California, Trump Eye Logging To Fight Wildfire As Scientists Point To Climate Change, Sprawl

Nov. 25--After the Camp Fire obliterated the town of Paradise this month in California's most horrific wildfire to date, everyone from President Trump to Gov. Jerry Brown raised concerns about the state's overgrown and drought-stricken forests.

Both administrations called for a significant increase in logging on federal and private lands earlier this year to thin timberland characterized as tinderboxes ready to explode.

However, according to research scientists and ecologists, wildfire's increasing toll on life and property in recent years has been overwhelmingly driven by global warming and patterns of development -- not the state's most densely wooded areas.

"The fires that are getting everybody's attention right now are not about forest management," said Leroy Westerling, a professor and researcher specializing in global warming and wildfire at the University of California at Merced.

"The major factor is climate change across the west," he added. "Regardless of fuels management, we just wouldn't be burning like this, especially in Northern California, in a normal year."

In fact, few if any of California's most destructive blazes dating back to the early 20th century have been driven by densely packed forests, according to a review of records kept by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, also known as Cal Fire.

The most devastating and deadly conflagrations have most often resulted from high winds whipping fire through dried out chaparral and grasslands. These blazes often torch sprawling subdivisions that abut undeveloped landscapes, such as the Tubbs Fire did in Santa Rosa last fall.

Even the Camp Fire, which occurred in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, spread on strong westerly winds blowing down from the mountains across heavily logged forests before jumping from house to house. Trees were one of the only things that remained intact after walls of flame swept through the town of Paradise.

Researchers call for change amid the status quo

Now a chorus of academics and ecology and policy experts have spoken out across the state -- from Stanford University to Sonoma State University to University of California at Santa Barbara -- calling on regional governments to tighten zoning rules and even consider buying people out of homes in fire-prone areas.

"We've got to do something smarter than what we've been doing," said Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis at Pomona College, who has proposed the creation of flood and fire bonds that would allow local governments to purchase and set aside property in high-fire areas.

Backstory: Reporting on wildfire, logging and climate change »

"This is very clear. Get people out of there. Go back to the cities and towns and counties, planning boards and zoning commissions and have a very different approach," Miller added.

However, the opposite seems to be happening throughout the state. For example, residents in parts of Santa Rosa that burned in 2017 have started to rebuild. And in San Diego County, officials have approved several sprawling new suburban developments despite the concerns of environmental groups and several lawsuits.

"Our experience shows wildfires burn right into the city of San Diego's long-established neighborhoods, so halting new suburban home building is no panacea," said county Supervisor Ron Roberts, who's held the post since 1995 and also sits on the state's California Air Resources Board.

"The projects this board has recently approved meet stringent, modern fire safety standards, and during our public, televised deliberations, fire authorities responded positively during extensive questioning about their confidence in the safety of those developments," Roberts added.

Those in Southern California are used to bracing for dry fall seasons when so-called Santa Ana winds create dangerous fire conditions. Using the latest technology in building materials and clearing defensible space around homes are established practices.

Still such precautions only go so far, such as in the recent Woolsey Fire that rushed through scrublands on high winds destroying homes from Oak Park to the opulent Malibu coast.

Northern California now also appears to be increasingly facing this dangerous recipe for wildfire, said Noah Diffenbaugh, an earth science professor at Stanford University and the senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

"Autumn precipitation has been decreasing, and is likely to decrease in the future as global warming continues," he said. "So when those winds occur, they're occurring over a backdrop of record dry vegetation."

Pressure ramps up to log the forest

Much of the official government narrative around wildfire in California has centered on the more than 129 million dead and dying trees ravaged by drought and bark beetles that are scattered across the state. Officials have repeatedly pointed to forests that have turned an ominous red and gray, especially in the central and southern Sierra Nevada as evidence that forests pose a threat.

Timeline: California's intense tree mortality follows a culture of fire suppression driven by logging interests »

On Tuesday, Trump called on congress to pass legislation that would dramatically expand the federal government's authority to remove dead and dying trees as well as salvage logging following wildfires.

The move comes just days after U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed "radical environmentalists" for preventing adequate management of forests, telling Breitbart News: "You have dead and dying timber. You have years of neglect. It was like a flamethrower of embers shooting through the forest."

The comments echo recent statements made by House Republicans such as Rep. Tom McClintock, whose district covers much of the southern and central Sierra Nevada.

"In the name of protecting endangered species, we placed increasing tracts of land off limits to forest management, allowing our forests to become dangerously overcrowded and overgrown," he said in October at a meeting of the Tuolumne County Alliance for Resources and Environment, a group that among other things advocates for logging on public lands.

Brown has repeatedly blamed climate change for the recent fires while reiterating concerns about overgrown forests.

"The president has talked about how our forests are managed. That's an element," Brown said in recent national news broadcast, after surveying wildfire damage with Trump.

"The fact is that managing the forest is part of it," he added, while also acknowledging the role of climate change. "They're a lot denser than they were 200 years ago."

Over the last two years, top forestry and firefighting officials have spent countless hours in public and private meetings discussing how to address overgrown timberland and their potentially catastrophic threat.

While the state's most destructive and deadly fires are largely not associated with current forest conditions, some researchers fear that could change in the future.

As those dead logs fall on top of one another, they can "jackstraw" and create the conditions for wildfires of unprecedented scale, said Malcolm North, a research ecologist with the Forest Service.

