse even if it was caused by local irresponsible behavior. Of course what climate hits first are areas where the local ecology already had problems (In before "It's not [Local bad behavior], it's climate change" or the opposite).
I just want to chime in not to disagree with anything you’re saying (for the record I think your post is thoughtful. I don’t know enough about the nuances to agree or disagree) and it isn’t even directed at you but to all of us and our discussion styles. I really hope that the collective We shift to saying something like “One of the many complications…” rather than “The problem” or “The biggest problem”.
When it comes to very large and very complicated problems we often get stuck arguing over which one piece is The problem or The cause or The singular thing. Over and over and over we get stuck arguing over which is the biggest or the only cause/solution.
A ton of the issues that we confront here are some of the most complicated issues that interweave technology, economy, ecology, humans, weird borders, power/influence, money, etc…
I know this is just semantics but I really do believe that for complex issues we’d get a lot further in discussions if we weren’t limiting ourselves to a silver bullet solution or the one cause.
I know it’s “just a casual internet forum” and i know we can’t (and shouldn’t) expect intense rigor on our comments, but i think the hn community has some good minds to discuss some of this and it pokes at me every time i see us (i do the same shit too) get bogged down with “well acksually the biggest cause” or “THE solution is…”
Sorry for the tangent poster and readers, but this minor quibble seems important.
To your point, I wish there were diagrams "we'd" all use to illustrate any issue with complicated interwoven relationships that put the complexity into at least some degree of comparability. Ideally you'd be able to see how some relative amount of funding needs to support some physical effort required and in the context of some degree of regulatory scope.
A simple example is the two-factor, two-axis diminishing returns line graph. As cost goes up, returns decrease and we can point to a spot and discuss it.
I wish I could give you a good intuitive example of a far more complex (more factors), but if this were easy we'd all be doing it and we'd all be seeing such diagrams more frequently. So in the absence of simple and nuanced illustrations, we have lists and we necessarily fall back on language and our own biases like we do here. (Just humans being human, no judgement.)
One possibility I can imagine is a table with solutions on one axis and influencing dimensions on another. e.g., One axis is tech, funding, regulatory, etc. and the other is proposed solutions. In the table, the cross referenced cell might contain a number showing how much of some environmental dimension is needed for a given solution.
This example is crude at best because clearly we can debate what the cross-reference values assigned are, and whether or not they're correct, and even whether or not a dimension should be broken down further, but this technique's shortcomings are a compromise–the price paid for attempting to communicate the holistic understanding of an issue. One hopes that price is worth paying for greater appreciation of the issue's systemic complexities, and enabling others to see and evaluate factors they might not otherwise consider.
> Sorry for the tangent poster and readers, but this minor quibble seems important.
I fully agree. It's not just important, it's actually the essence of the problem.
1. Forest fires are hard to solve because many of the loudest voices on the topic are people who see them as an opportunity to bring up their favorite issue.
2. The fact that root causes are intertwined also means that real progress will be slow and potentially limited, at least in the short to medium term.
This is not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that fires were suppressed for nearly 200 years and now turn into raging infernos. Fires were suppressed first for economic reasons, and then later for misguided Environmental reasons
Forest fires of a historically typical magnitude would pose much less Danger to communities adjacent to wildlands. This is further complicated by the fact that any of these communities and dwellings were not designed for fire resistance because public policy at the time was no fires ever.
I don't think I agree that the distribution of development poses a significant challenge.
If that were the case, you would see at least some controlled Burns in undeveloped areas, but that is not the case. You might see more logging or a small low risk Burns near inhabitated areas.
The fact that we still see essentially no control burns is strong evidence that the barrier is Still what it has been for the last 100 years. Bad government policy informed by Environmental emotion instead of environmental science.
At the end of the day, the rationale is stupid but simple. People don't like the Aesthetics of a burn Forest for the smell of smoke in the air. Actual risk to life and property from controlled Burns can be effectively minimized. In some areas of the state they never existed in the first place and still don't exist
The solution isn't rocket science. You just start with small safe Burns adjacent to communities. Nobody wants to look at a burn scar for several years, so instead they roll the dice on their Community burning down
It’s also dumb concern cargo-cutting in California. Even the limited number of burns that are authorized can be cancelled if the air quality that day is bad.
This is true, but even where it's not, the biggest issue in doing controlled burns is simply funding.
Controlled burns aren't just "light it up". You may need to create a firebreak. You may need to cull some trees as too many areas have lots of spindly, unhealthy trees that are going to make a controlled burn much harder to control. etc.
All of this costs manpower which translates to money.
What everybody (homeowners, forestry types, loggers, environmentalists, etc.) can agree to is prescribed burn practices should be improved.
At the time, the story told about the Cerro Grande fire was an inexperienced Forestry agent started a prescribed burn in the heart of the Spring wind season, leading to an inevitable wildfire that no local NM understanding local conditions would have approved. Probably the most expensive fire in NM history.
The story told of the Hermits Peak fire is another outsider Forestry agent tried to squeeze a prescribed burn into a very narrow “safe” time slot to stay “on schedule”. To no one’s surprise, the fire didn’t care much about the narrow slot of safety and the largest wildfire in NM history resulted.
I think giving a State powers to selective delay any specific prescribed fire within their borders (State, Fed, tribal) would have prevented both destructive NM fires. Local wisdom counts for something and at least the Feds don’t come off looking like idiots when things get out hand. Maybe the Feds and the State together would look like idiots, but not just those outsider Feds.
Controlled burns cost money, no doubt. But just an example, California's fire suppression complex is very well funded. California has a fleet of 747s and other huge aircraft, just for example.
My guess is there's no funding where there's no people and where there are people, there's funding but the people's arrangement prevents controlled burns.
The wildland-urban interface (that's what I've heard foresters call it, also "WUI") is a problem, and it's amplified by the fact that the US Forest Service and various state foresters will more or less subsidize those people living in the WUI. They nearly have a blank check. Rather than having some sort of extra tax or additional insurance requirement for living in the WUI, the USFS simply lobbies for (and usually receives) more money every year.
Even though there is this WUI problem, there's also the problem of past poor forest management, where fuel coats the bottom layer of many forests in the West. The forests are denser than the natural equilibrium, and they are primed to become wildfires because so much fuel has built up. That's a serious problem even without encroaching the WUI.
It's a complex problem, though various jurisdictions could probably implement more controlled burns than happen today and make the entire ecosystem a bit stronger.
I worry about the places where poor management leads wildfires to be so hot that they essentially sterilize the soil, preventing quick regrowth. At scale, that makes climate change worse.
That's how development always happened in much of the US. Cities expanding into forestland or grassland. The problem isn't that the homes are all of sudden luxurious, or that we somehow do less planning than in the 1880s or 1960s. It's that a mix of well-intentioned environmental policies and activism mean there's no fuel reduction happening at all. Controlled burns are one way, but logging is another.
Yes but ultimately No and No. US cities have always expanded but the current level of "exurban" development is new - a continuation of the expansion trend no doubt but still more expansiveness, sufficient to be a barrier to fixing the problems created by fire suppression forestry.
And logging doesn't fix things the way natural fires fix things. Logging companies only want big trees and a sustainable forest has big trees that survive fires and little tree that are removed by modest fires. Clear cut areas tend to burn quite intensely because they're all small tree.
I live in Tahoe and firefighters do controlled burns feet from houses all the time (in Nevada) without a problem. I see them rake the debris into piles and burn them.
The only federal regulation I saw referenced in the article were clean air regulations. Otherwise, it appears states and their residents are imposing additional barriers. And public opinion is a local issue of course as well. I don't know if it's really possible to change public ignorance, particularly if the strong opinions are political, so this might be a case where it makes sense for the federal government to step in. We can't just let CO decide to burn themselves to the ground without that decision putting other states at risk.
