California/Australia Fires, and their roots in Climate Change, Land Management, and Ecosystem Collapse

i definitely had dams in mind when i noted water projects and development but they are such a big issue they perhaps deserve their own note. Same with the concretization of streams and of watersheds in general, where most of the sometimes copious rains of southern California dump straight into the ocean along with pollution, instead of soaking in to feed what was once another vast wetland complex. Sigh.

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It would difficult to address the question(s) posed by Charlie in an iNaturalist Forum Discussion (as the venue), in great detail, but I think the topic is relevant and timely – as it relates to the activities relating to biodiversity, habitat status, and ecosystem health - that we all are a part of either professionally or personally (or both).

Your questions are framed around climate change and the devastating wildfires in California and Australia – and to what extent is there is a link (?) – and perhaps if there is a causal link, or at minimum, a correlation such that there is an association, but multiple factors are involved, with varying degrees of influence (or impact).

While climate change is often thrown into the discussion as THE factor or the primary factor in increased intensity (frequency?) of wildfires (e.g., California; Australia), it appears that some have already declared a psychological state ( existential – perhaps ) of “climate despair” and that we have not only entered an era known as the Anthropocene (and the related topic of “Reconciliation Ecology”), but it is time to consider what to do (action – praxis) “after climate despair” (see Matt Frost in The New Atlantis , Fall, 2019) who proposed, “Only by changing our entire energy system and social order can we preserve the continuity of our biosphere. And so, climate politics has become the art of the impossible: a cycle of increasingly desperate exhortations to impracticable action, presumably in hopes of inspiring at least some half-measures. Understandably, many despair, while others deny that there is a problem, or at least that any solution is possible.” Not everyone will agree with the solutions proposed by Frost, much less his diagnosis, but I think of the of Walt Kelly’s cartoon character Pogo (in the early 1970’s) and the quote: “We have met the enemy, and he is us” - in this case and with the topic at hand with climate change and wildfires.

A partial and provisional answer (or answers) to your questions can be provided (I think) by three articles that address the issues, and the answer in both cases, does not indicate climate change as the “pristine” causal factor, but rather climate change is a part of the multivariate equation to the outcome that we observe, and so your point of “land management practices” (local and regional), and ecosystem decline (or decay), and myopic political choices – all factor into the outcomes. Two articles below touches on this theme - in regard to the California fires – and the third one focuses on fires in Australia - and I am trying to rely on scientific analyses to frame the questions – and findings:

  1. Williams, A. , Abatzoglou, J. , Gershunov, A. , Guzman‐Morales, J. , Bishop, D. , Balch, J. , & Lettenmaier, D. (2019). Observed Impacts of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire in California . Earth’s Future, 7(8), 892–910.

Since the early 1970s, California’s annual wildfire extent increased fivefold, punctuated by extremely large and destructive wildfires in 2017 and 2018. This trend was mainly due to an eightfold increase in summertime forest‐fire area and was very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human‐induced warming. Warming effects were also apparent in the fall by enhancing the odds that fuels are dry when strong fall wind events occur. The ability of dry fuels to promote large fires is nonlinear, which has allowed warming to become increasingly impactful. Human‐caused warming has already significantly enhanced wildfire activity in California, particularly in the forests of the Sierra Nevada and North Coast and will likely continue to do so in the coming decades.

  1. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS):
    Wildfires and Climate Change
    Many factors contribute to wildfire occurrences, and human activities are by far the leading source of wildfire ignitions even as climate change has contributed significantly to wildfire size and intensity. (From 1992 to 2012 in the United States, humans ignited 84 percent of wildfires. Instead of asking whether climate change “caused” a wildfire, it’s better to ask:
  • How is climate change influencing the likelihood of wildfires such as these?
  • To what extent was this wildfire larger and/or more intense because of climate change?
  • How has climate change made the U.S. more vulnerable to large fires like this one?
    https://www.sciline.org/quick-facts/wildfires-climate-change
  1. “The causes of unprecedented bushfires are complex but climate change is part of the puzzle”
    By David Bowman
    David Bowman is professor of pyrogeography and fire science at the University of Tasmania, exploring the relationship between fire, landscapes and humans.

