Hawai‘i is a spectacular place—not just visually exciting, but also located above incredible geological forces and beneath amazing atmospheric conditions. As a meteorologist who reports on earth science news, I call the Aloha State home because of the multiple scientific processes that come together here every day to create a true paradise.

The casual joke shared among locals is that we live on an island that is actively trying to kill us. Hawai‘i has a long history of epic natural disasters and will be a home for earthquakes, tsunamis, flash floods, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions for thousands of years to come. But the wildfire tragedy on August 8 on Maui has turned the joke on its head, leaving my neighbors and me to wonder whether it’s more than just nature that doesn’t have our best interests at heart. Why don’t leaders take better advantage of our vast scientific knowledge to prevent future catastrophes?

I live in Waikoloa Village on the Big Island of Hawai‘i’s west coast, which the Hawai‘i Wildfire Management Organization declared one of the communities most at-risk of fire in the state. Here, down-sloping, east-to-west trade winds tend to warm and dry the air, leading to an abundance of warm sunny days year-round. But when the atmospheric pattern is just right over the Pacific, as was the case when Hurricane Dora passed well south of Hawai‘i on August 7, 8, and 9, those winds can be fierce, potentially damaging, and extraordinarily dry. The same is true for many other leeward (downwind) communities in Hawai‘i in the shadows of old volcanic mountains that blunt most precipitation away to the windward (wind-facing) side.

Waikoloa Village, a community of about 7,400 people sitting about 900 feet above sea level, is also uniquely situated on ancient lava flows from two volcanoes. Over time, invasive grasses introduced by ranchers and landscapers have spread on what was once a completely barren landscape, coming to life in infrequent rainy periods, and going dormant or dead for most of the year.

The community is packed tightly together in a mix of one- or two-story homes of wooden frame construction, with larger parcels and condominium complexes here and there. It is essentially a giant cul-de-sac, with a single road leading in and out. During a 2021 evacuation event in which fire threatened the village, many were trapped in traffic for hours. Fire fighters successfully fought that battle, but we cannot rest peacefully knowing they may not prevail next time.

Maui’s Lahaina, like Waikoloa Village, had previous experience with wildfire threats. Yet in both places, there have been few policy changes or necessary investments in recent years: no substantial changes to building codes, evacuation programs, communication systems, or land use issues where flammable invasive vegetation runs rampant. Many utility lines, including several that run on poles through the grassy regions upwind of Waikoloa Village, remain exposed to the elements, as was the case in Lahaina, where electrical sparks ignited the recent tragedy there. On Hawai‘i Island, government officials make promises for Waikoloa Village, but have done little beyond permitting new construction and inviting in new residents. Commitments and deadlines to install emergency sirens, roadway improvements like traffic lights, and the construction of new roadways to improve evacuation routes come and go with the regularity of the trade winds.

The author’s backyard is surrounded by a tinderbox of flammable invasive grass. Photo by author.

There is a sincere sense of loss in our state after the August 8 fires. But in addition to missing hundreds of people, we’re also missing out on a sense of urgency, purpose, and intent to prevent the next disaster. This is inexcusable, in part because we have the forecasting technology and knowledge to make better broad policy decisions as well as to sound the alarm in advance of specific events, like the August 8 fire, as well as broader threats, like the current drought.

We are currently in the midst of ENSO, El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a recurring climate pattern involving changes in the temperature of waters in the central and eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. Over an ENSO period ranging from about three to seven years, the surface waters across a large swath of the tropical Pacific Ocean warm or cool by anywhere from 1°C to 3°C, compared to normal. This oscillating warming and cooling pattern directly affects rainfall distribution in the tropics and can have a strong influence on weather across the United States and other parts of the world. El Niño and La Niña are the extreme phases of the ENSO cycle; between these two phases is a third phase called ENSO-neutral.

While these phenomena impact the entire United States, Hawai‘i may find itself particularly vulnerable to bad weather this year, as a wet La Niña fades and a dry El Niño arrives. In May, Kevin Kodama, hydrologist at the Honolulu office of the National Weather Service, shared their 2022-2023 Wet Season Rainfall Summary. According to Kodama, the October–April wet season in Hawai‘i was an unusual one, starting off with severe or extreme drought in portions of all four of Hawai‘i’s counties, which gave way to the state’s ninth wettest wet season over the last 30 years. The Big Island saw the most rain, with rainfalls recorded at 130–170% of average.

