Forty years ago, I was a fire dispatcher for the Tahoe National Forest when a series of lightning strikes triggered the largest fire in the history of the forest. I worked ten straight 14-hour days and quickly found myself in charge of “initial attack” for all other fires on the forest. Our system for attacking new fires was simple: there were a pre-set series of resources (fire engines, hand crews, aircraft, bulldozers, and even paratroopers) we would commit to a fire based upon a combination of forecast temperature, humidity, fuels, and wind conditions. The most important variable for the risk of an initial fire was the “fuel moisture,” which captured how dried out the forest fuels were after days or weeks or months of actual temperature, humidity, and wind. The most important variable for a fire spreading was wind: if the fuels were dry and the wind was high, conflagration was likely.
That experience was on my mind thirty years ago when the 49er Fire broke out near my hometown of Nevada City and briefly threatened the complete destruction of the town. Wind shifting up the canyon from the South Yuba River would have brought the fire straight into the town, and we all knew that nothing could then be done to stop it. Smoke hung thick in the air as a gloomy orange orb hovered throughout the day, but the wind held off and spared us. But the prospect of such a fire—one that would wipe an entire town off the map, its residents fleeing in a panic—has haunted my land use work ever since then.
I therefore explored this issue carefully in my work for the Sierra Nevada Ecosystem Project (SNEP) and then in my book, Shaping the Sierra: Nature, Culture, and Conflict in the Changing West. I wrote about the problem of too many houses penetrating the forests in the “wildland-urban interface,” poor escape routes for those who lived there, and the fact that houses themselves are fuel that can spread a fire. I then talked about this risk on CNN, CBS, NPR, and on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and other papers.
It was twenty years ago that I wrote “it is only a matter of time before people get caught in a Sierra Nevada firestorm.” That was true before I fully appreciated the scale and scope of climate change, and it has become even more true today. Climate change makes all of the things worse that cause a fire to start and allow it to spread quickly without any control: temperature, humidity, and wind. Most importantly, climate change lowers fuel moisture.
It was ten years ago that Bettina Boxall and Julie Cart published their remarkable Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the problems of wildfire in the west in the Los Angeles Times, titled “Big Burn” (https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/bettina-boxall-and-julie-cart). I had many conversations with Bettina and Julie as they prepared their series, so I was thrilled when I read that they had won the Pulitzer. I called one of them on her cell phone and I managed to catch them together celebrating at the Times. They had laid out the problem for all to see.
But what can we say now, in the wake of the devastating fires of the past 14 months? Mariposa, Sonoma, Napa, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Shasta, Mendocino, Los Angeles, and Butte counties have all experienced devastating fires that encircled entire towns and forced rapid and perilous evacuations. And in Paradise, we saw “people get caught in a Sierra Nevada firestorm.” Paradise is just like my home town of Nevada City, California: a small, everybody-knows-each-other kind of town, situated in the idyllic Sierra foothills above the fog of the Central Valley and below the long, cold winters of the higher Sierra Nevada.
Welcome to the future: the new “abnormal,” as Governor Brown has said. All bets are now off when it comes to wildfire in the west—and climate change, unless we act decisively to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions—will mean wildfire in the southeastern USA, too. This is what climate change actually looks like: more intense wildfires occurring across more months of the year, more intense winds fanning the flames and embers across an ever-drier forest, and more loss of life while we are left praying for rain. The hurricanes and drenching rains that flooded the Gulf of Mexico and southeastern states (including the torrential flooding in the Carolinas and George) are another greeting card from the climate we have made. This isn’t a problem for the future; it is a crisis for us and our children now.
There is a lot we can do to reduce the loss of life in these situations, and I’ll write in the future about how land use planning and forest management may both play a positive role in California. But nothing else we might do will make a difference if we don’t also deal with the root cause of the crisis: greenhouse gas emissions are driving global climate change. And climate change is the root cause of the complete destruction of a place called Paradise.