“It’s a simple question with an incredibly complex answer that involves fuel management, firefighting techniques, landscape planning, building design and environmental history.
Climate change is making a bad situation worse.
Bushfires are an ancient presence in Australia, and the landscape is generally able to spring back to life because this regenerative capacity has been honed over time.
Bushfires are burning and many Australians are suffering directly.
It is a tough time to talk about bushfire causes and solutions.
But without respectful, informed discussion — including the linkage between climate change — we cannot effectively adapt to the inherent risk of bushfires.
I want this debate to be beyond sensationalism, blaming and the promotion of simplistic solutions.”

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-12/cause-of-bushfires-is-complex-but-climate-change-is-part-of-it/11692176

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People like to ignore the fact that the vast majority of the environmental issues we face (including climate change) are management and implementation issues.

Throughout the history of the Earth there are periods of rapid environmental change similar to what we are now facing but those are rare… that’s part of why they have such a significant record in both fossils and in the geology of the planet.

What we, and the majority of other species are facing now is a human based event, one that we have a choice over, not an impersonal event like a commentary impact, a massive series of volcanic eruptions, a synchronous change in orbital and axial parameters, the evolution of a new algae species that floods the environment with a different gas (oxygen at the time). The changes we humans are imposing are intentional and broad in scope.

If it was just climate change it would be bad, but not so bad. Instead we are blocking connectivity routes plants and animals need to move ranges. We are introducing thousands of foreign species in large amounts to novel and sensitive ecosystems. We are destroying biodiversity left, right, and center. We are “preserving” only the most extreme habitats, the places where organisms are already on the edges of their viable habitats. We are building over what will be critical habitats in the next 50-100 years as we lose existing habitats (intertidal wetlands and mangroves are a good example of this). And we continue to extract and use non-renewable sources (or only multi-million year renewable sources) of stockpiled energy (oil and coal) with abandon.

These are all management and implementation decisions humans have made based on economic and philosophical concerns not “naturally occurring” environmental ones.

We are now in the midst of what’s currently the 6th largest mass extinction we know of in the history of the planet and the extinctions are happening in large enough numbers and rapidly enough that we may well be on the way to an extinction event larger and faster than the Permian Extinction, the Great Dying, the largest extinction event we know of.

This is already the first major extinction event that is due to philosophy and intentional choice, the only one that we could make a choice to prevent or change.

But we, as a species, won’t do so.

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i guess one could question whether our species is in fact actually sentient enough in large groups to not act the same way as the algae did, though that’s perhaps a divergent topic. I’ve often commented that if/when intelligent aliens come to earth they may comment that while our species is sentient on an individual level, in such large groups (at least under the current socio-economic-cultural algorithm) we kind of are not. I feel like many are working to change that but… maybe our species just isn’t there yet or has become lost/trapped in an invasive sort of worldview. We will see if we get there or not. But we need to (re) learn true systems thinking to do that. Keep on pushing… I feel like iNat is a part of this, especially in terms of community discussion. But even here, it’s hard.

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i guess one could question whether our species is in fact actually sentient enough in large groups to not act the same way as the algae did

I think this is a really interesting discussion, though I agree, it probably needs its own topic. I’ve lately been thinking a lot about domestication, and I have been becoming more aware of how this process was not originally an intentional or planned act. Staple domesticated agricultural crops today would have had to be uncommon, but useful, in the wild, that way they could have been removed from the genetic influence of wild populations allowing the process of domestication to begin. This is why it would be impossible to domesticate red oaks or sugar maples where they could still breed with wild populations. No hunter-gatherers could have planned this act on the scale that it has occurred, yet I think we retain some belief that these acts of cultivation and domestication were very intentional and that we have been on an intentional “ascent to humanity” ever since. I like to think of this as a ‘great accident’ that has brought some benefit to certain species, but a lot of trouble to countless others.

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A post was merged into an existing topic: Hypothetical past and present trajectory of our species

3 posts were split to a new topic: Hypothetical past and present trajectory of our species

Well said, @charlie. Rich Minnich, a professor at UC Riverside, has gone through decades of fire records in SoCal and Baja California. He gave a departmental seminar a couple years ago where he had an animation showing fires through time. The evidence was pretty damning about it being an issue of mismanagement. It was amazing watching the fires happen at the same frequency, be at the same size, and with the same spread between them in the entire study area at first, then a distinct shift in the size (larger), frequency (less frequent), and location (concentrated in areas of heavy [mis]management) of California fires happen, with a stark straight line between them and the Baja fires carrying on as they had been.