Controlled burns happen regularly in NC on state and federal land.
It's something even more fundamental than all that.
If someone does a prescribed burn (say, a local government), and it gets even slightly out of control and accidentally burns down a few homes, they will immediately face a huge amount of blame and consequences and probably get run out on a rail. But if they don't do a prescribed burn and then the inevitable wildfire burns down a bunch of homes, well then, tough luck. That's just an unlucky act of god.
Doesn't a controlled burn work by removing a swath of combustible material, so that a subsequent fire cannot cross that area? That material can be removed by other means that don't risk fire.
Yes that's exactly the idea. And yes those "other means" sometimes exist, but they tend to be much more expensive than controlled burns. The amount of person-power and time needed to remove that material manually would be cost-prohibitive.
And that's assuming other methods even exist. Much of the fuel that needs to be removed is in places where there are no roads, so the only way to remove that fuel would be hundreds or thousands of individual helicopter trips. No government is going to pay for that.
EDIT: Methods like tree thinning are manual methods and they are done routinely and they help. But they cannot take the place of controlled burns for removing large amounts of fuel and creating big fire breaks.
"Cannot" is a strong word. Fires smoulder for a long time and you cannot control the wind. It would be foolish to expect a prescribed burn to have zero chance of causing collateral damage.
Uhh, no. Fed just needs to relax regulations around air quality, especially when the thing they're saying no to will improve air quality in the long run. I recreate on our federal lands and can't imagine the same access in state or private hands. State ownership inevitably leads to valuing extraction activities over recreation activities, if not just selling it to the highest bidder (Wilkes Brothers) directly.
At least with the states imposing regulations it's limited to that state. I don't see how Colorado effects neighboring states that presumably are doing what they are supposed to do. If Wyoming is running controlled burns but Colorado is not, then (admittedly in this very simple thought) the fires will be more easily contained because they have done their diligence.
The citizens of that state should step in and make the changes, not the federal government.
If CO continues on their path, their fires will go out of control and spread to other states. If they had a way to contain their fires within their state I’d agree to let them burn it down if that’s what they want to do, but I don’t see how that isn’t a major problem for all their neighboring states. Even if their neighbors are smart and doing prescribes burns as they should, it doesn’t mean they can’t suffer massive losses from a huge out of control fire started in another state.
> Even if their neighbors are smart and doing prescribes burns as they should, it doesn’t mean they can’t suffer massive losses from a huge out of control fire started in another state.
These sorts of issues usually wind up in court, in which the circuit court would then certainly have the ability to force CO into acting properly. WY would just need to show that there was indeed damage. States fighting happens all the time (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_water_dispute for example), but rarely does it need to become a federal issue.
> it appears states and their residents are imposing additional barriers
As long as the states imposing the barriers are bearing their own costs, I don't see reason for federal intervention. The situation gets complicated in the West, because a lot of the forest is federal.
> I don't know if it's really possible to change public ignorance,
Let me clear that up for you, no, it is not possible. Society is suffering willful ignorance in so many aspects of day-to-day life that this is not going to change in our lifetimes if ever.
Most of the land West of the Mississippi is Federally owned. You wanna do fire abatement on BLM land, you got a long hard fight ahead of you, before you ever get to a written regulation you can cite. Much less laws voted on by Congress.
Thanks for the update, I was near some of the early lawsuits against the BLM to allow controlled burns back in the 90s; and haven't kept up with it much since then.
One of the big problems is that controlled burns can and do become uncontrolled burns. The largest ever wildfire in New Mexico was started as a planned burn (more honest label) just last year. [1]
I'd rather experience frequent uncontrolled burns in areas that do regular controlled burns than even a single uncontrolled burn in an area that doesn't.
Canada recently had a "controlled burn" that was made by an international association. They weren't trained on Canadian forests properly, now it's a huge wildfire.
Which was this? The Banff one [may 4] doesn't seem related to this, and if anything seems to defend the practice by example - 31 hectares burned, 28 of which were planned, and only three horse stables were damaged despite weather changing suddenly and spreading the fire.
It's still got a much higher expected value to do prescribed burns have some of them turn uncontrolled than do nothing, or do what is happening now (pretend we can control for every variable).
Weather forecasting is pretty amazing these days, along with modelling, has changed the equations compared to decades past. It becomes a question of how much risk are you prepared to take vs how often you want to do a prescribed burn (sometimes favourable conditions (still, humid, not raining) don't show up for months or years.
This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system.
When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing.
We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause unintended damage and harm, there's a person to institution to blame, so no one wants to take on that liability. So instead, we let brush grow out of control and eventually a mega fire hits that creates orders of magnitude more destruction and health hazard than the sum of all prescribed burns ever would have.
Another example is medical treatment. If you develop cancer and die because you get no treatment, there's no person to blame and no one to sue. It's just an "act of god" so people accept the outcome and move on. But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention.
The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse.
I don't know how we solve this problem. To me, the root of the problem seems to be a weakness of the constitution of our society and/or leaders.
Collectively, we need to figure out how to balance diffuse statistical risk against acute, dramatic risk, or else we all risk being the frog slowly boiled alive.
I think this is a good diagnosis of some of our issues, but it’s a really hard problem.
When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms.
I think, as the other poster noted it really comes down to the individualistic nature in which we try and address some of these collective action problems. We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.
Totally agreed. I was 100% in the pro-controlled-burn camp until I happened to stumble upon the consequences of rubber hitting the road.
A few months back I was visiting family in New Mexico and chatting with some locals. I asked offhandedly about if they did controlled burns out where we were… and boy did I immediately realize it was a sore subject. Last year, the US Forest Service set off the biggest wildfires in the state’s history doing controlled burns, by irresponsibly starting them in the windy season and not monitoring appropriately.
“Only” a hundred or so homes were destroyed, but imagine if the federal government were to burn down your home, livestock, and property only to abdicate any responsibility and fail to have any modicum of transparency or accountability. The nominal monetary damages do not nearly capture the social harm caused by the incident, and there’s been little trace of accountability when it comes to the policy makers who approved the burn, living thousands of miles away and suffering none of the impact.
This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS. If anything this should highlight the importance of doing controlled burns so that there is minimal chance of these raging infernos cropping up. Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead.
> This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS
You're not contradicting anything, that's literally the topic of this subthread. From the GGP:
> We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.
> Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead.
Wherein you've created the same problem in the opposite direction. Who's going to volunteer to do controlled burns if they can be held personally liable for failures?
Starting from "prove you didn't cause the problem" with such a dynamic and hard to control activity is setting up the same issue.
Most reasonable people understand the difference between accident and negligence. How is it we are able to have professional engineers sign on off plans if they know they will be held personally liable for failures? This is very much a solved problem and I don’t think it’s wise to entertain FUD.
People get sued all the time (and lose) due to damage caused by accidents (that weren’t negligence).
Professional engineers ARE held personally liable for failures. That’s why there aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be extremely conservative and most things they sign off on are very limited in scope.
No sane PE would ever sign off on a realistic prescribed burn plan, because they couldn’t control the variables enough to not get ruined. Any plan a PE would sign off wouldn’t be implementable because, surprise, conditions change rapidly and it’s not economic to do detailed real-time surveying of overgrown areas that need prescribed burns all the time.
Agreed; I don’t mean to imply I’m firmly against controlled burns now.
I am disenchanted with our current system for executing them in the US, however. Like you say, we need a system for accountability to deal with the externalities.
