What, Then, Is Natural?

Obi Kaufmann considers the coming of the modern megafire and many misconceptions about California’s land, in an excerpt from “The State of Fire.”

By Obi KaufmannSeptember 14, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Environment

The Coming of Modern Megafire

Why and how now is different

THERE WAS ALWAYS going to be a period of reckoning—with California’s colonial legacy, with the state’s history of fire management, with the practices of extractive industries, with our patterns of land development—and in the past 20 years, it has arrived. California has entered an era of megafire. In accordance with the National Interagency Fire Center, the word megafire refers to any fire that is larger than 100,000 acres (156 square miles). Eighteen of the 20 largest wildfires in the past 200 years have occurred since the year 2003.

The largest wildfire event in the past 200 years was made up of 38 smaller, lightning-sparked fires that converged to rage through and spill out of the Mendocino National Forest in the summer of 2020. Called the August Complex Fire, or the August 2020 California Lightning Siege, the combined fire complex grew to scorch more than one million acres (1,563 square miles), making it the first so-called gigafire in California history. The year 2020 turned out to become the biggest wildfire year ever for the state, with a total of almost 10,000 fires having blackened over 4.4 million acres, nearly four percent of the state. Although the sheer number of acres burned indicates a possible return to the quantity of acres burned under Indigenous fire regimes before Spanish and American colonization, the fire on the land may be too dramatic and severe.

To make matters even more concerning, these fires aren’t influenced by local forces alone. Climate breakdown by way of anthropogenic global warming, and the ways that global forces intensify local problems, are core to emerging fire patterns in California. Ecological science indicates that as temperatures rise, precipitation patterns change, including decreased snowpack in California’s mountains and a higher probability of statewide drought. Combined with fire exclusion policy and the advent of the timber industry, more rigorous growth within forests due to a warmer climate has increased the statewide fuel load in conifer forests, as well as the connectedness of that fuel inside new fire corridors. Drought-stressed arboreal habitats are increasingly vulnerable to fungal infection and beetle infestation, causing massive tree mortality events that raise the probability of fire. The ravages of invasive plant species, habitat fragmentation and loss, biological pollution and dysfunction, and the depletion of resource stores have radically altered burn patterns across the California Floristic Province and the deserts of California. The expansion of urban development, residential neighborhoods, and electrical infrastructure in the fire-prone landscapes of the wildland-urban interface (WUI, pronounced woo-ee by fire professionals)—not to mention the rise in arson events—has led to a dramatic rise in human ignitions and the spread of wildfire through human communities.

Three primary factors that describe societal and climatic conditions in the early 20th century set the stage for the era of megafire in the first two decades of the 21st. The first factor: Thanks to the invention of the internal combustion engine, the advent of the automobile, the expansion of the rail system through California’s woodlands, and the increased opportunities for wildfire ignition, California experienced more fires in the 1920s than in any other decade in the 20th century. The second: To protect timber commodities, foresting companies of the early 1900s led the charge to keep fire out of California forests, and the USFS codified the request with the 1935 “10 a.m. policy,” which mandated that all fires be extinguished by 10 a.m. the day after their discovery. And the third: The century between 1850 and 1950 saw the fewest drought events in California in over 2,000 years. The result of a century of fire exclusion, coupled with the urban forests of human communities, led Governor Brown to say in 1962 that there were more trees, more tree cover, and more forested land in California than ever before. California was covered in smaller, younger, overcrowded, vulnerable, and stressed trees—not in healthy ancient forests. With the decline of the timber industry in California in the 1970s, fire suppression strategies began to evolve into fire management strategies, as the 10 a.m. policy was slowly replaced with letting big fires rage and managing their effects by modeling and thus anticipating and potentially mitigating their behavior.

Year after year of endless megafire is not inevitable or an eternal state of affairs. The causes of this decades-long march of megafire incidents are recent. Depending on how the current ecological bottleneck is resolved, the increasing emergence of megafires as unceasing, yearly events may be temporary. This chapter does not describe a situation without hope of relief from endless, repetitive fire. Developing and popularizing a nuanced understanding of wildfire’s perennial and dynamic character will lead to the development of a road map through many perilous years to come. California is at a crossroads, and what choices are made in the near future regarding the issue of fire will be remembered by future generations as perhaps the most important that the people of the state ever had to collectively make.

