|
|
|
|
|
|
by iongoatb
2065 days ago
|
|
|
Question everyone should be asking - where are the federal lands versus the state lands, and what is the proportion of state lands that have burned versus federal lands that have burned. The insinuation of that statistic is that federal land management should be blamed as much or more than the state of California. That may be true. It also may be true that the actual lands that have been burning and been poorly managed are more state lands than federal lands. California is obviously a large state. That's why we need to know what percent of the burnt lands are actually state versus federal before I'd deem the statistic in question to be useful. |
|
|
By acres burned in California, Federal lands are still usually in the lead but not by as much; very roughly in proportion to Federal landownership, which is 57% of state forests. See overview at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wildfires-forests-ins.... The hard numbers seem to come from the historical state-by-state statistics from https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_statistics.html
From the Reuters article:
> The number of acres treated by the U.S. Forest Service in California during fiscal 2020 was the second lowest under Trump's administration, and 40% below a recent peak of 424,486 acres treated in the state during the last year of the Obama administration, according to the data.
But that seems a little misleading considering the impact of COVID-19 on 2020. Here's a nice table of historical prescribed burns broken down nationally: https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_stats_prescribed.html (also https://www.predictiveservices.nifc.gov/intelligence/2019_st...). From that it doesn't seem Trump's administration is substantially any better or worse than Obama's. Other than that Trump's accusation seem off-base--if California is to blame, to a first approximation so too must be the Feds, and in any event states seem to perform several times more prescribed burning by acreage than the Feds--I don't think there's much else that can be said without some domain expertise. The types of lands and their locations, the appropriateness of mitigations (or lack thereof), the distribution of fires, etc, would all seem to be important to drawing any serious conclusions about what has happened and what is practicable in the future.