> When we go the other way, and allow actions that harm people, we have an unfortunate tendency to allow those harms to fall… extremely disproportionately on those with the least burden to bear the harms and the least power to be compensated for those harms.
I don't think this is true, or at least it is nonobvious. Are prescribed-burns-gone-wrong more likely to harm the most vulnerable, as compared to unprescribed burns? If not, then this objection doesn't really apply.
In general I'd be in agreement with you, but I think this is one case where the typical argument is quite clearly true. I've lived in regions with slash and burn agriculture, which uses seasonal controlled burns. It is horrible. Air quality levels spike into the hundreds for a period of weeks to months, depending on the specifics of the season. It's difficult to tolerate in my hoity toity life with indoor work, air conditioning, and multiple air purifiers [barely] managing to keep the air breathable.
At the same time this is happening, there are countless people working outdoors or in other sorts of conditions where they don't have such luxuries. And the cost is masked because, somewhat like smoking, many of the consequences happen over many years if not decades. And even when you do hit a climax, it may be argued that the bad air contributed, but did not provably cause, e.g. some cardiovascular event.
Of course, if you don't burn - then a lightning strike, or a firebug, means you're going to really burn. Clearly we need an army of sheep. Gah, then people would complain about the methane and massive marbled mutton fests. Cripes things are tricky.
> I don't think this is true, or at least it is nonobvious.
Texas capped medical malpractice damages, because surely, all the frivilous lawsuits were the reason for driving up medical costs. This resulted in gems like this guy maiming dozens of people[1].
You couldn't sue him, because lawyers aren't going to front their own money to take on a case like this, when the likely awards will exceed legal costs. Hospitals wouldn't fire him, because he'd sue them, and because they get a share of the business he brings in. Other surgeons couldn't pooh-pooh him, because he'd sue them.
Presumably, if he maimed someone who had enough out-of-pocket money to pay a lawyer, and then vindictively pursue litigation against him, this could have been resolved earlier. That's a lot of 'if's. In practice, he just... Kept on maiming people, shielded by protection from financial liability.
I suspect that they would, if for no other reason that if the direct action is indiscriminate in whom it harms, then the well-heeled will have the resources necessary to seek compensation via litigation while the marginalized will be out of luck.
> Are prescribed-burns-gone-wrong more likely to harm the most vulnerable, as compared to unprescribed burns?
Yes. Because those planning the controlled burns will take more care in ensuring the politically powerful are not as likely to be harmed by the burns. If a controlled burn goes wrong it's more likely to fall on those who have less power.
Also, if the politically powerful are negatively impacted by the burns, their losses are more likely to be adequately socialized, while those that lack political power are more likely to bear the costs directly and individually.
Basically, the legal equivalent to the trolley problem. Worth noting that there are solutions in our legal code for this. Good Samaritan laws would be a good example.
However, even in a world without such countermeasures, if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing, it stands to reason that simply paying the price for the negative externalities would still be logical and it would have the advantage that those negatively impacted by those externalities would not feel like they are disproportionately bearing the burden of the action.
> But if you get treatment and the doctors make a mistake and their actions cause some unintended harm, then there's someone to blame and sue, even if your statistical outcome was drastically improved by their intervention.
Doctors still have a lot of cover, even if they make a mistake, for exactly that reason. The real challenge for doctors is the difficulty preventing the litigation itself. Even if they win in court, the consequences of being subject to so many lawsuits are dramatic.
> The same problem is going to exist trying to mitigate climate change. Positive actions to reverse the problem will create negative externalities that hurt some people, but doing nothing will be drastically worse.
I think the bigger problem is that mitigating climate change will necessarily change the winners and losers, and the current winners have more power than the current losers.
Yep, in Ethics this is known as the Act / Omission distinction. (Even if they result in the same consequences, you’re ethically responsible for your acts, and rarely to the same extent your omissions.)
It’s common to the main deontological ethical frameworks including the Judeo-Christian models that underpin “western values.
The “solution” is to take a Consequentialist approach, though most people fail the trolley problem and find consequentialism repugnant, so I don’t think we will solve this problem any time soon.
(Most people are familiar with Mills’ hedonic utilitarianism, but it’s quite simplistic; I’m a big fan of Eudaimonia as your value function, and richer systems like two-level utilitarianism as a way of getting round the “calculate everything all the time” problem with some utilitarian systems.)
The medical analogy here is the DNR order. Doctors don't want to create liability by explicitly assisting in a patient's death, even of someone in a vegetative state. So instead, they avoid this liability while still "accomplishing death", by following an order to intentionally avoid explicitly reversing any sudden "act of god" event that would cause the patient to die without active intervention.
Or, to put that another way: instead of controlled burns where you're actively setting the fire, why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out?
> why not just build (and maintain) the firebreaks, wait for a wildfire to happen inside the burn zone, and then just refuse to put it out?
Per my understanding, part of performing a controlled burn is mustering more resources near the burn (spatially and temporally) than you could reasonably maintain near every possible burn site all the time.
Under the prepare the firebreaks ahead of time doctrine, you'd still be on the hook for mustering resources in response to an unscheduled fire as is the case today, but if the firebreaks are already in place and appropriate for the conditions at the time, the response would be watch and wait, and if all goes well, let it burn out without much additional effort.
If conditions aren't appropriate, then you're back to status quo of containing a wildfire; but maybe the firebreaks help somewhat?
(Would need the opinion of someone knowledgable in wildfire fighting rather than random internet peeps to know if this approaches a reasonable idea at all though; I'd wonder if it's reasonable to build and maintain general purpose firebreaks in large forests at all; and what effect that would have on the habitability of the forest for its flora and fauna)
The interesting thing about controlled burns is that by doing them, you end up with fewer possible burn sites. So such an approach would get easier over time.
I don't know about the US and other countries, but firebreaks are not really there to stop fire. Well, they do have that effect on some intensity fires, but the actual reason is enabling vehicle access.
A fire of any reasonable intensity can easily jump a firebreak with a decent wind. And then there's spot-fires, which are like voodoo, you can be fighting a fire in front of you and have fires suddenly 300m behind you.
All they really do is give you a point to fight a fire.
A viable solution might be the creation of an insurance fund to compensate for any unintended damage caused by prescribed burns. This fund, funded by utility companies especially those in wildfire-prone areas, would function similarly to banks' contributions to the FDIC. This could alleviate liability concerns, thereby encouraging proactive wildfire prevention strategies.
This is a good idea but it doesn't address the pollution problem. If a prescribed burn will increase pollution beyond the EPA's acceptable limits then the burn will be against the law.
We need the EPA's emissions/particulate rules to be adjusted to give priority to prescribed burns by certified firefighters and foresters. They don't do burns often enough that the EPA should be limiting their power to manage fire susceptibility. We also need watchdogs to make sure that regular polluters don't increase output during prescribed burns in order to hide their actual emissions.
Being the devil's advocate, when my mother was dying of cancer there were forest fires here. She had to leave the area and stay at a hotel far away at great cost/physical discomfort (at that point she had a hospital bed at home). There are people who physically can't handle the higher particulate amount, what do you propose we do with them? Let them suffer/die?
But the burn will happen anyway. It'll just happen at a different time, when it hasn't been prepared for, with less control and more particulates as well as destruction of communities.
Filtering particulates in interior spaces is relatively easy, and when moving between them, you can wear a mask. Of course, this is very inconvenient, but it is so no matter whether the fire is a prescribed burn or a wildfire. Having to move elsewhere during prescribed burn might be highly inconvenient to you, but doing the same during wildfire will be highly inconvenient to other people. We might decide to favor some people over others, or balance the positive and negative externalities, but it seems silly to me to choose wildfires over prescribed burns just because the former are caused by inaction, and latter by action.
