Biden Administration Will Try To Prevent Wildfires, No Forest-Raking Required
It will need some funding, though.
Following another year of apocalyptic scenes of wildfires, the Biden administration announced this week a 10-year, $50 billion plan to reduce wildfire risk on 50 million acres of federal land, especially in areas near vulnerable communities. The first five years of funding will come from the already-passed Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, but the full amount will need further appropriations from Congress. If you're in the mood for reading a government report, here's the 25-page plan, with the lighthearted title "Confronting the Wildfire Crisis: A New Strategy for Protecting Communities and Improving Resilience in America’s Forests." (PDF document.)
We'll let the New York Times do the summarizing:
The federal Agriculture Department said in a statement that it would take measures to reduce the danger of catastrophic fires in dozens of spots in 11 Western states by thinning overgrown trees and using controlled burns to get rid of dead vegetation. The plan [...] would quadruple the government’s land treatment efforts.
“It’s the time to act,” Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, said at a news briefing on Tuesday, adding that the government needed to “change the trajectory of our wildfires.”
The plan would be carries out by the US Forest Service, which we always have to remind ourselves is part of the Agriculture Department, no matter how much our brain keeps insisting it should be part of the Interior (which does have the National Park Service). The goal is to help make forests more resilient and "fire-adaptive" in the face of climate change, which has led not only to droughts, but also to warmer air that dries out brush and makes it easier for fires to burn out of control.
As the Times points out, the number of fires every year in the western US has remained fairly constant over the last decade, but the size and intensity of fires have become much worse. In addition to climate change, past forest management practices have also contributed to the increased danger of huge wildfire. For over a century, the goal was to extinguish every forest fire, which allowed dead vegetation to accumulate. All that stuff that would in the past have been burned in small fires has instead just sat and dried out, making fires more likely to become massive.
In a very stupid way, Donald Trump was partially close to right about the role of built-up vegetation, except he completely ignored the role of climate change in making the situation worse, and thought the solution was as simple as raking the forests. As the Times 'splains,
the Biden administration has decided to use thinning and intentional burning to restore forests to conditions closer to those that existed in the past, when fire was a regular part of the forest life cycle and naturally removed some trees and dead underbrush.
The plan is aimed at reducing the risk of catastrophic fires in 11 states: California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, and South Dakota.
The plan so far is only partly funded, to the tune of $3 billion, through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed last fall. The Times reports that beyond that,
A spokeswoman for the Agriculture Department said the department would spend $655 million every year on forest management for the first five years of the plan. That money would be added to $262 million that the U.S. Forest Service had already allocated to the task for this year. [...]
To carry out the plan on 50 million acres of land would cost around $50 billion, the spokeswoman said. The government spent about $1.9 billion per year on wildfire suppression from 2016 to 2020.
If the Forest Service can actually get the appropriations to pull off the ambitious program of thinning and controlled burns — which is far from certain — that could make fire seasons far more manageable. Seems like a good idea, since wildfires are now a threat not just for the summer and fall months, but year-round, as the record December 30 fires that wiped out suburbs in Colorado demonstrated. The forest management efforts would be supplemented, the Agriculture Department says, with "investments in fire-adapted communities and work to address post-fire risks, recovery and reforestation."
And while $50 billion over 10 years sounds like a lot, it's probably worth noting that the costs of wildfires keep getting higher and higher. Western wildfires in 2020 alone led to insurers paying out between $7 billion and $13 billion in damages, and that's just on homes, land, and other stuff that was actually insured. When you factor in all the indirect costs of wildfires, like people being dislocated and the long-term costs of health problems caused by the air pollution from massive fires, estimates start running into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
In the Agriculture Department's press release on the plan, Vilsack emphasized the need for action to cut the risks of extreme wildfires, and to start doing it as soon as possible, since the damage from the largest wildfires has outpaced "the scale of efforts to protect homes, communities and natural resources," and that's only going to keep getting worse with climate change. He emphasized the need for cooperation on the prevention effort between federal agencies, other jurisdictions, and private landowners.
