![]() I’ve been teaching a lower-division fire culture class at UC Berkeley with Ken Lightfoot for the past five years. We have to become stewards of these lands, or we’re going to continue to have huge problems with climate change, drought, and high-severity fire. They say that this idea of stewardship is actually commanded by creator, to steward their lands for the benefit of everything that’s there-the four-legged, the two-legged, and everything else. When you talk to tribes, they all talk about being active stewards of the land. Indigenous people used and continue to use cultural burning to manage California for sustainability, resources, food, fiber, safety, travel, and ceremony. How well are we doing on incorporating traditional knowledge into forest management these days? CalFire is still pushing for more controlled burns the US Forest Service recognizes there’s a need, but they’re unable to get the necessary work done. This promotion of prescribed burning is a remarkable change that’s happened during my career. Governor Newsom put a lot into CalFire, trying to facilitate prescribed burning. It should give us great pause that changes in forest structure are happening at such a rate.Ĭredit goes to California for putting effort and resources into this. Millions of acres are still green but in the most vulnerable state you could imagine, because of climate change, higher temperatures, drought stress, and low moisture. Our forests’ vulnerability is incredibly high. I’m worried that we won’t get those forests back for decades…or ever. But that is a terrible cost to pay for restoration, in terms of homes lost, infrastructure damage, and forest conditions in the high-severity areas. The other half had lower-severity fire, which can be good for forests. About half of that acreage had high-severity fire, in which 90% or more of the trees died. For example, the Dixie Fire last year covered 960,000 acres. But it was a factor.Ĭould some of the recent fires give us a jumpstart on better management?Įvery wildfire-even the worst ones-creates some benefits by restoring forest structure. Also, CalFire increased resources for initial attack, picking up fires as early as possible, and that helped-though we all know that’s not a solution to the situation we’re in. We have seen more prescribed burns and thinning in the last five years, and some of these fuel treatments reduced fire behavior to allow for more effective suppression. Luckily that heat didn’t come with wind this year. A couple of factors led to that: we didn’t have lightning igniting hundreds of fires simultaneously, and the weather was a little better, though it certainly wasn’t perfect-we had a six or seven day period of the highest temperatures ever recorded in California. It has indeed been a remarkably different year. ![]() ![]() The 2022 fire season has seemed much less intense than in the past few years. But what does it mean in the larger scheme of things? We asked UC Berkeley professor and PPIC Water Policy Center research network member Scott Stephens for insights. This year’s fire season was relatively quiet-a welcome change of pace for fire-weary Californians.
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