> Heather Heward is a senior instructor at the University of Idaho who teaches about forests and fires. She said it’s not just federal land we need to be thinning and burning, it’s private land, too.
> “We have a real lack of (prescribed burn) practitioners, specifically on the private land side, that are able to do this work because – we're scared, honestly. We are scared that something will go wrong and that someone will sue us. I'm scared of that,” she said.
I have another specific example of this to offer: Active vs. passive flood control. One passive control mechanism is the retention basin. This is just a pond connected to a water system. When it rains and the water begins to rise, some water flows into the pond instead of flowing downstream, reducing the effect of the storm.
You can improve the retention basin by adding a pump to actively manage the basin's capacity. When there is rain in the forecast, you pump water out of the basin, reducing its water level. When the rain arrives, you turn off the pump and let the basin refill. This increases the amount of water that the basin is able to divert during the storm.
I worked with a company that designed such a system and we even installed a demonstration unit for a municipality. It worked as intended and the city engineer advocated for expanding the project to all suitable basins. However, when the municipality's lawyers looked at the project, they argued that if the system failed to activate prior to a storm, the city might be liable any flooding that occurred afterward. Of course, the scenario where the system failed to function was identical to one in which it had never been built in the first place*, but that was not a convincing argument and the project was killed.
* I like escalators because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. - Mitch Hedberg
I think the root of the problem is that we set erroneously low prices for some behaviors.
Actuaries should be able to figure out reasonable values for the probability of some costly outcome (e.g., a massive, uncontrollable wild fire) given specific behaviors or conditions (e.g., letting property grow into being a wildfire risk, vs reducing that risk by clearing overgrowth), and for risks with costs that a person/company can't ever cover (e.g., a massive wildfire), those responsible entities should have to carry insurance, who can incentivize or implement cost-reducing preventative actions in the places with greatest risk.
In the climate change context, the price of dumping GHGs into the atmosphere is nowhere near the cost. If we priced that in, economics would rapidly make renewable | nuclear power projects, public transit projects, shifts away from concrete in construction, etc economically obvious choices. But we've messed up the prices, and these messed up prices incentivize people to ignore problems or worse, spend societal quantities of money and labor on growing the problems.
And this just generalizes to the recurring problem of individualism vs collectivism. Government regulation is the answer, but it's not being applied efficiently here
I don't think that's it. I think it's more a consequence of democracy versus autocracy. An autocracy could make these trade-offs without political consequence. Of course, autocracies come with other profound challenges. Most I think agree that a benevolent dictator produces the best outcomes. The problem is that human benevolence is fickle, and subject to interpretation -- invariably leading to violence.
Near as I can tell, there is also a narcissistic manipulation element here.
Autocrats often exist because ‘no one else can do what needs to be done’. They do this by being willing to be unphased by the threat of being ‘the bad guy’, or even reveling in it. They know as long as the folks in the background get what they need, they’ll actually be fine.
Narcissistic manipulation is when someone tells a story placing the blame for damage on someone
or an institution while ignoring the actual context of that person or institutions actions so as to displace the blame/damage for their own actions (or lack thereof) and their own lack of ownership for the outcome. We’re awash in it right now.
It’s super toxic for everyone, and fighting it is extremely difficult to nearly impossible in the legal system because of rules designed to STOP this kind of manipulation (which is typical), and steady reduction in the consequences for ‘minor’ issues like Perjury and Contempt of Court which make failed attempts at this manipulation ‘free’.
Rules of evidence, standing, the way court ‘happens’, procedural things that cost time and money, etc. all play into it.
And the system inevitably ends up favoring bullshit, because anything but bullshit requires individuals take a stand and say ‘the rules say x, but in totality that’s bullshit and produces an unjust outcome so we’re doing something else’ is, well, not favored in the way the law works. Sometimes for good reasons, but it usually gets perverted in the day to day reality.
>The problem is that human benevolence is fickle, and subject to interpretation
Basically, the "benevolent" half of the "benevolent dictatorship" is a long-shot at best and a total fantasy at worst. I think this is well-understood by reasonable people, but I'd also argue that "dictatorship" in this context is even more of a fantasy.
>An autocracy could make these trade-offs without political consequence
See, I don't think this is true at all.
Nobody rules alone, every dictator needs enforcers, those enforcers need enforcers, all the way down, and suddenly the well-oiled autocracy that can cut through red tape like butter looks more and more like it requires an endless hierarchy of "benevolent" (i.e. compliant) dictators or a bureaucracy overburdened by rules that was supposed to be democracy's great weakness.
Every decision you make as an autocrat is a gamble that your enforcers will carry out your vision faithfully, with a bunch of details you haven't even thought of also accounted for, while maintaining the facade that you are actually all-powerful.
All it takes is a few slip-ups for your underlings to have flexible loyalties, where "of course" you're in charge but maybe next time leave some wiggle-room for an alternative path of implementing your omnipotent decrees.
Democracies also make these tradeoffs without political consequences, if the people who are subject to the negative externalities are sufficiently disenfranchised, or are simply a powerless minority that we can run over, or are ones whose concerns are sidelined for the benefit of a larger umbrella movement.
I completely agree with the parent poster. This is not a democracy vs autocracy question. This is entirely an individualism[1] versus a collectivism[2] question.
[1] Which prioritizes 'do not actively harm any individual.' [3]
[2] Which prioritizes 'do what is best for the group as a whole.' [3]
[3] While some societies are pretty clearly democratic, and some are pretty clearly autocratic (and some are a mix of both), every society is, to a mixture of degrees, individualistic, and to a mixture of degrees, collectivist. Where they differ is in where the line gets drawn, and on which questions.
There's a reason by China is having no problem rolling out high speed rail across the entire country on the order of a decade while California can't even roll out a single line in the same time.
China can just bulldoze entire villages while the little people have no recourse to resist. That power is incredibly useful for getting things done, but the big problem of succession makes that level of power incredibly dangerous, fickle, and fragile.
1) it’s all good until you’re one of the ‘little people’
2) succession/plan B is always the problem with dictators/dictatorships.
If you’re lucky, the interests of those in power are genuinely aligned with your best interests and they’re competent - (Singapore/PAP, at least historically), but nothing lasts forever.
Don't forget in China these little people have way higher attachment to their homes. They are often ancestral homes. The people that would be happy to be 'forced to move' have already moved to the city in most cases, with only those with high connections to their home remaining. In the USA we don't really have the same sort of attachment to ancestral homes and would be more receptive to paid relocation and view it way differently. Those that celebrate China's way and say the relocated people are happy to be moved from their ancestral homes and communities to concrete block apartments don't understand Chinese culture and provide cover to how soul crushing relocation is for those impacted.
At the end of the day, it either happens or it doesn’t - and that has pros and cons either way.
You’re correct on the impact to those folks, but there are also a LOT of other folks who benefit from the new rail (or should, anyway!).
At the end of the day, their strategy works for the majority better.
We’re deadlocked trying to not offend anyone (and get scammed by the contractors in the process). They say ‘fuck it’ and pave it over, and then tuck the little people in a closet and tell them to shut up or else.
But if they didn’t, they’d have no rail where they need to go, like…. us.
Eventually, without some compromise or balance, either system reaches a breaking point. Ours, we’ll eventually be so mired in shit not working that people will leave to somewhere different (if they can) wherever it’s really bad. Think NYC/Detroit/LA/etc. in the 70’s and 80’s.
In China, they crack down too hard (or stay too focused on ‘the plan’) that they destroy what they are trying to preserve/create. Either Violently (Russia), or by going broke/financial crisis (Japan).