Forest Service Chief Randy Moore (yes, "chief" is his actual title) added that the job is doable, but that we gotta actually do it:
“We already have the tools, the knowledge and the partnerships in place to begin this work in many of our national forests and grasslands, and now we have funding that will allow us to build on the research and the lessons learned to address this wildfire crisis facing many of our communities,” said Moore.
Vilsack also said at Tuesday's press conference that the goal here isn't to eliminate wildfires, but to prevent them from being as catastrophic as the fires of the last decade.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), who also spoke at the presser, said the emphasis on prevention and risk reduction is especially needed because of climate change, because "We can’t keep doing the same thing under worse conditions and expect a better result."
And somewhere in Florida, Donald Trump mused about having an underling bring him a rake so he could go on TV and say 'Even Wonkette says I was right!" But then he wanted a Big Mac and a Diet Coke and forgot all about it.
[ NYT / USDA / US Forest Service / Photo: Brody Hessin on Twitter, Creative Commons License 4.0 ]
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Oh, absolutely. I live in a bushfire prone area and my family's all in with the local BFB. There are some "lovely big blocks of bush with a house on it" developments that would NOT get approval today because they're death traps. A bad fire went through the region 10 years ago where the people of 3 different beachside developments had to flee to the beach and be evacuated by boat...because there was only one access road. When the fire made that road too dangerous, they were trapped. Firies had been pointing out the danger of that exact thing for more than a decade at that point. Now, 11 years later, there's still only one road accessing those communities.
I can't speak for other Australian states, or even other areas of WA; but farmers in my area (Margaret River region) recognised that "burn little and often" was the best plan, and they were sufficiently knowledgeable about local conditions and fire behaviour to make that happen safely. There was very little in the way of official oversight of how a man burnt his own property, and farmers were encouraged (begged, actually) to also burn the road verges and reserves bordering their farms. Bush fire brigades were extremely local coalitions of farmers with no official training and very little government assistance. Brigades fundraised to buy equipment and members used their personal machinery. If you spotted a fire you phoned your local Brigade Captain; one of the children would be sent haring off to drag him in from the paddock, while his wife started the "phone tree" to notify other members. Dad would throw on a long-sleeved shirt, long trousers (both of heavy cotton drill) and a hard hat. That, and his everyday wool socks and leather workboots, was the extent of his protective clothing.
Also, the whole area was Hicksville; population was very low and "lifestyle blocks" didn't exist. You either lived on a cleared 1/4 acre block in a townsite, or you lived in a farmhouse in the middle of a cleared area for the express purpose of fire safety. The kikuyu "lawn" of the house yard would be watered through summer, providing a nice green firebreak that also kept the wife and kids happy. No scheme water, so that was a significant allocation of resources.
Environmental and anti-pollution movements began to take off in the 1980s, and people started to value living on "lifestyle" blocks on the fringes of towns and cities. From Perth down through the South West people started howling about habitat damage, air pollution from the smoke and how ugly burned patches look. The area was also making a name for itself for production of quality wines, smoke can ruin unpicked grapes, and the prime burning and ripening seasons overlap. Overall result; lots of pressure against controlled burns by a well-meaning but ignorant public. There was even a landmark court case, where a vineyard owner sued the Forestry Department for smoke taint on his grapes (he lost). Fortunately the responsible govt agencies toughed it out and refused to drop burning altogether, but were forced to reduce the scope and number of burns. This allowed a build up of litter we're still dealing with.
Also in the 80s, the WA government brought in compulsory training for all volunteer firies. I've seen the material and holy shit. Not only was it EXTREMELY basic (This is an axe! An axe is a useful firefighting tool!), it was written at about Grade 3 level with lots of brightly-coloured pictures and a condescending tone. Men who'd been defending their communities for decades were quite reasonably insulted, and some quit altogether.
Anyway, not really sure how this turned into an essay on the History of Firefighting in WA. It's an interest of mine. I'll shut up now, sorry.
In Western Australia too. Crown and Forestry Land are both managed by government agencies, and don't have to conform to the same fire mitigation standards as privately owned farmland. If you want to see a rant, ask a farmer who's land adjoins Crown or Forestry land, what they think about the government agency's fire management.