"President Trump’s visit Saturday to the fire-ravaged California town of Paradise seemed to be going fine, until he began explaining his understanding of forest policy. Apparently, California needs to buy more rakes.
“You gotta take care of the floors. You know the floors of the forest, very important,” Trump told reporters, as Gov. Jerry Brown and Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom stood nearby. “You look at other countries where they do it differently and it’s a whole different story. I was with the president of Finland and he called it a forest nation, and they spend a lot of time on raking and cleaning and doing things and they don’t have any problem. And when they do, it’s a very small problem.”
Trump appeared to be talking about the need to thin forests that are overgrown from decades of fire suppression, something that Brown accelerated this fall when he signed a law approving $1 billion in state money over the next five years for forest thinning projects and controlled burns. Trump did not mention the role of drought or climate change in drying out the state’s forests, or power lines. Or the fact that many of the fires, particularly in Southern California, aren’t burning in forests at all, but in chaparral, or the fact that this one began in an area of federal land, the Plumas National Forest. His communications staff immediately cut off further questions.
Social media users pounced, noting that while California has a mostly dry Mediterranean climate, Finland is a Nordic country at the same latitude as Siberia, Greenland and Alaska, where temperatures reach -45 F in the winter, and the local animals include reindeer.
Under the hashtag #rakeamericagreatagain they raked away at the topic."
...
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that Brown is proposing one of the most significant changes to the state's logging rules in nearly half a century.
"Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing broad new changes to California’s logging rules that would allow landowners to cut larger trees and build temporary roads without obtaining a permit as a way to thin more forests across the state," the paper reports.
Environmentalists in California aren't on board. They've been pushing for years to make California's logging rules more restrictive, not less, but in the wake of the deadly forest fires that ripped through the state this month, prominent lawmakers believe a change must be made before more people die from a preventable situation.
...
This is a big change from two weeks ago, when Gov. Jerry Brown balked at President Donald Trump's suggestion that poor forestry and poor forest management might be to blame for the massive wildfires that ripped through northern and southern California earlier this month, claiming dozens of lives and tens of thousands of acres.
...
The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports that Brown is proposing one of the most significant changes to the state's logging rules in nearly half a century.
"Gov. Jerry Brown is proposing broad new changes to California’s logging rules that would allow landowners to cut larger trees and build temporary roads without obtaining a permit as a way to thin more forests across the state," the paper reports.
Environmentalists in California aren't on board. They've been pushing for years to make California's logging rules more restrictive, not less, but in the wake of the deadly forest fires that ripped through the state this month, prominent lawmakers believe a change must be made before more people die from a preventable situation.
...
This is a big change from two weeks ago, when Gov. Jerry Brown balked at President Donald Trump's suggestion that poor forestry and poor forest management might be to blame for the massive wildfires that ripped through northern and southern California earlier this month, claiming dozens of lives and tens of thousands of acres.
Nothing about raking the forest floor there. And those fires aren't in forests.
YazataNov 20, 2018 05:45 PM (This post was last modified: Nov 20, 2018 06:14 PM by Yazata.)
The big problem in California is that it's a Mediterranean climate where naturally occurring wildfires are a fairly routine occurrance. Lightening will often start them. So the vegetation of the state has evolved to be fire resistant. In fact, some plant species won't reproduce until after a fire.
Then human beings have come along and suppressed all the fires. That leads to overgrowth, where vegetation can become so thick as to be almost impenetrable. Add in dry conditions and it becomes a fire-trap. That produces larger, hotter fires than would have otherwise occurred, which starts to threaten even the fire-resistant woodland.
Biologists have known this for many decades. Many have advocated for controlled burns to reduce the overgrowth, or for other sorts of clearing. But it's costly and it's politically impossible (lighting national forests on fire? Intentionally??) People have moved into the forest and chaparral areas and nobody wants Cal Fire starting a fire anywhere near their homes.
So this kind of thing is going to keep occurring until some way is found to replicate the effect of periodic natural fires in the natural environment.
If one looks at the photos of the destroyed town of Paradise, it's readily apparent that most of the trees are still there, relatively unscathed. That suggests that what passed through Paradise was a Surface fire as opposed to a Crown fire, in which the upper portions of the trees burn as well. "Surface fires are typically low intensity, rapid fires that seldom reach high temperatures. These fires consume light fuels and present little danger to basal portions, root stocks, and tubers, in the soil." Hence vegetation is able to easily recover, even if homeowners can't. So what was burning in Paradise seems to have been brush, undergrowth, which in the absence of man would have been naturally controlled by naturally occurring surface fires at periodic intervals.
(Nov 20, 2018 05:45 PM)Yazata Wrote: [...] Biologists have known this for many decades. Many have advocated for controlled burns to reduce the overgrowth, or for other sorts of clearing. But it's costly and it's politically impossible (lighting national forests on fire? Intentionally??) People have moved into the forest and chaparral areas and nobody wants Cal Fire starting a fire anywhere near their homes. [...]
What would help a little is insurance companies gutting up and refusing to cover both new and rebuilt homes in high-risk areas. Neil Young had his California home originally destroyed in a 1978 fire, then again this year. (40 years is at least a significant span of survival, though, in his particular case.)
Nov 20, 2018 01:34 AM
(This post was last modified: Nov 20, 2018 02:02 AM by Magical Realist.)
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