It’s way easier to tie everyone up in manipulative bullshit court proceedings in the US, and no one has the incentive/interest in stopping it right now.
It isn’t even about 10-100x cost, if it was straightforward cash. It would be resolved in weeks if that was the case. In many of these equivalent situations, it drags out for decades. At that point, it’s a toss up if the project even makes sense anymore, since everyone who needed it when it was voted in/started has moved on (by necessity) to something else.
In China, the courts basically just say ‘which way does the CCP want this to go?’ and voila, that happens. For better or worse.
My 2 cents is that all 3 of you are right. There's an aspect of culture in the US which leads us to being very, very litigious. Call it "get rich quick" mentality, or "I got mine". The huge numbers of lawyers helps, but I think the causal relationship is the other way - that the number of lawyers in this country increased to meet demand.
Of course a consequence of democracy is as you way - there are political consequences to unpopular (but necessary) actions, making such measures unpalatable for any but a second term president.
But we surely have navigated politically unpopular initiatives before, for the greater good of the nation. See: Civil Rights Movement.
You are demonstrating the exact problem the OP is complaining about. "Does not cause harm to any individuals" is an impossible standard to meet, and should not be weighed against "do nothing, and eventually cause a catastrophe for which there is no clear agent to blame".
You're moving the bar a little there. There will always be harm to individuals due to the law of unintended consequences. However, government regulation is really good at preventing a "Tragedy of the Commons."
For instance, regulations on CFC emissions hurt a lot of individuals. However, they prevented a much greater tragedy.
Removing lead from car exhaust marginally hurt an entire generation, while improving the lives of the next by orders of magnitude.
Other examples: Building codes, Car Safety, Fair Labor Standards Act, Food and Drug Regulations.
Your bar for a government regulation is really “not a single individual is harmed”? That’s insane, and almost exactly the problem anonporridge was describing.
Almost every government regulation harms someone, in that it almost always is limiting the actions available to someone.
To answer your question: no, there is no such regulation, but it’s not relevant, because I think your metric is atrocious.
I'm assuming that taxes, fees, and other standardized costs are not considered harm, as well as other such incidental costs, otherwise no, nothing can be done by anyone that does not cause harm to someone else at the margin.
Mandating that the US postal service deliver to every address at a single price. This results in an efficient single price, efficiencies of scale that private carriers don't even have, and does not harm anyone outside of the externalities that would already exist for mail delivery regardless of who was doing the delivering.
> This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system.
I feel that this better illustrates the downsides of centralized power: centralized decision making won’t be as efficient as decision making done at the nodes, closer to the actual problem because of missing context and data; and maybe even indifference
For the record, I am not saying that there are no benefits to centralized planning and control. This is just one of its weaknesses besides corruption
We can start by evaluating and updating regulations, improving training and safety protocols, engaging with local communities, and increasing public awareness about the benefits and risks associated with controlled burns.
The goal is to enable the use of controlled burns as a valuable tool for land management and wildfire prevention while adequately addressing concerns related to potential negative externalities.
This sounds like a problem to be solved by the insurance industry, who can measure risk because it's their money on the line. Insurers should refuse to renew fire coverage in areas where they can see that the authorities have been derelict in doing prescribed burns. Don't like it? Risk losing your house, or move.
Another example is how many people advocated for (and how many countries essentially adopted) letting covid spread throughout the population (either like wildfire or via "flatten the curve") to get natural herd immunity because letting a poorly understood (but known to be quite deadly) virus spread through the population was doable but giving out vaccines that hadn't been through phase 2 trials wasn't.
Was preventing the spread of covid throughout the population possible once China failed to contain the virus? Can you name one country that managed to do that? Even China eventually gave up.
> Was preventing the spread of covid throughout the population possible once China failed to contain the virus?
It's not about preventing the spread, but about controlling the rate so that hospitals don't / didn't get overwhelmed.
One of the early countries to get hit was Italy, and the army had to be called in to help with the logistics of taking away the body bags / coffins. A year after the pandemic started there were still refrigeration trucks outside of some morgues because of capacity issues:
Everyone on the planet will eventually probably get COVID, but as long as it's not at the same time, there are chances for treatment for those more heavily effected (some folks are fortunate enough that it's no worse than the flu; others suffer for months (e.g., Physics Girl)).
Yeah I was responding the comment that said it was possible to prevent the spread, not control the rate which most countries did to varying degrees of success.
Yes, it was possible, but like all collective action problems it involves people organizing for the general good at a cost to themselves.
Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks), distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices edit to add, because I forgot - for two months, and a few with immune compromises spending some more months isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped this single one from spreading.
But it's not going to happen because a significant fraction of the population: 1) don't care (either from the get go or after a period of time), 2) think spreading the disease is a positive ('builds immunity'), or 3) make 'statistical decisions' that fail at points.
Edit to add: I hope the downvotes are because I forgot to add the "for two months" to paragraph two. This could all have been over and done with between April and June of 2020 (or maybe a few months later to give time to ramp up mask production). Oh well, at least big Pharma made big bucks.
> Everyone in the world masking (with effective masks), distancing a bit, and using standard sanitary practices edit to add, because I forgot - for two months, and a few with immune compromises spending some more months isolated, would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses, not just have stopped this single one from spreading.
This is delusional. China did far more than this and still was not able to control Covid. And even in a fantasy world where you could actually stop all human-to-human contagion, many respiratory viruses have animal reservoirs, making the entire exercise pointless.
It's comforting to think that it's all just a collective action problem and if people could be a little more self-sacrificing, we could make it go away, but it's simply not the case.
China is not the whole world, and had to deal with the risk of COVID entering the country from other places. Notably, they did bring COVID numbers down to a very low level, albeit temporarily.
> And even in a fantasy world where you could actually stop all human-to-human contagion, many respiratory viruses have animal reservoirs, making the entire exercise pointless.
None of this contradicts GPs claim that it would eliminate a significant chunk of all contagious respiratory illnesses. Quite a few (common) respiratory diseases don't have animal reservoirs and would be effectively eliminated.
And I didn't mention the problem of people who can't afford to take precautions, which is why this is a collective action problem.
And sure, SARS-CoV-2 did end up in animal reservoirs, but nipped early enough in the bud this either wouldn't have happened, or would have been controllable (with respect to animal-to-human transmission).
China was one of many Asian countries that prevented the spread until they had widespread vaccination available. Now thanks to a culture of filial piety and a particularly stubborn set of boomer elderly, China failed to achieve anywhere close to universal vaccination / boosting of its most vulnerable, but that wasn't due to failure to stop the spread.
That's not entirely accurate. The case for letting covid spread hinges on whether you have the medical infrastructure to manage the pandemic. If you can handle a "more than flu season" chunk of your population needing medical care then there's no real pandemic threat. Unfortunately, many countries in the developed world reduced the size of their medical infrastructure because they could rely on flu vaccines to minimize the demands of flu season. Sure, you can try to flatten the curve, but COVID-19 proved to be difficult to contain, and initially we had little understanding of how transmissible it was, and what it would take to contain it. This meant you had to plan for a worse that was almost certainly worse than we'd actually face.
The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.
> The thing is, vaccines that haven't been through phase 2 trials can potentially make a pandemic worse. That's why you have to wait for them to resolve.
You can do challenge trials. Especially if you're going to let the virus spread through the population anyway.
Isn't a challenge trial really just another way of doing a phase 2 trial?
Whether you let it run through the population anyway really doesn't matter though. If you push the untested vaccine out to the population, you might turn a manageable problem into an unmanageable problem.
We could point to death statistics and say "hey, that's provable harm".