Now, the National Weather Service is predicting an active 2023 hurricane season combined with severe drought by the end of dry season in October. Drought is most likely in the leeward areas, especially in Maui County and the Big Island—the two islands that saw fires break out on August 8. The bumper crop of invasive grass and scrub that blossomed earlier in the wet season is becoming a wasteland of drying fire fuels.

The forecast is crystal clear: Meteorological ingredients will conspire for ripe fire weather conditions in the months ahead. More lives could be at risk. And even as it is so obvious to forecasters and the public at large that more disasters are coming, the outlook on what the government will do, if anything, is cloudy at best.

Thus far, rather than capitalize on the loss, the media attention, and the tremendous amount of federal aid coming in, leaders here are digging their heads into the sand, doing what they did ahead of the Lahaina fire: hoping that disaster doesn’t happen. And because of that, the aloha spirit is being severely challenged, allowing a fog of anxiety and anger to rise. For this meteorologist, the overall outlook for Hawai‘i isn’t as sunny as it should be.

The post Will Hawai’i Succeed in Killing Me? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, maintains a list of the “Top 20 Largest California Wildfires.” Lately, as ever more massive blazes erupt, it’s become the norm for the agency to have to update the list each year. All but two of the fires on the current list occurred within the past 20 years; the top five all happened within the past five. That same pattern repeats in other states across the West, as headlines year after year announce wildfire size records dashed.

At the same time, more communities are at risk of burning than in years past. More than 460 million acres across the United States are at a “moderate” to “very high risk” from wildfires, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Climate change is creating some of the hotter and drier conditions, but urban sprawl and forest management practices over the past century also shape the landscape.

Addressing the heightened challenge fire poses requires rethinking how we approach our relationship with it. One step in that shift is changing how we quantify wildfires in the first place. Increasingly, experts suggest that we shouldn’t focus so much on their size, but rather on the damage they do. It’s not that measuring a wildfire’s acreage has no value, but the practice is often removed from crucial context. Evaluating instead the way wildfires cause destruction or interruptions in daily life—such as closing schools or destroying businesses—can help us understand how to better adapt to living with them.

While size is often the most prominently-featured statistic in news articles and political statements about wildfires, it’s never been the most telling risk factor for a fire’s societal damage. Area became the default measurement simply because it was easy for first responders to map using familiar tools like GPS, says Kimiko Barrett, a wildfire policy analyst with Headwaters Economics, a research institute in Bozeman, Montana. Size is also easy to communicate and attention-grabbing, University of New Mexico forest ecologist Matthew Hurteau notes.

Before the 1800s researchers estimate more than 4 million acres burned annually in California—more than 10 times the acreage that burned in the state in 2022. These wildfires originated from natural ignitions sparked by lightning, and from cultural burns performed by Native Americans. Indigenous people purposefully set such fires as part of a spiritual practice and to provide ecological benefits, like rejuvenating the soil and encouraging new plant growth. But cultural burning was outlawed by white settlers, and in the early 20th century, the Forest Service implemented an aggressive fire suppression policy requiring all wildfires be put out by 10 a.m. the morning after they were reported. Because of this rule, wildfires stayed relatively small, which made those that did manage to evade suppression particularly newsworthy and notable for their size.

The fallacy of this approach became clear within decades, and we are still paying for it, as overcrowded, fire-starved forests provide ready fuel for new burns. In some ways, today’s wildfires are making up for lost time. The problem is that communities have since sprung up in former wilderness, so while wildfires might not be unprecedented in those areas, their impacts on people are now more devastating.

Another list kept by Cal Fire, of the “Top 20 Most Destructive California Wildfires” as determined by the number of structures destroyed, makes this clear. It covers the same timeframe as the Top 20 largest fires list—and again, the majority of the ranking fires have taken place during the past 20 years.