"People will say that usually those big logs don't burn, but ten years from now you could get a fire in the concentrated down wood," he said, "and if that happens, we're going to see fires that we've never seen the likes of before."

Chad Hanson, a research ecologist with the Earth Island Institute's John Muir Project, dismissed the argument as an excuse to prop up the logging industry. He said that removing dead trees, known as snags, would likely increase the chance of a large fire.

"I have to say that it's shocking to me that scientists funded by the Forest Service would push snag removal as fire management right now, after the Camp fire just blew through an area where the Forest Service had removed nearly all of the snags and then burned down most of Paradise," he said.

Forest Service official countered, saying that efforts to increase logging will be based on the best science.

"It's for restoration of the forest ecosystem, to protect it from catastrophic wildfire and insect and disease outbreak," said John Exline, ecosystem management director with the Pacific southwest region of the Forest Service. "It's a combination of everyone rolling up their sleeves and working together."

The vision for thinning the forest

Brown set an ambitious goal earlier this year to increase mechanical thinning on private lands from about 250,000 acres last year to about 500,000 acres annually within the next five years.

He also ordered the first-ever creation of Cal Fire crews dedicated solely to thinning forests. The six 10-person teams will be tasked with using chainsaws and controlled burns to help achieve a goal of treating 60,000 acres a year.

At the same time, the U.S. Forest Service has also set a goal of increasing logging and controlled burns, from about 222,500 acres last year to about 500,000 acres a year by 2025.

While thinning out all of California's 8.9 million acres of dead and dying trees using chainsaws is financially and practically speaking impossible, state officials have focused on projects around backcountry communities most at risk. Clearing timber in these areas can reduce fuel loads, but also give firefighters better access when trying to protect homes and other structures using large vehicles.

Cal Fire is now doling out $155 million in grants to help start the process near backcountry communities. The money comes on top of $170 million in recently awarded funds to local government agencies and nonprofits for everything from fire-prevention education to cutting down trees to burning the harvested wood in biomass plants to generate electricity.

Officials have said that a key part of the equation will be convincing private landowners not currently engaged in timber harvesting to start thinning their property. But the state will have to dramatically boost its logging infrastructure, such as adding new sawmills in the southern Sierras.

"There has been a downward trend in timber harvesting in California since the 70s and 80s, so you cannot turn that around on a dime," said Helge Eng, deputy director of resource management with Cal Fire. "It takes time to attract new sawmills to certain parts of the state and attract the workforce, but I think the grants will help with that."

And even with new mills in place, clearing out smaller diameter trees doesn't make landowners a lot of money. Most of the profit is in harvesting larger and more fire-resistant trees, which forestry experts say would only increase the danger of wildfire.

Still, the governor's plan -- if not Trump's -- has won over many ecologists because they believe strongly that the forests could benefit tremendously from removing smaller trees and shrubs, known as understory. Beyond concerns about backcountry blazes, such vegetation can suck up limited moisture making a particular stand more vulnerable to drought.

As overgrown forests are exposed to drought and beetle infestations, larger trees die, opening up the canopy for shade-tolerant trees, shrubs and bushes. Beyond the loss of habitat for certain native species, these landscapes are more prone to dry out and fuel the types of wind-driven wildfires that have devastated communities throughout the state in recent years.

"If we could restore the fuels there to a more appropriate density and structure through thinning and prescribed fire we could make them much more resilient to climate change," said Westerling of UC Merced, "but it's getting harder and harder to get ahead of that. It requires a lot of resources."

Craig Thomas, conservation director for the nonprofit advocacy group Sierra Forest Legacy, also said that he supports cutting down smaller trees in targeted areas, as long as private landowners and federal officials don't turn to logging larger old-growth trees once a sawmill is established.

"I'm hoping that this doesn't devolve into another way to bag some big trees," he said. "We've had enough of that."

Getting fire back into the backcountry

Another huge selling point for the environmental community: The state and federal government's plans acknowledge the need to ramp up prescribed burns.

"Reestablishing fire has been the finding of the fire science community of the last 25 years," Thomas said.

California's forests are, somewhat ironically, overstocked because of aggressive fire suppression that started in the early 20th century and continue through today, according to researchers.

Timber sales in California, and throughout the west, peaked in the 1980s before efforts to protect several species of spotted owl brought levels down. While logging was dramatically curtailed, the Forest Service and Cal Fire continued battling backcounty blazes with zeal.

Ecologists have long criticized the state and federal government for putting out lightning strikes that burn far from homes and communities because such fire clears out brush and smaller trees that live beneath the canopy.

Unlike bark beetles that prefer larger trees, fire clears out this understory, while also creating habitat essential to a number of native plant and animal species.

While it's not as precise as logging and carries the threat of spreading quickly, controlled fires are the most cost-effective way to thin out the forest.

While there is overlap in the rhetoric of the Brown and Trump administrations on forest management and wildfire, it's unclear for how long the two strategies will converge.

Both promised to embrace prescribed fire and limit logging of lucrative old-growth trees. However, forestry experts have said that once efforts are underway, private landowners and timber companies will likely push for less prescribed fire and looser limits on logging.

Twitter: @jemersmith

Phone: (619) 293-2234

Email: joshua.smith@sduniontribune.com

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