This discussion reminds me of the lamented actor Troy McLure. You may remember him from such films as “Man Versus Nature: The Road to Victory.”
But for what it’s worth, firefighters have been taught the general premise of this article for years.
Some of my early training—we’re talking early 2000’s—included advisement that over a hundred years of max suppression had left our western mountains especially overgrown.
I bring this up because it supports Ben’s argument from an experiential perspective.
I especially appreciate his framing the piece around the societal-level benefits (to the tune of $billions in savings) that better management could provide. Would that all our policy discussions found this footing.
However, another aspect worthy of discussion is the tension between western housing needs and non-infill construction, which leaves certain neighborhoods vulnerable to this denser-than-expected fuel.
These are the fires which cause the most havoc and human cost, generally.
Finding a regulatory balance between living with nature and against it is, as Matt might say, really hard.
I just try to see areas of leverage that might be available here. Power companies are starting to get sued for fires from inadequately managed transmission lines through forests. Maybe Power Company vs. Timber Company can get us more controlled burning. My overall impression is that people Getting Away From It All with their cabins in the forest are one of the main things thwarting controlled burns, however.
"New forest plans will take up to 10 years to complete, and the financial cost will total in the tens of millions."
And, of course, I presume those plans are also subject to repeated halts whenever anyone finds new information on any endangered species in any of those 87 forests at any time in those 10 years?
I live on the border of Tahoe National Forest (literally). In my “backyard” the forest has been beautifully thinned. Go over the hill and it’s a mess: trees are crowded together, there are dead trees everywhere, and on the live trees there are dead branches down to the ground. A fire would *rip* through.
All last fall there were controlled burns around Lake Tahoe and I’ve seen one in South Lake so far this year. It does seem like fire operations are picking up.
Homeowners insurance is expensive and hard to get!
Lots of places are experiencing unprecedented forest fires, including Australia. Management regimes and history differ quite a bit. For example, hazard reduction burns are routine in Australia, though global heating is limiting the time in which they can safely be done. Nonetheless the same arguments about attribution are taking place.
Occam's razor suggests global climate change is a more plausible explanation than multiple policy failures in different places all producing fire disasters at the same time.
Nothing can be done with forests until the Sierra Club and its judicial stooges let it be done. Right now, they are still in the "natural state" mode (i.e. no management) with vast amounts of blood and treasure on their hands.
As a resident of the west coast, thank you for writing this!
When I talk to friends/family/acquaintances who live east of the Mississippi, most do not understand that wildfires are part of the ecology and that the forests need occasional fires to stay healthy.
This is especially true for Western Washington, Oregon and Northern California. I have to explain that even the wet west's ecology has evolved for regular fires, though they are less frequent than in Southern California. Back in the early 1900's smoky summers were a thing in Portland and Seattle. There are also old photos of the west side of the Cascade mountains with visible burn scars. The other thing I occasionally point out is that relatively small fires can lead to very bad air quality. A couple of years ago Seattle had the worst air quality in the world for a couple of days. The smoke came from a pretty small fire and the atmospheric conditions led to the smoke being concentrated in the Seattle area.
Caveat re: east of the Mississippi - my understanding is that the Southeast actually does a good job of prescribed burns and is held up as a model for forest management compared to the West. Southerners understand it, apparently.
I’m so sorry. I let you all down. And now everyone is paying the price.
One summer on vacation when I was six years old, a talking bear in a hat told me I was the ONLY ONE who could prevent forest fires. I thought I was too old to believe in talking bears. And anyway, I was a kid, just a regular kid, not the magical fire-retardant messiah this bear thought I was.
I brushed him off. I turned away from my fate, scorned the righteous mission that God, through this ursine John the Baptist, was clearly calling me to. My powers were wasted. I led a normal life free from divine intervention in forestry.
And now look. The world is on fire. The apocalypse is here. And it’s my fault.
Yes, always well-written. I should have said “well-argued” which isn’t to say that the take bakery pieces aren’t well-argued, but they purposefully aren’t fully baked.
“ Hotter summers, driven by anthropogenic climate change, have led to an increase in the frequency and scope of wildfires.”
Scientists do not know how much of the warming trend, which started before any material human contribution, is due to anthropogenic factors. This is fake news, just like when all the former security experts swore Hunter’s laptop was Russian misinformation, and just like Fauci and his paid lackeys claiming that it was “molecularly” almost impossible that covid was a lab leak or genetically engineered.
I would like to see large scale randomized field experiments in this space. Whenever I read about this topic the articles say we need to do an order of magnitude more prescribed burns, but of course that means no one has experience doing prescribed burns at that scale. When I search for RCTs on prescribed burns I cannot find any! What I take away from that is like most things where we fail to do randomized experiments, we actually know relatively little about the topic.