But fewer than half of the wildfires on the two lists overlap: Correlating “big” and “bad” is not necessarily correct. The most destructive wildfire, the 2018 Camp Fire, was more than 20,000 acres smaller than the 20th largest wildfire. The second most destructive, the 2017 Tubbs Fire, was less than a quarter of the size of the Camp Fire. Hurteau points to Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire as another example: It’s the most destructive fire in the state’s history, but only covered about 6,000 acres.

Multiple experts, including Hurteau and Barrett, believe counting buildings destroyed is a better measurement than size for understanding a wildfire’s impact. “It’s not just forests that are burning now, it’s communities of people and homes being impacted in a way that we’d never seen before,” Barrett says. What’s different and salient today is the intensity of our fires, and their more destructive impacts on towns and cities.

Fire scientist and former firefighter Crystal Kolden elaborated on this notion in a 2020 Nature article that encouraged a focus on studying what, rather than how much, is burning. She advocated paying more attention to human impacts, such as how many people are injured or killed in a wildfire, and how many are evacuated. In a keynote address to the International Association of Wildland Firefighters’ Fire and Climate conference last year, Kolden also recommended measuring interruptions to basic services like clean water, electricity, and school days, as well as tracking unhealthy air quality levels.

As fires become more severe and more destructive, we need to prioritize addressing wildfire risk in areas where it will have the most negative impacts, Kolden has argued. “We need to start acting more deliberately and proactively in communities in the first place,” agrees Barrett. That means making sure we’re building homes safer and smarter, and designing neighborhoods and communities thoughtfully in the face of increasing risk. Barrett calls this taking an “anticipatory approach.”

When it comes to measuring the wildfires themselves, Hurteau offers another useful metric for understanding how fires are changing: severity. “High severity fires” are wildfires that kill more than 75% of the overstory vegetation (like trees) in their path. These severe forest burns can be particularly damaging, since they destroy seeds and wipe out ecological diversity. Plus, they create lasting risk to human communities, from damaging watersheds to upping the likelihood of debris flows after storms like the ones much of California experienced this winter. Measuring high-severity fires does consider acreage, but in a way that captures the detrimental effects to the natural and built environments.

Turning to more nuanced measurements promotes a deeper understanding of the causes, concerns, and specific challenges related to wildfires. And adding new metrics and vocabulary into the public conversation will help us move towards more comprehensive solutions, Hurteau believes. Someone who might not be able to imagine what 100,000 acres looks like can understand what it means to have a week of school canceled due to smoke days or power shutoffs.

The area of land burned by wildfires is likely to keep growing in the years to come. But smarter measurements help show why more fire doesn’t have to correlate with more damage.

The post Wildfire Size Doesn’t Matter appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Understanding the history of wildfire is relatively new. That’s because fire science often falls between the cracks in established disciplines. As the well-known historian of modern fire Stephen Pyne has pointed out, while many universities have fire departments, they are never academic ones.

But a steady gathering of data has demonstrated that fire isn’t just an integral part of today’s Earth system—how the geosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere interact in our own time. Fire was an important feature of the Earth before humans, too. It has had an ongoing impact on the atmosphere—both on carbon dioxide, and especially, oxygen levels. It has also guided the evolution of plants and has sustained the health of ecosystems by helping to maintain the balance of species that live in them. These discoveries—and the lessons they teach us—should inform how we think about and manage fire in the modern world, and even encourage us to welcome it more often than we have.

Fossil charcoal in sediments from 170 million years ago. Courtesy of A. C. Scott

The earliest evidence of burned plants, preserved as charcoal, is found in rocks of the late Silurian Period (around 420 million years ago). But during the late Silurian, plants were too small to fuel big fires. They had to evolve into a large number of groups—several of which included trees and tree-like species—for the Earth’s first widespread forests to appear and offer evidence of the first extensive wildfires. Many of these charred materials date from the aptly named Carboniferous Period (between 360 and 300 million years ago), when plants first diversified throughout the world into a wide range of ecological niches.

