Afforestation, Fire, and Vegetation Management in the East Bay Hills of the San Francisco Bay Area

Abstract

The East Bay hills were transformed by human action from open grassland and oak woodland to dense forests of pine, eucalyptus, and other exotic tree and shrub species within a 50-year period beginning in the 1880s. Because this artificial forest is both within and also adjacent to the developed urban area, it has created an enormous fire hazard with catastrophic potential. In September 1923, over five hundred homes were destroyed when a wildfire devastated north Berkeley, and the October 1991 fire (over three thousand structures destroyed) was an unparalleled disaster. Yet this hazardous situation is not unique to the Berkeley-Oakland hills, for similar afforested landscapes are widespread in coastal California. In fact, some professionals call the 1991 catastrophe the “fire of the future,” underscoring the prevalence of these conditions and the inevitability of a major conflagration. Managing the vegetation in this urban/wildland interface is now a major issue in East Bay communities. Vastamounts of public resources are consumed by meetings, workshops, reports, plant removal, and fire prevention activities. But the issue is not a simple one, because there is little agreement on the actual role played by vegetation in a large fire, nor is there consensus on how to manage the extant afforested landscape to reduce the fire hazard. In this paper, I examine the historical afforestation of the Berkeley-Oakland hills, the link between this exotic vegetation and past fires, and, finally, the complexities of managing vegetation to reduce this fire hazard.