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that probably relates more to the thread I split off…

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The Western Cape is similar to California. Our fynbos (= chaparral) burns cooler than pine and Eucalyptus plantations, or invasive Australian wattles.
Knysna had a terrible fire - a combination of unusual weather and swathes of invasive aliens.
https://www.georgeherald.com/News/Article/General/knysna-fire-independent-disaster-report-released-201906060101

https://www.hamtern.co.za/background-on-the-origin-and-causes-of-the-knysna-fires/

Our groundwater use is unregulated, and some say we are in a green drought, and we will see trees dying.

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My impressions and thoughts are the same. Here, 1000 miles from Australia in New Zealand, with only a slight smoke haze here from those millions of hectares, I don’t know enough about Australian ecology to comment, but I see most of the issues Charlie referred to all about me here in urban Auckland with hundreds of hectares of forest nearby, one of them hanging over our house which is surrounded by piles of cut trees and shrubs and weeds generated by neighbours who don’t use their outdoor areas, just cut down most of the vegetation once or twice a year and pile it out of sight on the fringes of the forest - where it used to rot, eventually, but now is just drying, under trees growing only slowly because of the dry ground exacerbated by the current drought (we have late summer droughts; last summer’s started in late December 2018 and was barely broken over winter, and now it’s early summer again). The ridges around the forest remnants and gullies of Kaipatiki (this neighbourhood, stream and catchment) seem to be increasingly dry to me over the last 20 years, with ever-intensifying housing and paved outdoor surfaces, all drained by piping the runoff of any significant rain event directly out to sea.
@jharkness I also observe “restoration” activities and marketing, and believe they are mostly ill-founded and ineffective, due to the people involved operating from concepts based on other marketing and fashion rather than observation and the natural horror of pollution and destruction that would result from any relationship with the land or water.

Charlie, there was a media article recently about Australian Aboriginal traditional fire prevention by small staged burnoffs that allowed wildlife to move ahead. Apparently some consultation with people who know the practice has been undertaken or proposed, sorry I don’t have a link.

UPDATE see a more recent article with a successful example
https://www.stuff.co.nz/world/australia/118612599/australia-bushfires-owners-say-cultural-burning-miraculously-saved-their-property

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Hi yes our Australian indigenous people did regularly burn the landscape and still do in the Northern Territory. I am in my 70’s so remember places such as Mallacoota and Wilson’s Promontory that I visited as a child. Terrible fires are now happening at Mallacoota right now. As a child I loved the heathlands at both these places because of the diversity of flora and fauna. I visited Mallacoota at the end of October this year and was concerned by what appeared to me to be a huge amount of fuel both in the heathlands and the bush. I am not a scientist but there was no longer the diversity of flora and fauna that I remember as a child. Dead, dry vegetation was acting as a mulch preventing many plants from growing. Park rangers do try controlled burns but the often become “uncontrolled”. I wonder why they don’t slash areas rather than burn. I hope this may help your discussion.
rozkidd.

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I feel that the fires in Australia are driven more by climate than those in California. OP mentioned that eucalyptus has been introduced to California and has made the fires there worse due to their greater flammability. The areas burnt in Australia currently are dominated by eucalypt woodland. (Edit: these are more flammable than any gardens, invasive plants, urban sprawl, farms etc)

For fuel reduction burning to be carried out, there must be weather that isn’t too cold / wet (or the fires won’t start) and not too hot/dry/windy (or the fire goes out of control). Enough staff also has to be available. In a typical year, there are only ten days or so that meet the former requirements. Of those ten days, three will be weekends or public holidays with no staff available. Toss in climate change (so there are fewer suitable days), a sparser population (fewer firefighters and access tracks) and you have a disaster waiting to happen.

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I know in California, slashing with masticator type equipment often spreads the weeds that are making the fires worse, and doesn’t trigger the regrowth of seeds and burls that are adapted to grow after being triggered by a fire. Could be different there though.

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@rozkidd What an invaluable observation at this time as we read daily about the plight of Mallacoota, which was only a name to me until I read your description.

Unfortunately it appears to describe what I am seeing around me. Of course in NZ we do not have the same continental heat, but last summer there were unprecedented forest fires near two cities, Christchurch and Nelson. One of them unfortunately destroyed most of the forest in a large area of restoration on Reserve land.