An important feature of charcoal is that it preserves the detailed anatomy of the plant from which it came, thus allowing us to identify the plants that were burned. Examining these charcoal remnants has helped scientists trace how wildfires evolved, along with the Earth, over the next 200 million years or so. We can discern, for instance, that major changes were taking place in the Earth’s vegetation during the Cretaceous Period (between 140 and 65 million years ago, when dinosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, walked the land). This was a time when the early flowering plants first evolved and spread. The seeds of these small and weedy plants blew in after extensive fires cleared other vegetation. The plants then grew rapidly to cover the bare soil, expanding the area they covered. This was also a time when many groups of plants with fire-resistant or fire-loving characteristics thrived. Pines evolved to have thick bark to shield them from flames. Eucalypts, which are very flammable but developed mechanisms to regenerate after fire, evolved in the southern hemisphere. Other plants such as proteas—widely found in Australia and southern Africa today—flourished thanks to wildfires, too.

The last and perhaps most significant change in the Earth’s vegetation was the evolution of grasses and grasslands. While we have evidence of grasses from more than 20 million years ago, it was only around 7 million years ago that we begin to see signs that grasses, too, co-evolved with wildfires. So-called C4 grasses, like the tall varieties that grow in the savanna, were able to thrive in dry conditions—and spread across the globe, especially in Africa where there was an extensive dry area across the southern part. Their success, like that of the Proteaceae, was linked to fires. Grasslands burned on a regular basis, killing shrubby vegetation and trees nearby and creating more space for grasses to return more easily.

Charred Flower from the Cretaceous, 120 million years ago. Courtesy of Ian J. Glasspool.

Summary of fire through time diagram. Courtesy of A. C. Scott.

As we continue to learn the history of fire on this planet, we can better understand the nature and role of fire in many of the world’s ecosystems today. Many, such as South Africa’s Cape fynbos shrublands and many coniferous forests, have natural wildfire; indeed, some, including savanna grasslands, could not exist without fire. Other ecosystems, such as rainforests, cannot survive when fires are permitted to burn.

For thousands of years humans seemed to instinctively understand this complexity, and welcomed and used wildfire in a number of ways, both in the open agricultural environment as well as in the home. But over the past 100 years or so, there has been a major transition in how we view fire: As towns and cities have become larger, people have opted to extinguish natural fires. Urban populations have lost knowledge of fire and have demonized it, amping up their fear of flames at the same time that they have built out into remote wilderness areas with flammable vegetation. Today if a blaze breaks out at all, it is contained and extinguished in the service of protecting people and property. But sometimes letting fires burn may be the best option for an ecosystem.

Understanding the evolution and biology of ecosystems’ fire responses might help communities recognize which species around them are fire-dependent, which are fire-sensitive, and how to make wiser choices when managing wildfires. We need to appreciate that not all vegetation is the same, and that transposing different forest practices across different regions may not work. It has been shown, for example, that the conifer forests of North America burn much more frequently and vigorously than the conifer forests of Northern Europe. The ecosystems respond differently, and they should therefore be managed differently as well.

Environmental factors that influence fire can combine to have a devastating effect. Wildfire is a normal part of the landscape in the western United States—but the spread of invasive grasses and increased development, along with changes in climate that are leading to earlier spring snow melt and a longer dry season, are almost certain to produce more frequent and larger fires.

Climate change is fueling more extreme wildfire events all over the world. As temperatures rise and winds increase, small fires appear to be spreading more rapidly and amalgamating to produce larger fires. Large pyrocumulus clouds created by vast blazes like the 2019 Australian megafire produce dry lightning and create more ignitions. Most worrying, global warming is changing fires’ internal dynamics, making them more dangerous for firefighters and the general population. Historically, fires have expanded from surface vegetation, where they burn relatively slowly, to tree crowns where they spread more rapidly—and firefighters have depended on this model to predict how a fire will spread as they plan out their work. However, we are now seeing dramatic changes in fire behavior. Firefighters, including the renowned Spanish wildfire specialist Marc Castellnou, have noticed that surface fires appear to be spreading faster, accelerated by increased wind speeds. During the 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed the town of Paradise, California, flames consumed buildings but left the tops of trees surrounding them with unburned crowns, their leaves still green. This indicates that the surface fires are outpacing canopy fires, which means that firefighters’ planning calculations may be wrong. Fires typically used to die down at night as temperatures fell, giving firefighters a break. Increasingly, that appears not to be happening.

The aftermath of the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California. Photo by Shealah Craighead.