But quantifying the loss of quality of life from spending a year indoors, screwing the labour market and supply chain, messing up kids' socialization etc was harder, so we mostly just kind of ignored it.
Make no mistake about just how much money is involved here.
I got to work on a helicopter used for fire. It was a 1980s French something or another. It took an RPG in Afganistan and was refurbed to live in the pacific northwest.
The crew makes an insane amount of money. They are tickled with how many fires there are a year and how they "have" to be put out. I'm talking areas so far away from houses that it takes an hour to get there by helo, dump a few buckets, then an hour back. MAYBE in a 9 hour shift you get 12 buckets dumped.
This vehicle has only one turbine engine and goes through about 300 gallons an hour. There were two blackhawks in the same area that burn twice that, two engines.
Think of the money to make it not only profitable, but exceptionally so, to run vehicles that burn 300 gallons an hour for 8-12 hours a day, per helo, per engine, with crew, and the millions it costs to upkeep, cert, logistics, insurance, etc.
This is business now. And that's just one annecdote about helos. When you see people and machinery it takes to run firecrews, it's a wonder there aren't even more firecrew arsonists than there already are.
Here in Flagstaff and NAZ we've been getting hit hard by huge wildfires. The amount of fuel in these forests is mindblowing, and terrain is often a big challenge, too.
Luckily, we had a heavy monsoon season last year and a brutal winter. So much water that roads/levees have broken and lakes that are normally dry beds were overflowing. This has abated the normally horrible winds of April/May. This wet and abnormally calm weather has allowed for some action and I'm beyond pleased to have seen numerous prescribed burns in the forests around town this year. I really hope they can keep it up and treat a few thousand more acres before conditions turn.
The forest service seems like it does a good job here with fuel and flood management. There are still pockets of land that are wayyyy overladen/undertreated but much of the area, especially near town has been treated with thinning and slash and burn piles.
Unfortunately, the logging industry here is deteriorating and one of the longest-running operators closed shop. A few factors contributed to this, including the failure to open an OSB plant in Winslow, and the closure of a local mill just before the turn of the millenium. A damn shame, as logging ops really bolster the ability of the FS to manage fires.
Just this week, there was a post here about an invasive plant in the Sonoma desert that has taken off this season because of the extra rain, and this is one of their concerns outside of it being invasive. It's just going to be fuel for any fires that might start.
Yeah, we're all pretty concerned about that. We'll see if we get another heavy monsoon season to dampen the potential for big fires midsummer. Fingers crossed.
Unfortunately, we've got a bunch of events coming up that are going to draw big numbers of off-roaders and 'overlanders' who are, imo, some of the worst and least responsible recreators. Some of us are bracing for fires being started by them.
I spent some time talking about this with a family member that works in forestry. My takeaway was that the core issues are 1) it's labor intensive and expensive to manage the burns, beyond what we have budget for now, 2) there's a liability+harm issue to work through (e.g. when a burn will necessarily put a lot of smoke into an inhabited area how do you manage that), and 3) the combination of climate change and many years of fire suppression mean that doing the burns safely is harder than it was say 50 years ago. It's really a political issue, that is to get broad support to spend more and have worse quality of life for a while in order to get the situation under control and in much better shape a decade down the line. Tough sell.
Firefighter here. I support controlled burns because they're the only sensible way to manage large amounts of excess fuel in the western U.S. The problem is that there have been several occasions where frankly stupid mistakes were made by burn personnel and planners (e.g. not completely extinguishing previous fires [1] and going forward with a burn when the wind was clearly too high [2]) resulting in huge amounts of property damage and in some cases loss of life.
This is why we now have to deal with a ton of regulations. Some wildfires will always happen when controlled burns get out of control and it's nobody's fault, but we need to decrease the number of them that are the direct result of somebody doing something very stupid.
This 'controlled burn' issue is a general principle in risk management as well, where you respond to minor issues so as to not let them pile up into a tinderbox inferno.
Risk aversion isn't prudent, ethical, or professional either. It's a source of false conflict whose purpose is to centralize the objector so that they can direct and manage a proposed change. This is from someone who has been working in security for longer than most. It's something I find repulsive about some of the people who have joined the field, where once it was hackers who used elevated competence to judiciously take risks, and now it's authoritarian personalities who use affected fear and appeals to uncertainty under the guise of safety to position themselves as gatekeepers.
The same is true for government policy on controlled burns. Nobody ever gets fired over mega wildfires, even though their gatekeeping is the direct cause of them.
I think the equivalent analogy here is to prevent a big issue from occurring, management creates small issues that it can control. Or do I have it wrong?
If you handle small issues, it’s similar to handling small fires and not letting the small fires eat away at a certain portion of the forest.
The analogy might not fully hold. The risk is that the controlled burn gets out of control. IIRC there was a case last year in Nevada where a controlled burn turned into an extremely large fire. A better analogy might be safety drills at Nuclear power plants. Done well, it helps ensure safety protocols are in place that can mitigate a big disaster, done badly, and you have Chernobyl.
> not letting the small fires eat away at a certain portion of the forest
Funny enough, small fires are very healthy for many forests and even _necessary_ for some. For example, Some trees do not drop seeds until there are fires. EG: "Giant sequoias are the largest trees on Earth. They can grow for more than 3,000 years. But without fire, they cannot reproduce." [1]
Further, the clearing of underbrush can be good for animals as they can move around more easily, hunt, gather, etc.. [2] Though, what is really not good for them are the mega-fires that burn so hot that it burns trees & everything 100% up to the top of the tree (killing it) and also several feet underground.
So, perhaps another analogy is that every year is like adding gunpowder into the forests. Setting this alight every now and then is good, but let it build up too long and it becomes a bomb. Areas that have burned in the PNW tend to look really healthy 1 to 3 years later. On the other hand, areas that have "over" burned in California with mega fires are drastically impacted, as if a nuclear bomb had went off and killed everything.
At the end of the day, prescribed burns is an amazing tool to create a defensive patch work of lower-combustion areas that help prevent fires from becoming mega-fires that are super-impactful to everyone and everything.
In many of the burns which I've read about that get out of control, it's because the agency doing it (USFS, usually) had a plan to do it on that date and they didn't consider the actual conditions on the ground before they lit up.
Example: An Oregon sheriff arrested a USFS employee supervising a burn that got out of hand and torched private property. The FS was crying foul and saying it was an act of god, but there were warnings for burning that day because they conditions were so unfavorable (the county may have had an outright burn ban). The only reason the FS employee decided to burn is because that's what he was supposed to do that day. And he was legally okay, since it was federal property, but then it got onto private property next door...
For some reason the FS in particular has this problem. Most of them are alright people but the institution and culture needs serious reform.
We had a controlled burn near the SF Bay Area get out of control in 2021 which forced some evacuations. Of course controlled burns are still needed to reduce overall fire risk, but incidents like that naturally make local residents a bit leery.
Right. The small issues are minor outages causing customer inconvenience and/or lost revenue. The big issues are major pwnage and loss of everything because you were afraid of causing small issues while fixing things.
That makes a lot of sense. By allowing the teams to fix things quickly and break things, management creates an environment where people can continuously learn how to handle fires and this makes them ready to handle bigger fires and also prevent bigger fires.
But the problem is that there are incentives to keep pushing the middle ground closer towards eventual system collapse.
It's never the right time to see if the backup generators can take the building load. But during real emergencies, it's amazing how common it is for the backup generators to not work for one reason or another.
"It's never the right time to see if the backup generators can take the building load. "
How about a test outside normal working hours?
It is possible, to meassure the power output before and then plug in enough stuff, that draws roughly the same.