I have been looking for a proactive response from local authorities but have not yet seen any.

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@charlie,thank you for initiating this thread. While I would disagree with some of the points you made, I do very much agree that climate change is just one of many factors influencing wildfires in CA and the western US, and I also very much agree when you say it’s problematic to focus on a global issues like climate change if that means we ignore the local and regional issues. Blaming current conditions on climate change allows fingers of blame to be pointed vaguely elsewhere where it’s someone else’s problem, instead of focusing on the local and regional issues that would require pointing those same accusatory fingers at ourselves. Environmental crisis often arise from a failure to anticipate the foreseen, and I think this issue continues to be an example of that, and it is very much a social issue.
As fewer and fewer of us have working relationships with the landscapes that surround us, it seems we have increasingly developed something of an idealized perception of those landscapes, to where landscapes seem to be considered ‘natural’ and should be left to ‘nature’, and humanity is somehow separated from those landscapes. We have seemed to grow more and more resistant to actively managing forested landscapes, especially on public lands. However, there is one social necessity that has to be produced from forested landscapes, for which there is no alternative. That is commercial wood products, of which the US consumes a tremendous amount. And yet, very few discussions of managing forested landscapes focus on this necessity. Usually, discussions on forest management tend to focus on social values, such as managing for wildlife habitat, recreation or some undefined aspiration of ‘restoration’. And often the social value is given more weight than the social necessity, such that commercial timber harvest has become more and more constrained to promote a social value, such as conserving habitat for a given species.
However, constraining the production of a required product like timber volume while making no effort to constrain consumption of that product is absurd, but that’s where we are. If interested, James Howard tracks US timber production and consumption statistics, his latest summary covers the trends from 1965-2017 and is here https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/58506 . As shown in Table 12, in 2005 just before the recession hit the US, we were consuming over a billion board feet of softwood lumber per week. The recession caused this consumption to drop, but since 2009 as our economy has recovered our consumption has increased each year to reach 49.7 billion board feet in 2017. We do not domestically produce all of the timber we consume. In 2017 we imported 16.1 billion board feet of wood products, principally from Canada, and overall the US consumed 50% of the lumber produced in Canada in 2017 (pages 4 and 5). The largest concentration of public timberlands in the US is administered by the US Forest Service, representing about 30% of the nation’s timber growing stock in 2001. Yet timber removed from USFS lands represented just 2% of domestic production in 2001, 5% in 2017. Timber harvest on USFS lands has been constrained to promote social values like wildlife habitat and recreation, while at the same time public lands in the western US, especially lands administered by the USFS, have been hit hard by wildfires. But commercial timber harvest can be designed to not only produce the social necessity of timber, but can also be used to restore forest structure and species composition of our forests, thin dense stands of conifers to restore and promote ecologically important understory vegetation like grasses, forbs and shrubs that have disappeared at landscape scales due to the densification of forests as a result of fire suppression, remove conifers from aspen and other hardwood stands that are in danger of being replaced by conifers, improve habitat conditions for many species, and, in the specific interest in this thread, to reduce the density of forests and reduce fuels to make forests more resilient when fires do happen. Stopping wildfires probably isn’t feasible, but by thinning forests the intensity of fires in terms of the degree of mortality to the trees can be reduced, from high intensity to a more moderate intensity. So instead of wildfires resulting in 10,000s of acres of blackened, fire-killed trees and loss of green forest, mortality could be reduced such that a reasonably intact forest could still be present post-fire, but at lower densities. So the US could produce more of the wood products it consumes, reverse some of the negative ecological trends associated with fire suppression, reduce the effects of wildfires, and reduce the ecological impact of our consumption on other countries, if only we had the resolve to actively manage our forested landscapes. But even if an administration proposed doing so, many who would continue to promote social values over social necessities would litigate to stop it. In the meantime, we watch 100,000s of acres of forest burn every year and blame climate change. Given the trajectory of our population growth in the US, the necessity of conifer forests to produce a tremendous amount of wood products for that ever-growing population, and the huge acreage of those forests lost annually to fire mortality, I do think that in the future people will look back and consider us as the generation who largely squandered this resource. It’s not just climate change.