We urgently need more research to help to understand how and why fires are changing—and how to deal with the new conditions. In the meantime, initiatives such as FireWise in the U.S. and FireSmart in Canada, which engage with communities to help educate and develop local community initiatives, provide information and experience about how to plan and keep safe in the event of a wildfire.

Wildfires built the Earth we cherish today, by guiding the evolution of plants and ecosystems and people. As the 400-million-year history of fire teaches us, many ecosystems need fire to survive. Rather than squelching flames indiscriminately, we must learn, once again, how to live with them.

The post Understanding the History of Fire Can Help Us Fight Today’s Biggest Blazes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That was the message of scholars of fire at a Zócalo/Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West event, titled “How Can Humans Coexist With Monster Wildfires?” and streamed live on YouTube and Twitter Thursday night. Led by the evening’s moderator, NPR national desk correspondent Nathan Rott, the panelists discussed fire-related issues from prescribed burns to development in fire-prone areas.

But the conversation dwelled most on the need for people to change their attitudes. In order to coexist with dangerous fires, we’ll need to stop seeing fire as an enemy to be battled, panelists said.

“We have this attitude about fire that we don’t have with other natural phenomena,” said Arizona State University Cronkite School professor of practice Fernanda Santos, author of The Fire Line: The Story of the Granite Mountain Hot Shots, about a municipal crew of wildland firefighters and the 2013 fire that killed 19 of its members.

No one, Santos said, tries to fight a hurricane or an earthquake or a tsunami. “But historically, humans have had this very interesting relationship of dominance with fire,” she said. “… We still believe we can vanquish it.”

That’s not possible, Santos pointed out, because like other natural disasters, fires will always be with us. But we can better prepare for them, by providing better technology to firefighters and through better community planning “where people do work together to prepare to let this force of nature come and do its thing.” Santos, who is a former Phoenix bureau chief for the New York Times, added that media outlets should focus more attention on communities that successfully prepare for fires, and thus prevent damage.

“Don’t just look at fires when things go horribly wrong,” she said, citing the 2018 fire that destroyed Paradise, California, as an example. “Look at what happens when things go right.”

Another panelist, California State University Long Beach American Indian Studies professor Theresa Gregor, said that ways to change cultural perspectives on fire can be found by looking to history, specifically to the fire practices of Native peoples.

“For Native and Indigenous people, not just here in the Americas but in other parts of the world, fire was a tool—and it was a gift,” said Gregor, who is a descendant of the Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel (part of the Kumeyaay Nation) and the Yaqui Nation. “We’ve lost that relationship, and that sense of stewardship over it.”

If more traditional ecological knowledge were incorporated into the education of today’s firefighters, Gregor suggested, it would transform not just firefighting, but how we think about land and community. Gregor pointed to growing partnerships, particularly in Northern and Central California, that employ fires in traditional ways, such as the practice of “cultural burning,” where fire is used to clear underbrush and rid land of non-native and diseased plants.

“We’re actually looking at the trajectories and pathways of historical fires and the way they would approach a community, and burning appropriately,” she said.

The third panelist, the historical ecologist Jared Dahl Aldern, who spoke from his home in Fresno County, California, remarked that the greater frequency and severity of mega-fires in the American West reflect changes in climate, development, and in vegetation structures, or what firefighters and others call “fuel conditions.”

In response to a question from NPR’s Rott, who moderated the evening’s discussion from his “closet” in Montana, Aldern discussed the growing understanding over time of using fire to control such fuel.

Aldern said that “cultural burnings,” as described by Gregor, differ from “prescribed burns”—when fire is used by government agencies according to a written plan or prescription—because they go beyond reducing fire hazards to larger goals, such as enhancing land to support wildlife or a greater diversity of plants. Aldern said some communities have even held “fire festivals” to celebrate fire as a positive force for improving land.

The ecologist also outlined innovative practices that create fire-protected “pods” or “islands” that constitute archipelagoes, with fires able to flow around them.

“What we really need to do is change our relationship with fire, and to transform our idea of what fire is,” said Aldern. “There is an analogy to floods. Floods can be very destructive when they come through, but if you plan ahead and build a little basin, you can use that flood to do good things.”

