California is On Fire Again and it was Preventable - California Globe
When the Save the Environment movement took hold in California, forest management ended. The Forest Service used to actually turn a profit letting companies come in and harvest (marked) trees. You would go in with a Forest Service guy and mark the types of trees he pointed out - dying, diseased, cramped and thin, “no future”, too cramped, etc.
Part of the process included the lumber harvesters creating burn piles to light in the winter*. As the environment lobby took hold, every fire was immediately extinguished**. Slash was piled but not burned. Fire was bad because it killed trees and scared Bambi. Logging on public land mostly ceased.
*You would start your burn pile and cover it with plastic to keep it dry, then like triple the size of the pile with the rest of the slash. Then shove a lit signal flare in it December and run! The plastic was the first thing outlawed, effectively ending burn piles. Sadly, I was back in school when they lit those pyres! Damn.
** the Indians routinely lit the forest on fire to bring game back in to feed on the new growth and make hunting easier. You can’t hunt in a thicket.
So today, the forests and particularly the people who live in them are paying the price for misdirected forest management. If it were up to me most of the destroyed properties should not be rebuilt, but be bought by the state and returned to uninhabited forest. For the most part, they are putting out fires to save homes that were built in the wrong place. These fires are going to continue until it rains.