¤

A Tragedy of Misconceptions

When the wilderness is not wild

When the Americans settled California in droves during the latter half of the 19th century, many brought with them a fundamental misinterpretation of the core character of the land. California’s “wilderness frontier” was not wilderness, and it was not a frontier. Most American settlers had little idea of what they were looking at and carried only a vision of what they thought they could turn it into. Worse, they often invented what they wanted to see in California’s landscape and conceived of it as primeval and ripe for wholesale transformation. This myopic view of California as a wild Eden led to an extractive land ethic that ignored the endemic adaptive cycles supporting the land’s ecosystems since the earliest days of the Holocene. Worse, it ignored the ancient effect of people on the land, who worked with a sophisticated knowledge of best practices for stewarding ecological health. One of the primary tools used by so many tribal sovereignties across California was the regular application of fire, often across large swaths of land. To the settler, Indigenous fire in California was—and often continues to be—regarded as deleterious to the landscape. The tragic miscalculation was thinking that the land needed to be saved from fire when in fact the land thirsted for it.

To understand modern fire policy in California requires an analysis of California’s settler attitude toward the more-than-human world. This attitude relies heavily on the invented concepts embedded in the words nature and wilderness. To confront the many injustices that are still being perpetuated to theoretically protect what these words represent from what is conceived of in the settler mind as the deforming hand of culture, it is important to imagine that these words don’t exist as objective states but rather as political designations. Nearly all habitat space of precontact California was stewarded for some kind of anthropogenic purpose, through disturbance regimes that were complex and massive in scope. If California has ever represented nature in balance—a natural wilderness in a steady state, as many 19th-century colonizers imagined it—that balance existed not despite but because of regular perturbations within the state’s ecosystems. The relationship between fire, biodiversity, and human stewardship in precontact Holocene California that has existed for tens of thousands of years may be so complete that it forms a conceptual tripod that cannot stand without all three legs.

California’s dynamic ecology led to hundreds of pyrodiverse human economies that persisted for thousands of years. When tribal groups decided (decide, and will decide) when and how often to set fires, their decisions were (and are) engineered to manage a particular mix of economic resources based on fuel sources and ignitions, climatic and weather conditions, and the landscape patterns of previous fires. Enduring and thriving through millennia of dynamic climatic fluctuations, from centuries of drought through decades of deluge, the Indigenous people of California used fire to construct landscape-wide regimes of resilient pyrocultural food production. European history has often presumed the use of a single methodology of agriculture whose origins stretch back to Babylon. California pyrocultural technology wasn’t a precursor to European-style agriculture but more likely a conscious eschewing of irrigation and till-based farming. Pyrocultural food production reflected a variety of cultural traditions in what can be called commensal reciprocities, or kinship economies, that acted in accordance with the living rhythms of the local ecology.

If it is true that what was untouched, unworked, and untended in California prior to American settlement fades to a diminishingly small bit of unknown geography, what then is natural? What is wild? Might words like natural and wild, used from a settler colonial perspective and applied to thoroughly stewarded land, be something like a perpetuation of injustice? Associated words, such as pristine land or, even stranger, virgin land, only make sense in terms of purity, sexualization, or domination. The concept of wilderness may imply degradation and neglect in the context of what can be thought of as an Indigenous critique of modern land policy. Wilderness represents a fallen state into which the land descends in the absence of work not done and relationships not tended to, as expressed by Sierra Miwok elder James Rust, quoted by M. Kat Anderson: “The white man sure ruined this country, it’s turned back to wilderness.” Wilderness holds a kind of romance for the colonizing mind of the 20th century, explicitly and eloquently laid out by Wallace Stegner in his 1960 letter to the US Congress in defense of what would pass as the Wilderness Act four years later. In that letter, Stegner describes a “geography of hope” that wilderness bestows, a kind of sanity that modern development on that landscape would threaten. The Indigenous critique might counter that this policy is an invention that denies ecological reality. Preserving that thing called nature means imposing a stasis on the systems that deliver any given ecosystem’s vitality, effectively condemning so many such systems to overgrowth, stress, infirmity, invasivity, and disease. On the state and federal levels, the future of colonial policies in California that are predicated on the concepts of nature and wilderness will hinge on the ability to articulate the intersection between justice and ecology in terms of land management practice, traditional ecological knowledge, and fire science.