At Rott’s prompting, the panelists also discussed the 2020 fire season, and how it was being impacted by COVID-19. Santos, the journalist and Arizona State University professor, said that the response to fires have changed, observing that fire camps have less of the intimacy and close conversations about strategy, than before. She also lamented that people aren’t talking enough about issues of fire, as the pandemic dominates the news.

Aldern and Gregor both expressed concern about COVID’s impacts on fire operations. Prescribed burns to prepare for this year’s fire season were cut short because of the pandemic; COVID also has left fire units across a variety of governments with fewer personnel to fight fires. In California, there is a shortage of inmates to fight fires because of concerns about COVID breakouts in prisons, Aldern noted.

In the event’s final minutes, panelists discussed questions asked by audience members on YouTube’s live chat. The queries covered development and fire mitigation in the “wildland-urban interface,” whether powerful people and interests are really committed to providing the resources necessary to adapt to mega-fires, and historical resources for better understanding Native firefighting traditions. (Answering that last question, Gregor recommended UC Davis ecologist M. Kat Anderson’s 2013 book, Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources.)

In response, the panelists said that difficult issues with fire can be addressed with community work and planning that involved whole regions. “Here in Fresno County,” said Aldern, “it would be good for people to think of the forest in the Sierra Nevada as part of our home,” since, for example, mega-fires in the mountains have caused heavy smoke in the San Joaquin Valley.

Gregor noted that questions about possible retreat from development in places of high fire danger are especially difficult for Native and Indigenous peoples, whose reservations are often in such places.

“That’s our homeland,” she said. “If it burns, we can’t move and go anywhere else.”

The post Megafires Are Getting More Dangerous—But We Can Better Prepare for Them appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

From Australia to the Amazon to the American West, megafires—wildfires that burn more than 100,000 acres of land—have grown so frequent, large, and deadly that they’ve forced a reevaluation of how human societies coexist with fire. In a warming world, governments are confronting whether we must retreat from certain places to survive in a fierier world. Have fires become too big for people and the planet? How are fire management techniques—both old (such as “cool” or prescribed burns used by some Indigenous people) and new (digital technology that maps fire hot spots)—being employed against megafires? And how can citizens and their communities learn to live, build, and plan for a future of firestorms?

Historical ecologist Jared Dahl Aldern, CSU Long Beach American Indian Studies professor Theresa Gregor, and Fernanda Santos, The Fire Line author and Professor of Practice at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, examine how and whether human beings can coexist with megafires at tonight’s online streaming Zócalo/Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West Event event, “How Can Humans Coexist With Monster Wildfires?,” moderated by NPR national desk correspondent Nathan Rott.

Want more Zócalo? Get to know our panelists in advance of tonight’s event by stopping by our virtual green room.

The post Streaming Tonight appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Dear California Trees,

When are you going to stand up and take some responsibility for all the damage you do to this state?

It’s not only the blue-purple blossoms that you jacarandas use to stain Californians’ cars, or the colonies of disease-carrying rats that you palms harbor, or even the roots you magnolias use to keep messing up the sidewalks on my street. It’s not even that your out-of-control-fires foul California’s air, destroy homes, and drain the state budget.

No, what most upsets me is that, instead of being accountable for the trouble you cause, you leave us humans to solve all your problems. You trees are more aloof than any Hollywood star. Do you think the Lorax from Dr. Seuss is going to show up to speak for you? Or do you think you’re magical heroes, like the trees from The Lord of the Rings?

The only reason you get away with this irresponsibility is your millions of human apologists, who constantly shift blame away from you flora and onto us fauna.

We are told that the stuff you trees do is really the fault of environmentalists who make it hard to cull you, or loggers who cut down too many of you, or utilities who don’t keep you guys away from their power lines, or government agencies who don’t properly manage you, or rural homeowners who insist on living among you in the wilderness, or even the homeless who seek shelter among you.

Your defenders even rail against human overpopulation! That’s pretty rich when you recognize the reality: This state is much more yours than it is ours. There are 4 billion live trees in California—100 times more than the mere 40 million people who live under your rule. And you dominate geographically, with forests covering one-third of the state’s land mass.