But yes, it is more convenient to not do it and continue buisness as usual and hope for the best.
My point is, that in most cases, you can test and fix critical stuff and also fix problems created by your fixes, if you make it an important issue and plan accordingly. However, I did not say it is necessarily easy.
Disagree partly. Here we are preventing actively the natural circles of small fires in the lifecycle of a forest. We bring up that we need to introduce them at least in a controlled manner. Some people say no because xyz. Well these people need to cover the incalculable sometime damages that causes.
I think environmental policy people have a lot to learn from the philosophy and ideas in preventative medicine (and honestly a few ideas could probably flow the other direction as well).
These two groups need to sit down and compare notes.
Stitches suck, but they’re better than dying of cancer, or gangrene.
All controlled burns have to happen with government regulation for obvious reasons. Fire ecology and the legislation that regulates it in practice (read: research and it's influence on controlled burn methods) revolves mainly around constant disputes between agriculture and conservation efforts. This even winds all the way down to the age-old dispute about grazing cattle on public lands out west. Grazing on public lands leads to a reduction of fuel for natural wildfires in heavily grazed areas, leading to an imbalance in the natural fire cycle, causing the need to do controlled burns in the interest of human habitat and the economy rather than ecology. This ultimately causes a disruption is various parts of the ecosystem. In the high desert of Nevada, California, and other fire prone states that also are the home of agriculture that depends on grazing livestock, this issue is hot, no pun intended, and there is a constant dialogue going on between regulators and scientists researching land management methods in habitat where wildfire is not only necessary, but essential.
> "Also included in the prescription are optimal weather conditions, including a minimum temperature for burns in grass and brush of 30 degrees and a maximum of 80 degrees; relative humidity between 5% and 40%; and wind speed between 2 mph and 15 mph. Such conditions are becoming rarer."
If you broaden the acceptable range of conditions, you risk more prescribed burns going out of control, and you generate more air quality issues - and Colorado, like the California Central Valley, has some pretty bad air quality already:
>Note that prescribed fires aren't the only way of removing excess vegetation, there's mechanized mowing and goat herds for example.
Which works fine for the areas east of the Flatirons (that is, the plains), but that's only half the county. A real problem for wildfire management is that they often happen in areas that we consider undevelopable, which is to say, difficult to get into and out of.
I recall going climbing in Boulder Canyon some decades ago, looking up at some burn scars and thinking "it would be several hundred feet of technical climbing to even reach where that fire occurred". Fighting it would be simply out of the question, and prevention without controlled burns would be just as difficult.
The US Forest Service was started in 1905 in part to reduce forest fires. The result of that policy was forests with a much higher tree density than naturally occurred otherwise.
Other changes include that around 1900 settlers of the western US introduced livestock that ate grass, which in turn removed potential fuel for smaller fires, and enabled smaller trees to grow.
After a hundred years of fire prevention, you end up with very different forest density. As the fire manager of Santa Fe National Forest noted: “On this forest, it’s averaging about 900 trees per acre. Historically it was probably about 40.” The result is a much bigger fire risk than previously.
https://unintendedconsequenc.es/morals-of-the-moment/
One approach that I found interesting, and that is gaining momentum in British Columbia is the championing of a first nations indigenous "fire keeper" "cultural burning" movement: https://prescribedfire.ca/cultural-burning/
It especially makes sense in the context of BC where pretty much the whole province is actually unceded first nations territory; the indigenous groups there never signed it away to the Crown like they did here in Upper Canada.
The US economy needed more controlled burns and small "fires" - eg restricting spending back a long time ago when that could've been done without major consequences, unlike now.
Similarly, as a parent, allowing your child to experience small failures so that they are less at risk of big failures.
Small failures that don't cause ruin = increased strength. Reminds me of the antifragility concepts.
Intuitively I’d guess the carbon is net negative because so many forests require fire in order to differentiate strong, durable trees from weaker ones, which then opens the canopy, returns nutrients to the soil, and creates conditions more like we see in old growth forests which are able to store absolutely massive amounts of carbon compared to young (even very dense) forests.
Not only that but they store water better, too. They’re less likely to burn as they stay wetter later in the dry season and hold onto rain and atmospheric moisture far better.
Cutting down old forests was a much worse idea than anyone would have guessed.
> Cutting down old forests was a much worse idea than anyone would have guessed.
It's species dependent.. Cutting down trees that take 250 years to mature probably isn't sustainable for example.
However, logging can be a carbon negative practice if done with correct practices and the correct species. You're literally taking the mass of the air and turning it into a useful building material.
If they are occupying the same environment then the same argument applies to native species no longer regularly exposed to fire. But unless its being actively selected against, then it disappearing through random drift alone would, I'd think, be a pretty slow process, even by evolutionary timescales.
Way back in the 90's in college I took some elective class (I forget the topic) and the prof had a lecture on how controlled burns prevent wildfires. He also said that govt policy was already limiting controlled burns even then and he predicted that in 20 years, unless the policies changed, that we'd be having giant wildfires and here we are.
Along the North Eastern coastal regions of North America the predominant biome before European settlers began colonizing the region in earnest was the oak savanna: an ecological system dependent on fires. After those settlers arrived they took steps to prevent those fires from affecting their towns and inadvertently by clearing land for farming. The result are forests that are choked with under brush, mass migrations of animals, the spread of parasitic insects, etc. Completely changed the character of the region.
Try cutting down trees on your forested property in California. Environmental regulations can make that really tricky.
California should have regular wildfires. It's part of the ecosystem. Government regulations that prevent fires have created the tinder box we have now.
Living in Southern California is frustrating in that way. It's obvious that the plants here are adapted for regular fires. The native people of this area knew the importance of controlled burns and had incorporated them into their tradition. They likely were doing controlled burns for thousands of years before their lives were disrupted.
I think the most frustrating aspect of California is the capricious interpretation of laws. There isn't a clear way to ensure compliance. Louis Rossmann did a pretty good job demonstrating a similar issue with New York and the LeadsOnline reporting requirements. Often the people responsible for enforcing the laws, don't even know what the laws are and will often err on the side of fining people.
A few years back CA had serious wild fire issues. PG&E was just the scapegoat. There are multiple factors but the main issue is that it's nearly impossible to get the environmental documentation (Environmental Impact Statements or EISs) prepared and approved for prescribed burns on federal land due to legal challenges from environmental groups that really have no idea what they are doing.
Do you have any sources for this? I am familiar with people who manage private properties on federal lands and nothing you said here passes the smell test to me. In particular, environmental groups have been loudly calling for better wildland management practices for at least the past decade, typically from the direction of considering and adopting indigenous land management practices such as prescribed burns.
It sounds like you're trying to scapegoat environmentalists when the recent tragedies were obviously the fault of PG&E mis-managing their assets and refusing to allocate more budget or personnel to manage what are obviously tinderbox scenarios.
Ahh but replacing old growth forest with burnt out scrub land is not what we necessarily want. Old trees dying and falling naturally creates openings in the canopy to permit new growth without resetting the forest to a grassland like a forest fire would do.
A prescribed burn should burn out annual plant growth and leaf litter not perennial plant trunks.
I'm talking about established prairie ecosystems. The plants there depend on saplings to be killed by fires before they become full grown trees, while they can recover from the fires quicker.
Absolutely terrifying. We have major fires in rural Spain in the Summer months, especially as it's getting drier earlier every year. We've had a huge issue with the grass verges not getting cut in time, before everything dries out. Then people throw cigarettes ends out of their cars on the motorway and the whole area goes up in flames. It's a mixture of risk factors, environmental, council/planning, and some personal responsibility.
