Wildfire Activism for California
by Kelly Knight, Marketing Manager for The Good Table
Photo Credit: Glenn Beltz
California has been on fire for the last three weeks, and now, so is Oregon. During a year where we’ve all been staying home (hopefully) as much as possible to avoid contracting COVID-19, having fires fill the air with smoke has been especially hard on our resilience and mental health. With just COVID, you could exercise outside, open windows, and there was just more space and literal breathing room available.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve had moments of profound grief and helplessness the past few weeks. It’s not been easy, especially since I’m currently pregnant, with the birth of my second child imminent. But one thing that helps me during these times is activism. Being able to do something, no matter how small, really makes a difference to my mental health. With this in mind, I’ve compiled some resources so we can all start to make an impact to stop such massive wildfires in the future.
First of all, a note: wildfires are a part of California’s natural ecosystem. I grew up in Southern California, and we had a regular fire season, and managed it pretty well. However, according to my research, there are three major factors contributing to the firestorms and massive wildfire growth we’ve been seeing in recent years:
Climate Change
More People Moving Into the Wildland-Urban Interface
Forestry Management Practices
Climate change is creating hotter, drier weather for longer, and changing existing weather patterns, leading to hotter, faster spreading fires. That’s an observable pattern that climate scientists have been trying to alert us to for years.
It’s hard to know why many more people have moved into the Wildland-Urban Interface, the transition zone between wildlands (forests, grasslands and scrublands) and human development, but many have — there are 25 million more people living in these zones in 2010 than in 1990. It’s dangerous to those homeowners, as their homes border the areas most likely to burn. Plus, many wildfires are caused by humans, so not an ideal wildfire safety situation all-around.
Forestry management took a strong fire suppression tack for a very long time, with their spokesperson, Smokey Bear touting “Only you can prevent forest fires.” This made the general populace believe that forest fires are always bad, when in fact, they’re an essential part of good forest management. The result is “a tinderbox of unharvested timber, dead trees, and thick underbrush.” Basically, decades of fuel load that is now up in flames.
So, given all this, what do we do?
To get the biggest results in the shortest amount of time, we need to turn our activism towards management of California’s fuel load, and advocate for better forestry management practices. Selective harvesting, thinning treatments, brush removal, and pruning are practices used to thin out wildland close to the urban interface, typically. For broader swaths of land that have bigger fuel loads, prescribed burning is an effective way to clear out heavy vegetation, prepare new seed beds, and prevent the fuel load from getting too high.
The idea of controlled fires often meets with resistance, but these fires really do have an important place in forestry management. Done during winter, with firefighters setting and controlling them, they are safe and efficient, and can prevent the massive fires like the Creek Fire currently burning uncontrolled in the high sierras, growing by tens of thousands of acres per day.
In my research on how to advocate for better forestry practices, the best advice I found is to reach out to a specific landowner (at the lowest level of the organization possible - for example, an individual State Park vs CA State Parks as a whole) directly, and ask to be added to that agency/offices project mailing list for fuels reduction/prescribed burning projects. Oftentimes, if you ask to talk to a “Fuels Specialist” or someone who is “managing the fuels program” you can talk to those people directly.
So, figure out where your closest State Park is, and who is managing the fuels program, and either try to talk to that person about their strategy for fuel management/controlled burns in the winter, or failing that, get on their mailing list so you can reach out when they release details about the project.
In addition, here’s a few websites where you can find out about upcoming projects/opportunities for comment and engagement:
Forest Service, Schedule of Proposed Actions - https://www.fs.fed.us/sopa/
Bureau of Land Management, National NEPA Register - https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/home
National Park Service, Planning, Environment, and Public Comment Site - https://parkplanning.nps.gov/
CalFIRE - pretty difficult to figure out how to comment on anything. I’d recommend checking out the Governor’s priority project list and seeing if there are any projects going on near you, there may be a point of contact identified - https://www.fire.ca.gov/about-us/45-day-report/
CA Air Resources Board - these folks have tremendous power in determining when “burn windows” are allowed - https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/board-meetings
The Nature Conservancy - they are one of the biggest nonprofits doing prescribed burning projects and prescribed burning advocacy. Recent article about the 2020 CA wildfire season and a bill they are supporting: https://www.nature.org/en-us/about-us/where-we-work/united-states/california/stories-in-california/californias-wildfire-future/
Also worth noting: The Nature Conservancy does a ton of training to bring diverse people into the prescribed burning workforce (which is predominantly white/male) through TREX (training exchange) programs. So that’s a point in their favor as well.
In conclusion, we may not be able to stop forest fires, but there are many things we can do as individuals and a community to mitigate how large and destructive they become. Fuel management is a big part of this, and I hope you’ll join me in reaching out to local officials to advocate for better fuel management (and if needed, prescribed burns) in your area. It’s too late for this year, I’m afraid, but let’s keep this top of mind this winter so that next year may not be as devastating.
Wildfire with Deer, Source: Project LM