vegetation removal – Enviro Updates

Hayley Smith and Alex Wigglesworth, LOS ANGELES TIMES

As he stood amid the rubble of the town of Greenville, Gov. Gavin Newsom this month vowed to take proactive steps to protect California’s residents from increasingly devastating wildfires.

“We recognize that we’ve got to do more in active forest management, vegetation management,” Newsom said, noting that the region’s extreme heat and drought are leading to “wildfire challenges the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history.”

Yet despite a universal desire to avoid more destruction, experts aren’t always in agreement about what should be done before a blaze ignites. Forest management has long been touted as essential to fighting wildfires, with one new set of studies led by the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Forest Service concluding that there is strong scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of thinning dense forests and reducing fuels through prescribed burns.

But some ecologists say that logging, thinning and other tactics that may have worked in the past are no longer useful in an era of ever hotter, larger and more frequent wildfires.

“The fact is that forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires,” said Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist and the president of the John Muir Project.

Many of California’s most devastating recent fires — including 2018’s deadly Camp fire and the Dixie fire, now the state’s second largest on record — seared straight through forests that had been treated for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said.

Dan Silver, SONOMA COUNTY GAZETTE

A wildfire suppression plan adopted at the end of 2019 by the California Board of Forestry could cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars but will do very little to actually reduce fire risk for communities in Sonoma County and throughout the state. Fire safety experts and environmental protection advocates filed suit on January 28 to block the new Vegetation Treatment Program (VTP) from going into effect.

Proposed by CalFire, the state’s fire management agency, the VTP will not provide protection against wind-driven fires. Yet it is wind-driven wildfires that caused the devastating loss of life and property seen in the state in recent years. The Kincade Fire of 2019, which was the largest fire in Sonoma County recorded history, burned almost 78,000 acres and destroyed almost 400 structures. Similarly, the Tubbs, Nuns and Pocket Fires of 2017 burned more than 85,000 acres in Sonoma and Napa Counties, destroyed 7,000 structures and killed 25 people.

Across the state, 87 percent of the destruction of homes in 2017 and 2018 was caused by only six fires, all of which were wind-driven. Yet the methods to be used by the VTP would not have prevented those six catastrophic fires.

The VTP calls for removal of native forests, sage scrub and chaparral on a grand scale – on the order of 250,000 acres each year – at enormous financial and ecological cost, including releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. This approach does not stand up to scientific scrutiny and in many locations would actually be counterproductive by promoting the growth of highly flammable weeds. In addition, the VTP does not properly differentiate between what might work for northern forests versus chaparral and sage scrub in Southern California; these habitat types require very different management approaches when it comes to wildfire safety.

Environmental Center of Sonoma County

Tag: vegetation removal

As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management

Costly new wildfire suppression won’t prevent catastrophic fires