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Fires in California seem really bad - Mandate of Heaven in danger?
Let me just preface this in that I'm not American so I don't fully really appreciate what it's like over there or how systems are supposed to work. Anyway, when we have fires in Australia, it exclusively impacts rural areas right next to woodland. Rich people tend to live closer to the cities in inner suburbs, near the sea. It's unthinkable that a fire reaches them, it'd have to burn through huge swathes of suburban sprawl first. All that happens for most Australians (and especially rich Australians) is that air quality gets horrendously bad for two weeks. Of course the state still tries very hard to protect homes but it's very much a rural issue, the rural fire service goes out to volunteer and firefight.
I'm reading that in Los Angeles, it's the opposite. Rich people live on the edge of the city, right next to woodland. You've got expensive houses burning down.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg525q2ggl4o
There are pretty serious complaints about political neglect too. I hear that the mayor of LA was off in Ghana (which is frankly bizarre, this whole subnational diplomacy meme needs to be put down and buried in the backyard). I hear that the LA fire hydrants are somehow out of water in the Palisades. There have also been allegations that homeless people were lighting fires, I haven't seen any proof of this. TBH fire-lighting seems like very low-risk, high-return terrorism, it's astonishing we haven't seen it become more common in certain vulnerable countries.
Naturally the first have turned into a political issue. Anti-Trump people have started blaming climate change and arguing that Trump wanted to cut fire defence spending.
Pro Trump people have pointed out that Trump was critical of California's water infrastructure before. And it's not as though California is known for being run by legions of Trump toadies: https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1877055198604017790
There also seems to be dysfunction in insurance, a very high number of fire insurance plans were cancelled right before the fire (possibly due to regulations preventing rate rises): https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/1877128641802285064
IMO the solution is intensive backburning when it's cool. There can be no fires if you destroy the fuel beforehand.
However, it does seem like a major failure in state legitimacy if you can't even protect the rich from fires. From Chris Bakke on twitter:
Thoughts? I don't really have a thesis here.
California as a state that is about 33 million acres of forest. That is only 1/3rd of the state, but this is where you remember that california is also about 1/3rd desert, and another 1/3rd agriculture lands. In short- anything that isn't a city or farm is either a desert or a forest. As a result, if your city isn't surrounded by farms or desert, it's going to be adjacent to forests.
California in turn is a state that bought into late-20th-century environmentalism hard, including the belief that any wild fire was bad in and of itself. This is because burned forests are ugly and the pacific conservationist movement was significantly shaped by the beauty of nature. As a result, there was an extended effort to suppress and prevent wildfires and maximize forests in the name of the beauty of the environment.
This was bad ecological conservation, because nature isn't pretty and natural wildfires are needed to clear away dead brush that acts as fire tinder. As a result California has a tendency for exceptionally bad wildfires, especially in droughts, because of above-average underbrush compared to the more systemic burns practiced in the Appalachian forest regions.
The US Forest Service's policy of fire suppression wasn't related in any way to late 20th Century environmentalism. The Great Fires of 1910 happened only a few years after the Forest Service was founded and suppression followed soon after and was the policy for decades. Conversely, it was around 1970, just as the modern environmental movement was founded, that the Forest Service started to back off of this policy, though this wasn't due as much to environmentalist influence as it was to scientific research done in the 1960s that showed fire as essential to forest ecosystems, independent of the increased risk of "the big one". Controlled burns have been the preferred method of wildfire management for some time.
The problem with this burns, though, from a practical standpoint, is that there's only so much you can do. I'm on the board of a nonprofit that deals extensively with PA DCNR, and while the rangers love doing these burns, they have their limitations. In Pennsylvania, you can't burn in full leaf because it won't burn, and you can't burn in the winter when the ground is too saturated to burn, and you can't burn when it's too wet for anything to ignite, and you can't burn when it's so dry that the fire could easily get out of control, so you're basically limited to a few weeks in early April when the ground is dry, there's no foliage yet, and the spring rains have yet to start, and even that's weather permitting. And maybe you get another shot in November. And assuming you actually can burn, you can only burn as much as you have staff on hand to control it. They do several burns a year in a state park that runs about 20,000 acres, but none of them are more than a dozen or so acres at a time, and most are smaller. Things are obviously different out west where wildfire risk is greater, but they still have to work with the weather.
Thanks for this post. I hadn't considered that the conditions for controlled burns could be so restrictive and in the context of California, there's almost certainly permitting and approvals required that add additional cost and time to it.
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