I wonder how much of the wildfires are caused by lack of wildlife. The city I grew up in used livestock to manage brush every year. There were herds of goats and sheep that would go through in the spring and summer to make sure that brush growth was trimmed to the roots.
I wonder if we stopped killing wildlife wholesale if we would see reductions in this overgrowth. Although I wonder if any native species would be able to handle the insane numbers of Russian Thistle/Tumbleweeds.
Controlled burns are a single example of the uncountable things that humans have always had to do to maintain what is good for everyone and animals, but which come to be targeted by loud people who see a path to personal gain by making them a political issue. Presenting solutions as problems is explained as being more civilized, but it is less. Animal population management is another example.
Because of some careless or stupid humans, throwing cig butts and whatnot, the forests are endangered, and the burden of avoiding fires should be by the forest itself? I don't like it.
What about surveil forests with drones. I'm sure that will help people hold their sh*t together and be responsible of their actions. I'm sure wildfires will drop drastically.
Do we have understanding of fire frequency naturally? ie. how many years, on average, between fires on a given bit of land?
If we do, then it seems to make sense to try to maintain the same frequency - that, I assume, would be best for the plants and animals which have adapted to that.
Wildfires.org is doing really awesome work on unblocking and accelerating environmental review and planning for all kinds of wildfire prevention treatments.
So?
Just because a process sometimes fails does not mean the solution is to change the process, and if you do, it doesn't mean the result will end up better overall.
Also, it's not clear why burning should be used instead of, say, selective logging, or some other manual method of moving the material somewhere other than into the atmosphere.
Many ecosystems require fire. Fire is natural and plants and animals are adapted to it. So much so, that if you don't burn (or equally you burn too often) you can wind up making some species extinct.
"Selective logging" I'm afraid is not remotely an effective way to control fire. The fuel loads are often not the trees, but the leaf litter, shrubs, bushes and so on.
That is equivalent to saying sulphuric acid kills cancer.
While true, it does other things too like kill normal cells.
Likewise, broadly scoped regulation can hamper freedom and prevent people from doing otherwise harmless activities. Worse, it paves the way for selective enforcement. Think about federally mandated drugs regulation and how that is abused by biased authorities.
Kind funny that Trump was excoriated for mentioning this very fact - that the Californian wildfires were happening due to good forest management practices being prevented by bad environmental laws.
Environmentalists have inadvertently shot civilization in the foot and served the interests of the fossil fuel industry by blocking expansion of carbon free nuclear.
In exchange, we've spent the last several decades dumping drastically more carbon in the atmosphere than was necessary.
I'm a little annoyed we're 40 years behind on fusion, because a vocal group spent 40 years crying about fission. Chernobyl was a disaster, that was made possible by the Soviet gov, it was far more a knock on communism than it was nuclear energy. And yet... Here we are with Harvard grads arguing for the former and against the latter.
The Fukushima disaster has the same rating as Chernobyl on the Internation Nuclear Event Scale, and occurred in a highly regulated developed capitalist nation.
Well I wouldn't go that far to call it disgusting, since the vast majority of human actions probably result in unintended, mostly negative, consequences.
First, why are you sure that this didn't influenced elections results?
100 people killed or still missing. Many killed only in one wildfire by the mud floods that came later. Helicopter pilots and firefighters killed. More than 13500 homes and human structures destroyed only in 2020 and 2021.
Not all fires were deliberated, but too much wildfires were deliberated to be statistically random. We'll never know how much of them were attacks. A few people managed to spread chaos in entire villages, forced the authorities to evacuate tens of thousands of people, nuked the local budgets, and introduced a lot of tension in the economy and society. And it cost them practically nothing.
And I'm not talking about the people killed and injured, or the natural resources lost (like millions of liters of freshwater stored in the area that were lost and have some, non negligible, economical value).
"Maynard's fires were placed in the perfect position to increase the risk of firefighters being trapped between fires" [1]
If this is not terrorism, nothing is. Don't fool yourself. The only difference between a "non cleaned" and a "cleaned" forest (whatever it means), is that the terrorist will carry its own can of gas.
We should put in the air as many CO2 as possible, yep. What could go wrong?. This valuable fertile soil that need 200 years to build and all the CO2 accumulated must be released... because religious thinking.
Or we could try something different and jail the arsonists. Respect the soil and let the forest accumulate water and include thousands of new species.
While it seems wildly counter-intuitive, burning, done properly is usually a net carbon increase.
Many, many ecosystems require fire for their life-cycles. Without reasonably regular fires, some species can go extinct.
The soil fertility, for example, in Australia is so poor, and there's not enough moisture for fungi etc to break down the leaf-litter, that unless there is a fire valuable nutrients remain unavailable and it impedes growth.
Let me know when you have a goat that will eat thousands of pounds of fallen trees.
No offense, but it's fairly clear you have never stepped in the forests that this is a problem. It's not yearly grass. It's 50 years of buildup. You make a 12ft high and 30ft wide pile of this stuff then please tell me about goats.
From experience, had a bone fire that lasted three days before it was out.... Goats...
Along the same lines, you have an excellent wolf feeding solution, now to find the problem it solves!
I'd like to point out that this problem can technically be solved by a well-meaning arsonist who's willing to break the law. Simply send a public message to fire departments naming the date and location that a forest fire will start, let the fire departments prepare like they would for a controlled burn, and then set off the blaze. There's some difficulty involved with establishing sufficient credibility for this to work, but it's a weird case where illegal action can accomplish things that operating within the legal system cannot.
An extremely brief google search tells me that controlled burns require firebreaks, knowledge of the wind patterns (something called a downwind backfire?) and presumably continued monitoring/support from firefighters to actually be a controlled burn over the area that needs it.
I think what you're describing is a total fantasy.
The only controlled burn is one that happens regularly. You cannot start with a controlled burn after years of suppression as there is too much fuel. You have to "rip the band-aid off". That is evacuate the whole state, and then start the whole state on fire at once. If you want your house to survive, then you use the warning to clear all the trees/bush around your house so it isn't close to the fire (this is easy to say, impossible to pull off).
This is not really true, and if you'd like to learn more than you ever wanted to know about this topic then you should start following Zeke Lunder from The Lookout and review some of his wildfire analysis videos on YouTube. He often talks about the idea of "good fire". Not all fire is "good fire". A lot of megafires, the kind that might be sparked by an arson technique ignorant of modern wildfire management practices, do not necessarily lead to "good fire". They may at certain stages (especially when wind dies down) exhibit some traits of "good fire", but for the most part, these are forests that are the way they are due to too much suppression for too long, and now require "good fire" if our goal is to still have a healthy forest after the fire. An arson that starts a megafire is going to potentially transition to a very different type of forest, or an un-forested wasteland, as seen in various places in the Sierra foothills and SoCal.
We had a small fire that had to be fought last year on the mountain that shadows the city by a teenager. I was hiking through the area affected recently and there were burn piles being created in the parts that didn't burn last year, so I guess that the arsonist at least created the impetus to prevent future burns closer to the city.
This is the general message, and is extremely poisonous and insidious. "Arsonists are heros"
Thousands of puppets ear-whispered to break the laws. Then there came the consequences, the dry, the mud flood, the people killed and the houses burnt. The best joke is to blame the green and the hippies.
Of course, the regular fires threaten and destroy these areas too. We've seen the destruction of Paradise, Berry Creek, Greenville, and Grizzly Flats in the last few years (just reading from Wikipedia).
Edit: Always need to mention that global-warming/climate-change makes this worse even if it was caused by local irresponsible behavior. Of course what climate hits first are areas where the local ecology already had problems (In before "It's not [Local bad behavior], it's climate change" or the opposite).