Presumably, the USFS has a list of, say, the top 100 places where brush has accumulated that they'd like to do a controlled burn. Presumably, Congress isn't going to fund the USFS enough to burn all 100, because (as Ben argues) Congress has other things on its mind.
So when the USFS gets enough funding to burn 50 places, don't burn locations 1-50 on the list. Flip a coin for each of the 100 spots, and only burn the places that come up heads. Then watch the forest fires for the next 5 years, and keep track of our best guess at their origins.
What's the distribution of distances from those origins to the burned spots? …the unburnt ones? Are those different?
You just described why it’s extremely hard to do an observational study. The whole reason you run randomized experiments is because you cannot know all of the different factors exactly, but if treatment assignment is random you have an expectation of equivalence that on average the treatment and control groups are the same before the intervention. If you have a small sample size you can also do paired randomization/blocking/rerandomization so that the groups are similar in realization as well as expectation. But what you cannot do is observationally model all of the different factors you cannot fully observe, you have to do a randomized experiment.
I didn’t argue for an observational study, I pointed out that it’s quite obviously impossible to run an RCT of controlled burns vs. full suppression. I am well aware of what they are and how to run them - l’ve spent a large portion of my career running them
Even if the forest management can only cover a very limited amount of land, it can still cover the most crucial areas of land - that which is nearest to people's homes.
To me, when I hear there’s a strong consensus among forest management professionals that we need to spend more money on forest management, it’s like hearing the association of snack food manufacturers declare that Americans need to eat more snack food. Why should I believe these people?
It reminds me of claiming the Olympics will bring billions of dollars of benefits so we better build more stadiums.
This is a good point, and why I love the recommendations on this post. Allowing the Forestry service to skip these unnecessary reviews will make them both more effective and save taxpayer money.
This! It is a historical fact that the US Forestry service is institutionally coupled with the timber industry & takes a particular approach to forestry -- one modeled on extractive resource "management." Original institutionalization has a strongly dispositive effect. Any student of long-fetch political history knows this.
In this case, it matters because there are many kinds of forestry & ways of approaching the work. I don't trust an unreformed agency that's flush with cash (and over burdened with an urgent workload) to exercise unchecked judgement. Trust is at issue, and so is a balancing of concerns/perspectives.
I live in Northern Sonoma County. This issue is not theoretical for me or my community.
Hippy/green punching bros: keep it in your pants. The comments on this have been gag-enducing.
Fair point. But I’m not sure whether this is a question of asking for more funding, or more freedom to do their job. There’s a lot of good evidence for the benefits of prescriptive fires and mechanical trimming.
Great article! I’m not a de-growther anymore thanks to people like MattY and his book One Billion Americans but I care more about the loss of biodiversity than humans if I had to choose. So, I would love to read more about the net policy impacts on habitat destruction/protected species status. What kind of policies have worked, what haven’t.
Accommodating my viewpoint and lowering per capita carbon emissions are entirely compatible goals that are achievable with densely populated urban areas.
Yeah, but it doesn’t accommodate my viewpoint, which is that I’ve earned a bunch of money and I want to use it to create a large space for my family. Also, as I said in 1990 when these ridiculous energy transition plans were being proposed, we have at least a hundred years to come up with a solution, and that’s a ton of time considering how technology advances. The global warming clique has shifted to a timetable that is even farther out than I suggested in 1990.
No one has any obligation to accommodate everyone’s wishes. We make a case for what we believe in and try to convince a majority. In your case, it seems like a fool’s errand to assume that nothing will change over hundreds of years and your descendants will keep whatever property you own now. Even powerful kings could not guarantee that for their descendants.
Well, you sure jump to erroneous conclusions, lol. I am in favor of confiscatory inheritance taxes. My wife and I have willed, about what an upper middle class kid would likely inherit, to each of our kids. The rest goes to teach-them-to-fish type charities, as well as to some conservative think tanks. I hate the idea of ruining kids lives by giving them money. Plus, we raised our kids well and they won’t go hungry.
How did I not comment on this one?
This discussion reminds me of the lamented actor Troy McLure. You may remember him from such films as “Man Versus Nature: The Road to Victory.”
But for what it’s worth, firefighters have been taught the general premise of this article for years.
Some of my early training—we’re talking early 2000’s—included advisement that over a hundred years of max suppression had left our western mountains especially overgrown.
I bring this up because it supports Ben’s argument from an experiential perspective.
I especially appreciate his framing the piece around the societal-level benefits (to the tune of $billions in savings) that better management could provide. Would that all our policy discussions found this footing.
However, another aspect worthy of discussion is the tension between western housing needs and non-infill construction, which leaves certain neighborhoods vulnerable to this denser-than-expected fuel.
