On Nov. 8, 2018, the town of Paradise, California became hell. The sky turned black. Dead birds fell from the sky. And a fiery inferno enveloped the secluded hamlet, destroying thousands of homes and killing 85 people. Over the following year and half, the town began to rebuild. But this September, the skies darkened again. An evacuation warning was lifted, but for many residents, the memories of destruction were enough to compel them to flee.
Paradise’s plight is representative of California’s cycle of wildfires and rebuilding, which has left Californians unsettlingly familiar with tragedy. One Paradise man described the chain of events to CNN as “relentless punishment.” This past year, nature punished California in two ways: through the COVID-19 pandemic, which has killed almost 18,000 Californians, and one of the worst fire seasons in the state’s history. So far, California’s fires have burned more than four million acres, caused damages in excess of $10 billion, and killed 32.
These terrors are the result of a perfect storm of risk factors, including 12,000 lightning strikes in August and a record-breaking heat wave in September. However, climate change, the elephant in the room when discussing any natural disaster, affects many of these events. Therefore, even if this fire season can simply be attributed to the cosmic implosion that was 2020, there is a real possibility that the future could bring fire seasons even worse than the current one. That puts the onus on local, state, and national leaders to reexamine decades of misguided fire policies. For California, the spotlight must be on poor fuel management in forests and continued construction in high-risk areas.
Adequately addressing all the factors that contribute to deadly and destructive wildfires will be dizzyingly complex, likely requiring huge injections of capital and ambitious policy changes. In formulating a new approach, California will have to confront a dilemma that the country will face for years to come: How much are we willing to change now to avert climate catastrophes later? If California does not answer this question by rejecting the status quo and taking more urgent action, it will continue to burn and watch the rest of the nation burn with it.
Lighting the Right Fires
Smokey the Bear, the lovable grizzly who advises campers to keep their wits around the fire pit, has been the face of the US Forest Service since the 1940s. This ad campaign, by emphasizing fire suppression, enshrined a simple but significant principle in U.S. forest policy: Fire is something to be put out, and put out quickly.
This philosophy trickled down to state forest agencies, which generally followed the lead of the Forest Service. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Production (“Cal Fire”) sprouted in 1905 aiming to monitor and suppress wildfires in the state’s 15 million acres of forestland. This diffuse and localized system of lookouts and ranger stations gradually expanded and secured increased funding from the state. In the 1800s, frequent, low-intensity fires burned 5 to 12% of California’s land. With Cal Fire patrolmen ready to pour water on any detected burn, the state hasn’t come close to that percentage since.
But Cal Fire became too skilled at its own job. When land that is meant to burn is prevented from doing so, small trees and underlying vegetation overpopulate forests. Climate change has yielded rising temperatures and inconsistent rainfall patterns, which leave forests with large amounts of dry fuel waiting for a spark. The ignition could come from wind, lightning, a downed power line, or even an overly extravagant gender reveal party. State Senator Hannah-Beth Jackson, who has represented Santa Barbara County since 2012 and chaired the state’s Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management, told the HPR that today’s fires “burn hotter, burn faster, and cover far greater swathes of territory.”
Getting a grip on the current fire predicament will require an end to indiscriminate fire-fighting and the adoption of a more balanced approach. As Jackson put it, “We have to respect nature’s power, and try to work with it instead of destroying it.” To bring down the level of dry fuel within the state’s forests, Cal Fire will have to make much more frequent use of prescribed fires, the intentional and controlled burning of forestland. To this end, former Governor Jerry Brown approved $1 billion of spending over five years to clear excess brush. Sadly, this package took effect in early 2019 — months after the Camp Fire razed Paradise.
Like Brown’s fire prevention regime, current Governor Gavin Newsom has taken necessary steps, but they could be too little and too late. A memorandum of understanding that the state signed with the US Forest Service in August to jointly treat one million acres of land annually would be a major step forward, if fully implemented. However, that is a large “if,” considering that the state’s efforts have so far peaked at about 125,000 acres annually and the price of large-scale fuel treatment could break into the billions.
Home, Sweet, Fiery Home
Even if the resources and personnel required for such a prescribed burning bonanza were standing at the ready, there would be another problem: In modern-day California, you can only burn so far until you hit houses. More than 11 million Californians live in the wildland-urban interface (WUI), where man-made structures meet foliage, and 800,000 homes are located in moderate to extremely high-risk wildfire areas. Besides the damage-control implications of having millions of people live right next to fire-prone areas, construction along the WUI restricts the range of prescribed burns and increases the risk of human-caused blazes.
So why not simply leave the WUI? Firstly, there is the issue of convincing millions of residents, many of whom have lived in the backcountry for decades, to pack up and go. Then, there is the much larger issue: California’s unprecedented housing crisis that has 151,000 people homeless and 47% of voters reporting that they can’t afford to live in their own state. Due to decades of exclusionary zoning and NIMBYism — when local community groups block new developments — affordable housing in California is rarer than snow in Los Angeles. State Senator Scott Wiener, who chairs the California Senate’s Housing Committee, told the HPR, “It’s not enough to say, let’s not build in the wildfire zones. We get the question, ‘Where are you going to build?’”
