Californians must learn from the past and work together to meet the forest and fire challenges of the next century

Abstract

Outlook Californians must learn from the past and work together to meet the forest and fire challenges of the next century Susan Kocher, Forestry/Natural Resources Advisor, UC Cooperative Extension Central Sierra I The fire-suppression stalemate n 1920, forester Charles Ogle issued a warning about the emerging consensus that all wildfires in forests should be suppressed. “Under natural fire conditions,” Ogle wrote in the July 1920 issue of The Timberman, “a proper amount of thinning was effected and the remaining trees were thereby given a better chance to mature.” He predicted that trying to extinguish all wildfires would crowd the woods with small trees and leave forests prone to major fires and disease and warned that “a complete destruction of our standing timber of today and the elimination of possible second growth of practical value may be the result” (Ogle 1920). UC U.S. Forest Service Ogle and other prescribed-fire advocates lost the argument. Today their concerns seem prescient. After a century of fire suppression, California for- ests are denser and have fewer large trees. Severe fires are increasing in frequency and size through- out the Sierra Nevada. And regeneration is not a given for severely burned forests where seed trees have been killed across large areas. How have we gotten to this moment of crisis? Though land managers have understood for more than 40 years that fire has an important role in a functioning forest ecosystem, the use of fire to man- age forests has remained limited. Fire suppression has led to dramatic increases in forest fuels, and let- ting wildfires burn now for ecological benefits and hazard reduction is considered too risky in most forests and weather conditions. Thinning forests of small trees and brush can reduce the severity of fires that burn there; however, paying for the work required to get those materials out of the forest is increasingly difficult as the number of mills and biomass-burning facilities has waned in the last decade. Additionally, biological, legal, operational and administrative constraints significantly limit where thinning can be carried out in the 10 national forests in the Sierra Nevada (North et al. 2015). Decades of successful fire suppression lulled regulators of residential and commercial develop- ment into permitting new construction without regard to fire risk. These developments now reduce our ability to use fire to lessen future fire hazard. Attempts to get out of this predicament are made more challenging by political polarization over public land management, the uncertainties of a warming climate and concerns about the impacts of forest thinning on wildlife and the public health ef- fects of smoke from prescribed fires. Moving toward a healthier role for fire in California forests will be difficult. One area where there is opportunity, however, is in post-fire land- scapes. Because today’s wildfires tend to be so large and destructive, post-fire areas provide a large landscape on which to try to design a for- est that will incorporate wildfire concerns from the beginning. Reforestation can be developed to incorporate fire and warming climate concerns. Restoration sites can also serve as an ongoing labo- ratory for experimentation, so that forest managers The Rim Fire began in the Stanislaus National Forest on Aug. 17, 2013 and burned 257,314 acres. More than 100,000 acres burned at high severity, meaning nearly all trees were killed. http://californiaagriculture.ucanr.edu • JANUARY–MARCH 2015 5