[zbrozek]

Many CA communities make it hard to cut down trees ("conservationism"), and also don't religiously enforce clearance rules that they do have on the books. The combination means that there's a huge pileup of fuel even in suburban neighborhoods.

To those downvoting - this is a town-owned parcel in my neighborhood, just a few miles down the hill from the CZU complex evacuation zone. https://i.imgur.com/PVUoUVg.jpg

[rsj_hn]

Indeed

"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres[...] California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."

https://massivesci.com/articles/megafire-california-climate-...

[njarboe]

Well, 4.4 million acres burned in 2020 and 1.7 million in 2018, so were a third of the way to that 20 million already.

[rsj_hn]

> Well, 4.4 million acres burned in 2020 and 1.7 million in 2018, so were a third of the way to that 20 million already.

Unfortunately this article was written in Sept 2020 so I think (but don't know) that those are baked in. But in the big picture, yes, nature will eventually burn what needs to be burned. However the hope is for controlled burns, not burns that destroy lives and property. The Camp Fire in 2018 alone killed 85 people. That's a steep price to pay for refusing to do controlled burns.

[njarboe]

The article states: "In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."

So the data the article is using is from before the 2020 fire season. Only 15.4 million acres to go.

[bart_spoon]

The issue isn’t just the quantity but they type of burning. Historically, wildfires would burn out underbrush and younger trees, but would leave the older, larger trees alive. This would clear out the underbrush so that there was never too much at any given time.

But over the last century or so, well intentioned environmentalism has meant that these fires get put out before they get going. This has led to a very dense accumulation of this underbrush and young growth trees, which essentially have turned California forests into tinderboxes. Now when a fire starts and gets out of control, it gets so intense that it takes out old growth trees with it.

We’ve managed to turn natural forest fires from something that was a rejuvenative part of the ecosystem’s life cycle into an apocalyptic death blow.

[edoceo]

old nature wanted ~5MM acres a year, we messed with it, then nature figures out a way to get what it wants (after some delay). I thought we'd learn our lesson with that firestorm in 1991 (my first big fire memory). silly me.

[scriptkiddy]

Who are these "academics"? The article you linked uses politically biased language and provides no sources.

Seems like you're talking out your ass about something you don't understand. To make the claim that "90% of California's forest shouldn't exist"(paraphrasing, correct me if I misinterpreted) as you did in one of your other comments is absolutely absurd. It illustrates a complete lack of understanding regarding the extremely varied and countless ecosystems present in California. California is not "a desert", California "has a lot of desert".

To be clear though: It definitely HAS been proven that the absurd amounts of fire suppression California has engaged in over the past several decades has indeed increased the severity of wildfires[1].

[1] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES14...

[bcrosby95]

I live in SoCal and the park backing up my house has giant piles of dead wood everywhere. It basically looks like your picture but everything is brown and 1/3 of the fuel is dead trees. The Woolsey fire went right around our city - mountains on 3 sides of it, and all 3 of them were on fire at one point.

Been thinking of trying to organize something to clear out some of that crap. I know our neighbors take it upon themselves to cut park trees that encroach on their properties.

[zbrozek]

The area in that photo turns brown in the fall. It's a few hundred feet from my house. I moved into my place late in 2019. Spring 2020 was creating a defensible space around the house - trimming trees, removing ground cover ivy near the house, etc. This spring is more about clearing the brush and trying to disconnect the ground from the canopy on the whole parcel. Some folks walking through the neighborhood called the town to complain that I was removing native plants. Town came by and ultimately decided I was within my right to clean up, but it was a hassle I didn't need.

Given the close calls I'm really surprised that there isn't a strong rallying around removing fuel.

[skystarman]

Local regulation for "conservation" seems to be a net negative for society in many places.

Can't build housing in cities with MASSIVE housing shortages because we need to "preserve historical character" of the laundromats that's currently there wasting space.

Can't cut down trees or do controlled burns to prevent turning much of California into a hellfire for months because "conservationism"

All of this is of course mainly tied to maintaining property values. And keeping the wrong people out of the community.

Why are people such selfish assholes?