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Thanks for that post. My view on forestry has changed a lot when I moved from California to Vermont. Why? Here in Vermont it often is done well, and is often very much sustainable. In California, at least as of about 10 years ago, what I seen was very much otherwise. Huge corporate entities strip mined the forest and then failed to do any followup management other than bombing the regrowth with herbicide if they didn’t like its species composition. Their spiderweb network of logging roads were not well built or maintained and caused long term watershed damage. Invasive species were spread about.

So… if like Vermont we had people with 100 years of relationship with the land (or better yet Native Americans with 10,000+ years of relationship with the land) ready to truly manage it in the long term? And we had the political will to let them do it? Definitely open to expanding logging in California (i have no idea about Australia). Given the choices we have now - massive corporations and political interests, short sightedness, darn near slow-motion suicide in a lot of cases… i’ll take the anti-logging stance over them any day. And to be blunt, unless there are major changes in who logs and how, I don’t think I personally would ever trust the powers that be to log California again. When a fox kills all your chickens and pees all over the coop, you don’t bring it back in to manage your new chickens.

Don’t get me wrong, I mostly agree with what you are saying too. I just have a very cynical attitude about logging out west, based on a fair bit of experience (though it may be you have more).

In any event one thing I don’t agree about is that logging is the biggest/most important commodity from western US forests. It isn’t logging, nor is it recreation, hunting, ranching or anything else. It is water. The water from those lands supports ~75 million people and much of the country’s food production too (a strong majority of it if you also consider the aquifers in the plains that are fed in part out of the Rockies). It also provides electricity (for better or for worse), fishing, recreation, allows the trees to grow for logging, etc etc etc. The bottom line is even if you have no interest in conservation, watershed management should always be priority number one for the western forests. This, indeed, is something i fear Australia has missed as well, from what I am hearing.

You can ship wood in or if need be find ways to live without it. You can’t live without water and in the western US, the vast majority of that water comes from public lands.

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I personally don’t like clearcuts followed by herbicides either. But there really are no right or wrong ways to manage landscapes - how a landscape is managed depends on the fundamental objective of the ownership of those lands. In the USFS, there is a multiple use mission, the NPS has a more ‘natural’ bent on things, private timberland manages timber for economic returns. While i don’t like clearcutting followed by herbicides, i understand it to be consistent w the fundamental objective of those lands. And, i also realize that there are vastly larger clearcuts in British Columbia being harvested to feed our economy here in the US. Even water can be shipped in, such as to S Cal from N Cal via the CA Aqueduct and Delta-Mendota canals… But i agree, water will become a huge issue. i thought the quote provided by @hawksthree from the Matt Frost article hit the nail on the head for me, “Only by changing our entire energy system and social order can we preserve the continuity of our biosphere.” [i haven’t quite figured out how to directly paste quotes in this system…] I do think that’s accurate, and climate change will make that need for change more and more urgent

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Well, i’d argue that there is definitely a wrong way to manage the land, and it’s what we’ve been doing in the US West (and Australia?). To be honest I don’t really much agree with either ‘side’ of the ‘liquidate assets’ versus ‘post-colonial “wilderness”’ debate. And for sure, I totally agree that outsourcing forestry is unethical, when we have more control over it here in theory. But in practice, we really don’t. I guess what I am calling for isn’t more or less logging but just as you say at the end of your post rather a total reform of the system which… is really really hard but also is going to happen, either by our own choice or via the laws of physics and the emergent consequences of ecology, climate, and human behavior. What we want I think, and what most people want who are paying attention, is science- based land management that respects all angles of the ecology (including the human ecology), culture, society, water, and climate but without placing ‘nature’ on a pedestal away from ourselves or outsourcing harm via NIMBYism. And that isn’t what we are getting. The current ‘capitalist’ system doesn’t provide that and a quick glance at the USSR tells us that authoritarianism communism doesn’t either! Culural, social, emotional, and one way or another spiritual connection to the land and community are what we need to (re)build. And that’s one reason i lean so heavily on pushing for more rights and recognition of indigenous people including within conservation and land management. Those systems already exist, despite much effort by many people to the contrary, and while we can’t just appropriate them we also need to give them more space to do what ‘we’ (meaning the socio political system that predominates) have failed to do.

It’s true water is shipped some distance but only so far, and it has a lot of various vulnerabilities, there are some very scary earthquake and flood scenarios, not to mention civil unrest, volcanos, drought, etc pertaining to California’s water system (and I imagine Australia’s as well). That’s a whole other issue, too.

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