| home | print page | email to a friend |

Fragmented Forests
Even though the wildfire series sparked by the June 20 lightning storm was highly unusual, bigger, more intense fires are becoming the norm in California. Fuel loads in the forests are high, fed by years of fire suppression, drought, and insect infestations. Fire seasons are getting longer, and global warming will increase that trend, bringing earlier springs, higher temperatures, and less snowfall in the Sierra.

As a result, the demands on California’s firefighting resources have been spiraling upward in recent years. According to a March 2007 report by the Legislative Analyst, Cal Fire’s fire protection expenditures increased by 83 percent in the decade between 1996-97 and 2006-07, from $475 million to $869 million.

Perhaps the major cause of growing fire hazard, and of the skyrocketing cost of fire suppression throughout the West, is the penetration and fragmentation of forests by humans seeking to own a house or cabin of their own in the wild. While fire has a major role to play in an intact forest ecosystem, once humans--especially urban or suburban ones--are added to the mix, allowing wildfires to burn tends to be excluded as an option.

“People are moving further and further out into the wilderness, and they’re not cattle ranchers” who know how to protect their own property, said William Stewart, a forestry specialist at U.C. Berkeley. “They’re from Orinda; they expect urban-level fire services.” When such houses are threatened and the area has not been evacuated, Stewart said, firefighters “park an engine at each house--and each truck that’s parked in a driveway is not on the fire lines.” And more people mean more fires: most fires in the so-called wildland-urban interface are sparked by human activities.

One of the main reasons the Conservation Fund bought the Salmon River property was to prevent such forest fragmentation. “I believe that had Salmon Creek not gone to the Conservation Fund, it would have been developed out the ridges,” said Darcie Mahoney, a contractor who is head forester for Salmon Creek. “That’s what happened to another nearby property.”

Adapting to Fire
Increasingly, public officials, agency staff, and fire experts around the state are asking: Is the state prepared to protect all of the residents now living in or moving into remote, fire-prone areas? Should it be?

Many experts believe that instead of throwing more and more resources into fighting wildfires, we need to change how we think about them and examine our own role in creating disasters. We need to learn to adapt to fire and allow it to regain its natural place in the landscape.

“We have to start examining how we’ve set the stage for human disaster.” said Jack Cohen, a research physical scientist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Fire Sciences Laboratory in Missoula, Montana. “Without people, fires are just natural disturbances, not natural disasters.”

One key is for local governments to restrict where and how residents can build homes in rural areas. If a county chooses to allow wildland development, it should be responsible for providing, or at least paying for, services like fire protection, Stewart said. “In California, if people don’t want to finance their own local fire district, the state becomes the fire district. States like Oregon charge people for that.”

A bill introduced this year by Assemblyman Dave Jones (D-Sacramento), AB 2447, would be a big step toward accomplishing that: it would require counties to certify, before approving new subdivisions in the wildland-urban interface, that adequate local fire protection exists--or contract with Cal Fire to provide it. The bill is still being considered in the Senate.

Copyright 2008 © California Coastal Conservancy All Rights Reserved