¤

A Policy of Prescription

Opportunities and challenges in normalizing wildland fire

Over the next 100 years, California’s climate and its landscape may be determined as much by how the land is adaptively managed as it will be by the industrial mitigation of anthropogenic carbon emissions. The dire need for the complete installation of a comprehensive suite of proactive fire management tools has been clear for decades, but the fulfillment of statewide objectives remains elusive. Part of the challenge is economic, and part of it is ethical. Forest management is expensive and dangerous. Prescriptive fires, for example, may burn out of control, or the smoke may be hazardous to local communities. If the whole suite of management tools were available, it would range from energy infrastructure redesign to the massive escalation of prescribed fire application and would involve private and public industries on a scale not yet fathomed.

One of the great paradoxes of fire is that with more fire, patterns of less fire emerge. Another way to conceive of this is that with more good fire comes less feral fire. In this case, good fire is recurring, often low-intensity fire that enables ecosystems to remain resilient and robust. Feral fire, by contrast, is high-severity fire that destroys habitats. The idea of bringing fire to the land to protect land from fire is slowly gaining ground. But it will take a long time for this practice to be widely accepted again. Just over 40,000 acres of forestland were treated by CAL FIRE in the 2022–23 fiscal year. That acreage is approximately one percent of forested land that has a high fire return interval (FRI), meaning that it has been way too long since that land has seen fire. Those 40,000 acres also represent 10 percent of CAL FIRE’s fuel treatment goals. Just as it took approximately 100 years for fuel conditions to become as we know them today, it may well take another 100 years to restore the ecosystems to how they were before.

Current research suggests that although no solution for fuel reduction works as well as fire on the land, mechanical surrogates such as forest thinning and tree mastication—which can be a euphemism for logging—might mediate the effects of high-severity fire. Some commercial timber operators, sometimes working with CAL FIRE, may claim that their work is purposeful thinning and fuel reduction, but they have been accused of removing larger, economically valuable trees while leaving the smaller trees that make the best ladder fuel. Further, some environmentalists argue that by removing trees, you also remove shade and the wind shields that trees may provide, exposing the land to greater fire danger. Regardless, if the intention is fuel reduction for the purpose of increasing resiliency and restoring biodiversity, then thinning only at modest levels (without building new roads) and implementing grazing programs are important tools to moderate devastating crown fires in mixed-conifer forests—if coupled with techniques of surface fuel reduction.

Fuel reduction and management work effectively to reduce megafires and to promote restoration only on systems that are adapted to burn with regular low-intensity fires and not on systems that burn as crown fires, such as chaparral. Megafire transforms, resets, and in some instances restores fuel loads across large areas for great short-term resiliency, but will only continue to do so if future burn management regimes are implemented, sometimes in return intervals as small as three to five years. Management following megafires presents ongoing challenges, as these landscapes often can’t reestablish forests because of a lack of seed viability or seed dispersal and often become home to high-density shrubland that presents a continuous fuelbed for the next megafire. The strategy of harvesting dead trees (postfire salvaging of dead trees, as opposed to prefire thinning of live trees) is often presented as a way to mitigate future fires, when in truth it may be more of an economic enterprise, as the results in terms of fire mitigation, restoration, or short-term habitat resources are neutral at best, deleterious at worst.

Current fire practices and land management decisions are affecting fire conditions at least as much as amenable fire weather and fuel-burdened landscapes. For example, increased nature preserve acreage and a growing tolerance of fire’s ecological process have led to a generalized policy of letting backcountry fires burn, and decidedly not spending (or risking) the firefighting resources to extinguish them immediately, which contributes to the trend of bigger and bigger fires. In the letting go of the famous 10 a.m. rule—the USFS policy of extinguishing all fires anywhere by 10 in the morning the day after they were spotted—early in the 21st century, massive wildland fires became inevitable. The success of the subsidence of fire exclusion policy will be measured by the ability to institute prescribed fire regimes and to attain the project goals for treated acreage. Fire’s return this century, after its long, actively designed absence, has resulted in the aggregation of conflagration after conflagration, but this result was arguably not unexpected. One of the basic truths about fire that is more apparent now than ever is that California burns because of decisions people make as much as for any other reason.

¤

This is an excerpt from Obi Kaufmann’s The State of Fire: Why California Burns, which will be published on September 17 by Heyday Books. Reprinted with permission from Heyday, © 2024. Illustrations by Obi Kaufmann.