Reducing the number of individuals who live in at-risk communities will require major strides on the housing front. Governor Newsom has brought verve to this conversation, entering office promising a “Marshall Plan” for housing and 3.5 million new homes by 2025. Yet last year, the state broke ground on just 120,000 new units, and some of the boldest legislative proposals have been stymied. A bill that Wiener proposed that would have permitted much denser development around public transit was defeated in the legislature, though he said that “It opened the door to other bills that are now more palatable.”
The inability of the state to adequately house its citizenry makes it difficult to stop building in remote areas, a necessity to stem the rising destruction of wildfires. Frustratingly, efforts to promote resilient construction through retrofitting have also underwhelmed. Newsom vetoed Senate Bill 182, which would have required localities to identify structures in need of retrofitting and restricted their ability to approve extremely high-risk development, in October, citing the need to balance wildfire resilience with the state’s housing needs. While Wiener was unsurprised by the governor’s veto, Jackson, the bill’s primary author, lamented that the governor couldn’t “take a broader view of the issue.”
Delaying land use reform doesn’t only leave the WUI vulnerable, it leaves a glaring hole in California’s otherwise robust climate policy. While the state has capped automobile emissions, it has done far less to reduce driving itself by prioritizing housing that is close to amenities. Adam Millard-Ball, an urban planning and environmental economics researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told the HPR that “There’s plenty of vacant or underused urban real estate that has good access to transit and walkable communities, but it’s really difficult to build on that land.” Houses next to wildlands, he said, can be doubly harmful: “We definitely shouldn’t be building more car-dependent housing in the WUI because it’s not just a risk for fires, it’s also making the climate crisis worse.”
Evidently, improving wildfire preparedness will demand a climate policy that is not only deep in a few areas but is wide-ranging — one that invites collaboration between local areas, state governments, and the federal government.
A Revitalized Partner?
During the Trump administration, it appeared that California and the federal government diverged on fire management. The president has embroiled wildfires in what some have described as a personal vendetta against the state, mocking the state’s supposed incompetence in forest management and threatening to cut off federal disaster aid before backing down. The irony of Trump’s mockery is that his government controls 57% of California’s forests, a fact that isn’t lost on the two state senators. Both indicated that deeper collaboration with the federal government will be paramount under the Biden-Harris administration.
California would be especially wise to capitalize on a more amicable federal partner because it is fiscally limited in its policy options. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the state’s budget, the scale of investment necessary for a state-funded approach to retrofitting and prescribed burns would be gargantuan. David Garcia, the policy director of the Terner Center for Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview with the HPR that it would be prohibitively expensive for the state to fund individual residents’ home improvements due to the sheer number of houses that need retrofitting. Meanwhile, Wiener described Cal Fire as too under-resourced to effectively perform both fire suppression and fire prevention.
Fortunately for the Golden State, Joe Biden ran on a platform of massive investment to turbocharge the nation’s fight against climate change. Retrofitting and affordable housing both make appearances in the Biden climate plan. However, Biden will likely preside over a divided government, and congressional Republicans are likely to favor market-based reforms over government spending (except perhaps on green infrastructure). Biden’s first steps on wildfires, then, should be more incremental. Directing federal agencies to relax air quality standards that make prescribed burns difficult and proposing a budget that strengthens, not cuts, funding for the Forest Service would be a worthy start.
Where does this leave California? In a place where it has the knowledge to be a leader on wildfire management for a nation experiencing more and more wildfires, but is missing the execution. In the short-term, the state should focus on productive bills that have already been written; for example, SB1120 would allow millions of single-family housing units to be split into duplexes. This bill passed both houses of the legislature but failed to become law because time ran out on the legislative session — a shining example of the sluggishness of reform. In the longer-term, California’s leadership should haggle the federal government to pull its weight on fuel treatment and partner with the insurance industry, which has a vested interest in the fire problem, to reasonably disincentivize frisky building.
When the state doesn’t make the tough decisions, nature will. 2020 has illustrated the natural world’s awesome power to reward the prepared and punish the ill-prepared. In California, this dynamic is somewhat skewed: The state capitol in Sacramento is mostly sheltered from wildfires, while the residents of at-risk towns, even when they plan their evacuation routes and clear brush, get burned. Some of these Californians, unable or simply uninterested in finding housing elsewhere, leave the state. Jackson says it is “tragic” that so many people do so. For a state which prizes its natural beauty and forward-thinking government policy to be undone by nature’s wrath and lackluster policy? Tragic indeed.
Image Credit: “Wind fire” by Robert Couse-Baker is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