These are the fires which cause the most havoc and human cost, generally.
Finding a regulatory balance between living with nature and against it is, as Matt might say, really hard.
I just try to see areas of leverage that might be available here. Power companies are starting to get sued for fires from inadequately managed transmission lines through forests. Maybe Power Company vs. Timber Company can get us more controlled burning. My overall impression is that people Getting Away From It All with their cabins in the forest are one of the main things thwarting controlled burns, however.
"New forest plans will take up to 10 years to complete, and the financial cost will total in the tens of millions."
And, of course, I presume those plans are also subject to repeated halts whenever anyone finds new information on any endangered species in any of those 87 forests at any time in those 10 years?
Yeahhh, it's a litigation doomloop
I live on the border of Tahoe National Forest (literally). In my “backyard” the forest has been beautifully thinned. Go over the hill and it’s a mess: trees are crowded together, there are dead trees everywhere, and on the live trees there are dead branches down to the ground. A fire would *rip* through.
All last fall there were controlled burns around Lake Tahoe and I’ve seen one in South Lake so far this year. It does seem like fire operations are picking up.
Homeowners insurance is expensive and hard to get!
Lots of places are experiencing unprecedented forest fires, including Australia. Management regimes and history differ quite a bit. For example, hazard reduction burns are routine in Australia, though global heating is limiting the time in which they can safely be done. Nonetheless the same arguments about attribution are taking place.
Occam's razor suggests global climate change is a more plausible explanation than multiple policy failures in different places all producing fire disasters at the same time.
Nothing can be done with forests until the Sierra Club and its judicial stooges let it be done. Right now, they are still in the "natural state" mode (i.e. no management) with vast amounts of blood and treasure on their hands.
https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/california-needs-more-fire-prescribed-burn
As a resident of the west coast, thank you for writing this!
When I talk to friends/family/acquaintances who live east of the Mississippi, most do not understand that wildfires are part of the ecology and that the forests need occasional fires to stay healthy.
This is especially true for Western Washington, Oregon and Northern California. I have to explain that even the wet west's ecology has evolved for regular fires, though they are less frequent than in Southern California. Back in the early 1900's smoky summers were a thing in Portland and Seattle. There are also old photos of the west side of the Cascade mountains with visible burn scars. The other thing I occasionally point out is that relatively small fires can lead to very bad air quality. A couple of years ago Seattle had the worst air quality in the world for a couple of days. The smoke came from a pretty small fire and the atmospheric conditions led to the smoke being concentrated in the Seattle area.
Caveat re: east of the Mississippi - my understanding is that the Southeast actually does a good job of prescribed burns and is held up as a model for forest management compared to the West. Southerners understand it, apparently.
I’m so sorry. I let you all down. And now everyone is paying the price.
One summer on vacation when I was six years old, a talking bear in a hat told me I was the ONLY ONE who could prevent forest fires. I thought I was too old to believe in talking bears. And anyway, I was a kid, just a regular kid, not the magical fire-retardant messiah this bear thought I was.
I brushed him off. I turned away from my fate, scorned the righteous mission that God, through this ursine John the Baptist, was clearly calling me to. My powers were wasted. I led a normal life free from divine intervention in forestry.
And now look. The world is on fire. The apocalypse is here. And it’s my fault.
This doesn’t strike me as particularly half-baked. This is a well-written piece with a clear and actionable policy recommendation.
How off-brand…
Mixing it up! And I at least like to think the more out there ideas are at least well written…
Yes, always well-written. I should have said “well-argued” which isn’t to say that the take bakery pieces aren’t well-argued, but they purposefully aren’t fully baked.
This one was fully baked!
This one didn't have the Take Bakery intro to it.
This is NOT “a truth”:
“ Hotter summers, driven by anthropogenic climate change, have led to an increase in the frequency and scope of wildfires.”
Scientists do not know how much of the warming trend, which started before any material human contribution, is due to anthropogenic factors. This is fake news, just like when all the former security experts swore Hunter’s laptop was Russian misinformation, and just like Fauci and his paid lackeys claiming that it was “molecularly” almost impossible that covid was a lab leak or genetically engineered.
Excellent and thorough article, Ben. Need more people calling out the net harms of many "Greens."
I'm down to punch hippies.
I would like to see large scale randomized field experiments in this space. Whenever I read about this topic the articles say we need to do an order of magnitude more prescribed burns, but of course that means no one has experience doing prescribed burns at that scale. When I search for RCTs on prescribed burns I cannot find any! What I take away from that is like most things where we fail to do randomized experiments, we actually know relatively little about the topic.
How would you do an RCT of controlled burns? It’s just wildly implausible - literally impossible to generate comparable groups
"How would you do an RCT of controlled burns?"
