Is it the Apocalypse?

No, but it feels like it.

Dear Friends,

It’s been challenging for me to think about how to start this newsletter, because things are changing every day, and this is a humble newsletter and not a news organization, and I have a whole job and also am painting my room and things have been so busy. But whenever I glance at the news, my heart breaks for California.

I worked in California as a hotshot for three years; two out of Northern California, and one based out of San Bernardino, in Southern California. I was born in Los Angeles, and although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, California always called to me. When I was sixteen, I hitch-hiked to San Francisco from Olympia, and lived on a farm in Mendocino County. In my twenties, I backpacked by myself in the Ventana Wilderness, near Big Sur. In my thirties I worked in Big Sur every summer as a landscaper at a new age retreat. The California Coast is my soul home, from Crescent City to San Diego, but particularly along the Bay Area.

Maybe it was the road trip I took there with my mom when I was young; one of the only things we did together without one of her boyfriends. I’ll never forget seeing the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time. I was leaned back in the passenger seat, drowsy with Dramamine. The Bay Area has never lost its allure. I’ve lived in Sonoma County and Marin, Tuolumne and Kern, San Bernardino and Alameda. I’d gladly live there again.

Over the years and (ironically) after I worked as a firefighter, I started learning about the history of fire in California. How Indigenous Californians helped shape the land with fire. The hand they had in creating the famous meadows of Yosemite, meant as fertile ground for the ungulates they hunted, and how they burned yearly in the more Northerly parts of the state. Fire was (and is) an integral and sacred part of Indigenous culture in California.

But over the years the use of fire has been outright banned and, in more recent years, underfunded and under supported. Any funding agencies do get for burning often goes to fighting fires in the summer, and over the past five years that has especially been true.

(picture by Noah Edelson for AP)

Take, for instance, the current fires in California. National resources were already engaged in California and Colorado (which I wrote about in my last newsletter); already strained. When a fluke lightning storm (likely influenced by climate change) descended on Northern California, it started more fires. Lightning isn’t a common occurrence in the Bay Area, not like the Southwest, whose fire season is often driven by dry lightning. And California was already seeing erratic and dangerous fire behavior, like the Firenado.

Predictably, the lighting-caused fires quickly got out of control. This wouldn’t be an issue if people didn’t live in these areas, but obviously California is, especially closer to the coast, highly populated, and most of its houses aren’t built with fire in mind, as they should be. Local fire departments are often underfunded and aren’t meant to fight wildfires- they can only try to protect structures (which is often a fruitless endeavor if neighborhoods and houses aren’t built in ways that resist fire).

Cal Fire, an agency that began with the CCC and morphed into one of the best state fire agencies, can react to fires quickly, but is also quickly overwhelmed when fires blow up, and has to call in federal resources. At the end of this fire season, billions of dollars will have been spent on these fires- fires that get bigger and worse every year because of climate change, fires that have always been bad in California, whose climate is characterized by summer drought.

These billions of dollars are being spent reactively, not proactively.

Every year, agencies have broadcast burning projects they want to do. These consist of prescribed burns that will help to mitigate fire intensity during the summer. Usually these burns occur in spring, winter, and fall. But because of the regulations (such as clean air rules) and cost (both for equipment and personnel) plus a myriad of other reasons, agencies are only able to get about 10% of burning done each year, resulting in a backlog of area that needs to be tended. This has an incredibly negative impact on our public lands, and helps prime land for fire by creating an overload of fuels.

I have proposed more year-round employment to help with these projects, but that would mean budgetary changes.

It helps to mention here that Indigenous Californians are still doing incredible things for their land. Government agencies should be following their lead (as they should have hundreds of years ago). I spoke with someone from the Karuk Tribe in Northern California. They’re working with state agencies, trying to expand their burn areas and their cultural fire program should, no doubt, be expanded.

My point is: if we had been allowed to burn many of the areas that are out of control right now, people wouldn’t be losing their lives or houses. If housing developments were built with fire in mind, neighborhoods wouldn’t turn into an extension of the fuel they butt up against. It’s not just about the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), it’s about houses and developments mimicking fuel- built with highly flammable materials and filled with more toxic, highly flammable materials.

We need to focus on fireproofing neighborhoods and creating burn plans for the WUI, rather than putting all of our efforts into reacting to fires when they start. While the latter is necessary, the former would prevent it.

My heart goes out to everyone who has lost their homes and whose lives have been disrupted in this already terrible time.

I’ll be sending out another newsletter next week, with more in-depth details regarding how to move forward with fire mitigation, and solutions in the midst of climate change.

Love,

Stacy

P.S. Please remember that Redwoods are fire adapted.