Six years after the Camp Fire - what have we learned?

Our nation's forests need far more active management if we are to ensure their health and viability while also reducing wildfires

Generated using Grok2 beta (2024) - the graphic depicts a healthy managed forest with equipment loading timber

Six years ago, from November 8 to 25, 2018, the Camp Fire

…tore through Butte County and nearly destroyed the town of Paradise.

It was the deadliest fire in California's history destroying over 18,000 structures, homes, and businesses and taking 85 lives.

Right after the Camp Fire was extinguished, I wrote a piece for The Hill describing how that California wildfire highlighted the growing need for better forest management practices, especially in the Western states. I have reprinted that article below because it demonstrates that while the people in cities like Paradise, CA, are working to rebuild, we still haven’t learned the forest management lessons we should have learned.

I have explained in several other pieces that the progressive green tendency to treat wildfires as a climate change issue misses the basics and discourages forest managers from pursuing policies that could help reduce the damage caused by wildfires.

Wildfire science confirms a basic fact: Dry weather tends to dry out materials that fuel and intensify wildfires. But climate change is not to blame for this year’s or any year’s wildfires.

Instead, the reason for the continuing fires is poor forest management practices that are based on a misguided preservationist worldview.

Forest management policies play the key role in determining whether wildfires increase or decrease in number and intensity. Research by the Mackinac Center and other groups on forest management and wildfire policies in Michigan, Arizona, and North Carolina shows how a preservationist mindset has impacted forest health and wildfires. Competing demands over forested resources have made it nearly impossible for managers to manage the forest effectively while addressing demands that these areas be set aside and preserved.

These conflicts lead decision-makers to pause, effectively defaulting to non-management. As a result, ever-larger areas of dead and dying trees, shrubs, and grasses in North American forests give wildfires the fuel they need to grow out of control.

Hyperbolic headlines point to recent increases in the area burned, attempting to correlate these fires with a changing climate. However, as I pointed out in other articles, those frightening stories tend to cherry-pick data from the recent past. Ignoring far more extensive and more frequent fires that happened in the 1930s allows climate-focused commenters to pretend that expanding wildfires are unprecedented. In reality,

U.S. wildfires have dropped dramatically over the past century, both in number and total acres burned.

The number and size of fires dropped in the mid-twentieth century mainly because of our active forest management practices. However, as preservationist attitudes took over in government agencies and the nation’s forest industry was decimated by strict regulation and litigious special interests, many of the nation’s forests have become overgrown and prone to disease and fire.

Effective forest management techniques — spacing trees, thinning forests and using prescribed fires —have been largely precluded, at the same time as we have actively suppressed wildfires. As a result, our nation’s forests have become crowded with densely packed, diseased, and dead or dying trees. Beneath those trees, a compacted mix of deadfall, limbs, shrubs, and grass have built up, creating conditions that are ripe for massive wildfires.

I’m not arguing that we should start clearcutting everything again, as many of my critics would like to pretend. Returning to the excessive and damaging over-harvesting we saw in the early twentieth century would be a bad idea. Instead, we should base our harvesting and silviculture practices on the ecology of the tree species being managed. In some cases, clearcuts are the right prescription. In others, selective cuts fit better with the natural regeneration patterns of the forested areas.

We can choose to use effective forest management techniques—harvesting, spacing/thinning, road-building, and prescribed fire—in a manner that mixes forest stands, age classes, and species across the landscape. Doing this will ensure thriving and healthy forests while reducing the risk of large wildfires that can endanger human health and well-being.

Forest managers (and green special interests) need to move past the notion that harvesting trees is necessarily damaging or destructive or that it is solely based on greed or carelessness. Active management, including harvesting, helps to remove overmature stems and renew forests—just as fire, pests, and disease do in unmanaged forests.

We should do a LOT more of it.

Here’s the 2018 piece I wrote for The Hill.

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This piece was originally published in The Hill on November 29, 2018.

California fires highlight need for proper forest management

BY JASON HAYES, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR - 11/29/18 12:30 PM ET

That the wildfire in northern California is 98 percent contained is welcome news, as is the fact that some of the more than 1,600 firefighters who fought the fire are being allowed to return home. Reports put the toll from this fire at 85 people confirmed dead and approximately 475 missing; more than 153,000 acres burned, and as many as 14,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Whatever the cause of the fire — utility error, a changing climate, or some other factor — reducing the amount of fuels that cause fires such as this one to burn out of control must be a central focus of future management plans.

Recently, the Mackinac Center worked with the Bozeman, Montana-based Property and Environment Research Center (PERC) to publish “Conflict to Collaboration,” which considers many forest management issues. Our paper describes how a confusing mix of private property rights claims, environmental interests and historical uses are conflicting with a growing list of complex state and federal regulations. Where these various interests collide, national forest management often gets stopped by regulatory hurdles that federal forest service employees have labeled the “process predicament.”

There is a way around this confusion, however. Collaborative management efforts now in use can help to resolve the conflicts that stop management activities on federal lands.

In the case of the Camp Fire — as in many other cases — dead and dying trees on federal land, as well as dense shrubs and grasses, threaten adjacent state and private land. During dry seasons, this unmanaged land becomes an extreme fire hazard and can be an entry point for disease and insect infestations. “If human managers cannot or will not reduce fuel loads in federal forests,” the report concludes, “then age, wildfire, disease and pest infestations will do it for them, often with substantial costs for both national forest budgets and adjacent property owners.”

The current fire, with the tragic loss of life and massive destruction of public and private property that it has caused, stands as a stark and horrific testament to that fact.

Faced with this complex, expensive and difficult situation, even the outgoing California governor, Jerry Brown, backed August legislation that would allow private landowners to cut trees of up to 36 inches in diameter and build temporary roads to help thin out the state’s overgrown forests.

Unfortunately, however, there still exists a flawed notion that even properly managed harvesting of the nation’s forests is somehow inherently damaging. Not surprisingly, many environmental groups oppose the measure, claiming it was an attempt to open up these lands to logging interests.

Even if these claims were accurate, opening up a portion of the state’s forested land in that manner could not possibly have had more of an environmental impact than allowing hundreds of thousands of acres to be damaged, or even effectively sanitized by the intense fires now torching the state.

In truth, the logging interests under attack are typically small landowners on properties that are 300 acres or less, and they seek to protect their land, property and lives by reducing real, present fire hazards. Furthermore, actual logging interests that might seek to operate are fully constrained by federal and state regulations that require them to prepare detailed pre- and post-harvest plans, to harvest responsibly, and manage and reforest harvested areas when they are finished.

Our report describes collaborative management techniques, such as the Good Neighbor Authority, that could help to reduce dangerous situations. Under the Good Neighbor Authority program, federal managers constrained by limited staffs, budgets and time are allowed to partner with state governments to address the backlog of essential forest and watershed management activities. Through this program, state foresters can work within federal guidelines to hire local forest contractors to complete much-needed spacing and thinning operations.

Local contractors find work, the forests are better managed and healthier, and adjacent private and state land is protected from the threat of disease, insect infestations and stand-leveling fires.

Jason Hayes is the director of environmental policy at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a research and educational institute headquartered in Midland, Michigan.

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