[bryan0]

Here are some articles explaining California's role in forest mismanagement.[0][1][2]

I think what's interesting, and a real problem, is that all reasons about causes of the fires is seen as a political stance, when the factual causes of the fires should be not a political issue.

All of these things are true. They're not political statements: 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns 2. Climate change making conditions ripe for fires 3. PG&E was negligent in maintaining its infrastructure

But people want to assign the blame to either #1 or (#2 and #3), and by doing that they are implicitly taking a political stance.

It's not productive and makes finding robust solutions to these problems harder.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/01/why-isnt-california-...

[1]: https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article239475468.html

[2]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Top-scientist-knew-Bi...

[dragonwriter]

> All of these things are true.

That's highly debatable.

> They're not political statements:

At least the first is a political judgement.

> 1. CA mismanaged its forests by not doing proper controlled burns

The vast.majority of the first within the State are not subject to state management; 3% of the forest land is controlled by the state or administrative subdivisions. 57% of forest land in the state (and 47.7% of total land area of the state) is directly controlled by the federal government and some of the rest by federally-but-not-state supervised tribal governments. In between there is some private land which the state has less control over than the state-owned land but more than the federally-controlled land from which it is excluded from management. So even if there was mismanagement by the state, there's very limited potential impact.

> 2. Climate change making conditions ripe for fires

This is true.

> 3. PG&E was negligent in maintaining its infrastructure

This understates the case; PG&E was between grossly reckless and actively malicious in maintaining it's infrastructure.

[bryan0]

I’ll grant your final comment on #3 but on the others I disagree.

If CA was requesting that the federal govt do controlled burns to better protect their citizens from wildfires, and the fed govt refused, then you would have a point, but from the research I’ve done (and I cited 3 random examples above) that’s not what happened. In fact it’s the opposite where organizations which controlled the land desperately wanted to perform prescribed burns, but were prevented from doing so because of local regulations.

As far as #1 being a political judgment: That you think #1 is false and 2 and 3 are true, one can guess how you feel about a host of other political issues, most have which have absolutely nothing to do with forest management.

[ComputerGuru]

What about all the federally owned land in California suffering from the same “mismanagement?”

It’s also not clear to me that - regardless of the party in question - it is fair to call it mismanagement unless credentialed people had pointed out the risk of not allowing controlled burns and the government insisted on doing them anyway because of different priorities, aka mismanagement.

[bryan0]

Read the articles I posted. you can call it what you want, but "credentialed people" have been desperately calling for prescribed burns for years only to run up against local regulations. specifically: "local air boards around the state, and a lack of consistency can create problems for burn projects"

[zbrozek]

It's not news. Fire management folks have been preaching controlled burns for decades.

https://www.propublica.org/article/they-know-how-to-prevent-...

[EricE]

Whats even nuts is many types of trees only propagate with fire. Fires are required to open the cones and let the seeds out.

They are actively killing the native forests by over zealous fire suppression and lack of controlled burns. Environmentalism in name only - sound and fury signifying nothing.

[somesortofsystm]

Humans have known to regulate forest fuels for 1000's of years. This modern stubbornness is hubris based on ignorance of the real technology that has been developed, over tens of thousands of years, in forest management.

[NotSammyHagar]

And #4 almost 50% of the land is under federal control and thus California state govt has very limited influence and ability to ask for burning that.

[dragonwriter]

> And #4 almost 50% of the land is under federal control

Over 50% of forest land in the state, but almost 50% of the total land area of the state.

This is fairly common in the West and wildly different from the situation outside of the West.