Now, to your credit, you in the forestlands pull your weight in some ways: You provide opportunities for recreation and contemplation. You store carbon, helping limit climate change. And a big shout-out to you trees in the Sierra: You collect and store the snowpack that California humans depend on for water and, while you’re at it, you filter pollutants out of runoff and reduce erosion that would send sediments into our streams.

But, lately, trees, your job performance has been slipping.

Why? It starts with your total failure to plan for self-defense, a lack of foresight that looks like some combination of laziness and grift, as you profited from the good nature of humans while shortchanging us in the process.

You exploited our fire suppression policies in order to grow far too great in number. And while humans did you the favors of reducing our birth rate and limiting development (not to mention giving up newspapers), you grew everywhere, creating forests with 10 times more trees per acre than a century ago. And while that might have been OK if you’d produced the grand and majestic trees that you once did, instead you gave us small, flimsy imposters. (Many of you are also non-natives—unauthorized immigrants—but let’s not get too much into that here, lest ICE try to deport you.)

Today’s overcrowded forests are more vulnerable to drought and diseases. Exhibit A is the drought and the infestation of bark beetles that caused an estimated 129 million California trees to die between 2010 and 2017.

And did you responsibly clean up your dead? No. Instead, deceased trees fell onto buildings, roads, and power lines, while littering the forests and fueling apocalyptic fires that burned for months. To take just one example, 2017’s Wine Country fires killed 22 people and caused $8 billion in damage and destruction—more than the state’s annual investment in the University of California—torching 14,000 homes, 4,000 commercial buildings, and 3,200 cars.

Such fires extinguished much of the goodwill you built with your environmental work. After all, mega-fires have badly lowered air and water quality you trees are supposed to protect, while emitting carbon you’re supposed to store.

To reverse these trends, your forests must be thinned, with smaller or diseased trees removed so that larger healthy trees survive. This is hard and costly work because you trees tend to die in inaccessible places. But do you help us humans with massive and money-losing thinning projects across such huge swaths of California? Do you tax yourselves to cover the costs of making the forests healthy? No, just like California’s human taxpayers, you seem to think that someone else will pay to manage and restore the forests.

Your lack of leadership on tree issues has created a void that has been filled by polarized human politics. It’s sad. Once, you trees—especially the great coastal redwoods and the signature sequoias like General Sherman—were great unifiers. But today you just fuel the partisan fires.

When Governor Brown proposed regulatory changes to speed up forest thinning, he got mostly grief. Environmental groups said thinning would just ease logging practices that harm forests, and argued that wildfires are more the fault of grasslands and that dastardly chaparral than of you trees. At the same time, logging-minded folks and homeowners in the North State suggested they needed more freedom from environmental regulation to cull the forest. That descended into all kinds of other arguments, including how responsible utilities should be for wildfires that stem from their power lines.

Meanwhile, you trees, in failing to address your own problems, even gave an opening to the political arsonist in the White House, who blamed environmental lawsuits for not getting rid of more fire-prone trees. This was dishonest scapegoating, since most of our tree problems are on federal lands that his government fails to manage adequately.

Reflexively, humans blame themselves and not you for such problems. I’ve seen some commentary about state agencies not moving fast enough to address tree problems. But that’s not true. Years ago, Governor Brown saw this problem emerging and convened a Tree Mortality Task Force that comprised state agencies, local governments, scholars, utilities, emergency services, and pretty much every stakeholder in our forests except you trees.

Without the task force’s work on maintenance and dead tree removal, the tree situation in California would undoubtedly be worse. It might have helped if you trees had demanded a much greater budget allocation for the tree crisis, but you preferred to remain quiet.

You can’t play shy anymore. The truth is that California’s tree problems may have become too big for humans. For us to help you, we’d have to come together as never before to engage in long-term collaborations to restore our massive forestlands, to find significant new funds for managing forests, and to embrace very different systems for fire prevention and land preservation. That kind of thoughtful, far-sighted governance has been impossible for California even when it comes to housing ourselves or educating our children, so it’s unlikely we’ll get our act together to save you trees.

Which is why, California trees, it’s time for you to face the same reality that confronts every interest group. If you want to solve your problems in this state, you trees will have to do the work yourselves.

The post California’s Trees Need to Stop Just Standing There appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.