Presumably, the USFS has a list of, say, the top 100 places where brush has accumulated that they'd like to do a controlled burn. Presumably, Congress isn't going to fund the USFS enough to burn all 100, because (as Ben argues) Congress has other things on its mind.
So when the USFS gets enough funding to burn 50 places, don't burn locations 1-50 on the list. Flip a coin for each of the 100 spots, and only burn the places that come up heads. Then watch the forest fires for the next 5 years, and keep track of our best guess at their origins.
What's the distribution of distances from those origins to the burned spots? …the unburnt ones? Are those different?
You just described why it’s extremely hard to do an observational study. The whole reason you run randomized experiments is because you cannot know all of the different factors exactly, but if treatment assignment is random you have an expectation of equivalence that on average the treatment and control groups are the same before the intervention. If you have a small sample size you can also do paired randomization/blocking/rerandomization so that the groups are similar in realization as well as expectation. But what you cannot do is observationally model all of the different factors you cannot fully observe, you have to do a randomized experiment.
I didn’t argue for an observational study, I pointed out that it’s quite obviously impossible to run an RCT of controlled burns vs. full suppression. I am well aware of what they are and how to run them - l’ve spent a large portion of my career running them
It’s really simple: you flip a coin *before* you light something on fire.
1. Forest acreage in need of thinning is mind boggling and beyond what human resources can cover.
2. When we lived in Colorado a prescribed burn in our county ignited a wildfire which leveled many homes and took 4 lives.
So we should just live with massive wildfires then?
Right, forest management can only be applied to a very limited amount of land. "Pissing in the wind" summarizes the futility.
Even if the forest management can only cover a very limited amount of land, it can still cover the most crucial areas of land - that which is nearest to people's homes.
Yes, and we do this for our village. But the issue of huge tracts of land in the mountainous west should not be mistaken for local mitigations.
To me, when I hear there’s a strong consensus among forest management professionals that we need to spend more money on forest management, it’s like hearing the association of snack food manufacturers declare that Americans need to eat more snack food. Why should I believe these people?
It reminds me of claiming the Olympics will bring billions of dollars of benefits so we better build more stadiums.
This is a good point, and why I love the recommendations on this post. Allowing the Forestry service to skip these unnecessary reviews will make them both more effective and save taxpayer money.
This! It is a historical fact that the US Forestry service is institutionally coupled with the timber industry & takes a particular approach to forestry -- one modeled on extractive resource "management." Original institutionalization has a strongly dispositive effect. Any student of long-fetch political history knows this.
In this case, it matters because there are many kinds of forestry & ways of approaching the work. I don't trust an unreformed agency that's flush with cash (and over burdened with an urgent workload) to exercise unchecked judgement. Trust is at issue, and so is a balancing of concerns/perspectives.
I live in Northern Sonoma County. This issue is not theoretical for me or my community.
Hippy/green punching bros: keep it in your pants. The comments on this have been gag-enducing.
Fair point. But I’m not sure whether this is a question of asking for more funding, or more freedom to do their job. There’s a lot of good evidence for the benefits of prescriptive fires and mechanical trimming.
Great article! I’m not a de-growther anymore thanks to people like MattY and his book One Billion Americans but I care more about the loss of biodiversity than humans if I had to choose. So, I would love to read more about the net policy impacts on habitat destruction/protected species status. What kind of policies have worked, what haven’t.
"I care more about the loss of biodiversity than humans if I had to choose"
This is a reminder that there are lots of different viewpoints, and its very difficult if impossible to find a compromise that accommodates them.
Accommodating my viewpoint and lowering per capita carbon emissions are entirely compatible goals that are achievable with densely populated urban areas.
Yeah, but it doesn’t accommodate my viewpoint, which is that I’ve earned a bunch of money and I want to use it to create a large space for my family. Also, as I said in 1990 when these ridiculous energy transition plans were being proposed, we have at least a hundred years to come up with a solution, and that’s a ton of time considering how technology advances. The global warming clique has shifted to a timetable that is even farther out than I suggested in 1990.
No one has any obligation to accommodate everyone’s wishes. We make a case for what we believe in and try to convince a majority. In your case, it seems like a fool’s errand to assume that nothing will change over hundreds of years and your descendants will keep whatever property you own now. Even powerful kings could not guarantee that for their descendants.
Well, you sure jump to erroneous conclusions, lol. I am in favor of confiscatory inheritance taxes. My wife and I have willed, about what an upper middle class kid would likely inherit, to each of our kids. The rest goes to teach-them-to-fish type charities, as well as to some conservative think tanks. I hate the idea of ruining kids lives by giving them money. Plus, we raised our kids well and they won’t go hungry.
They could easily go hungry or your grandchildren could. Bad luck can strike anyone.