Prior to 2020, the largest number of acres burned by wildfire in California was 1.3M. Compare that to the 4M acres wiped out by fire this year. What’s more, forest fires are spreading much more quickly and releasing more heat—which leads to last-minute evacuations, a dramatic increase of smoke in the air, and the phenomenon of fire tornados.
Daniel Duane is the surfer, naturalist, and author behind this month’s WIRED cover story, ‘The West’s Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works.’ On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, Daniel explains why the 2020 fire season is so remarkable and how an accumulating fuel bed on the forest floor contributes to the intensity and severity of the wildfires. He offers insight on indigenous fire management, describing when the anti-burning culture took hold in America and how political pressures make it impossible for our government agencies to manage forests well.
Daniel goes on to introduce us to the terrifying phenomenon of a fire tornado, sharing how forest management practices and climate change are both to blame for the increasingly unpredictable, record-breaking wildfires we experience. Listen in for Daniel’s take on what kind of management practices we need to decrease our risk and find out how a pro-development, YIMBY movement could prevent destructive forest fires in the future.
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Resources:
‘The West’s Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works’ in WIRED
Charles C. Mann on Reversing Climate Change S2EP15
Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California’s Natural Resources by M. Kat Anderson
University of California Forestry Department
The Sagehen Experimental Forest
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today I have with me Daniel Duane, author of many books and articles, including this month’s Wired cover story, The West Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works. Hey, Dan, how are you? Hey, Ross, thanks for having me. It is my pleasure to have you on this article to start. I didn’t know fire tornadoes were a thing, and we’ll get there, but wow, thanks for adding that horrible image to my head.
That’s something that I have to be aware of. Yeah, my pleasure. It’s a pretty grim image, isn’t it? It certainly is grim. Let’s start at the top, give people a nice overview of this year’s fire seasons and what happened. I was in Seattle and our air quality was terrible. We were basically stuck indoors and had to get air purifiers. It was not fun and that was only part of it and we didn’t even see the worst of it. So why was this year so remarkable?
Daniel Duane: Well, the number that makes the headlines is acres burned. So the largest number of acres burned in a previous fire season, the all-time record in California anyway, was I think 1.3 million, something like that. We’re already at 4 million for 2020. But really, while that metric is meaningful and the size of these fires is kind of astonishing, it’s not really as Meaningful as something more fundamental that has changed in the nature of fire, which is the sort of sheer severity with which these fires are burning.
It’s a little bit of a harder thing to capture. There isn’t an easy metric like, you know, there isn’t just sort of a numerical scale of severity or intensity. But severity or intensity has a lot more to do with why this year’s fires were so important. And what I mean by severe, you know, one of the metrics you can think One of the simple things to think of is, well, how fast did the fire spread? There are fairly standard spread rates that are functions of ground slope and wind and that kind of thing that are observed in a lot of fires in the American West.
Increasingly, we are seeing fires that slip over into this other set of behaviors in which they spread much, much more quickly, plenty fast enough to trap people as they’re fleeing. There are a couple of fires in particular this year in which the sort of amount of heat released, the speed with which they spread, the appearance of these fire tornadoes has been much more pronounced. And that leads to things like really last minute evacuations and scary situations of people trying to get out or not getting out. It also leads to the fire tornadoes problem.
And then it also affects the smoke in the air, actually, because the sort of density, the thickness of the smoke that we all experienced all over the West Coast this year was in part a function of just how much woody material was being consumed all at once. Just how big the underlying fuel bed was of the giant bonfire, put it that way.
Ross Kenyon: Was the fuel bed... It’s just always growing, right? So it was only a matter of time until it caught at this rate. Is that the correct way for understanding it, by the way? Is that even right?
Daniel Duane: I think so. I mean, one way you could think about it is just if you, I mean, if we speak in sort of simplified terms, that if you think of a forest, you know, trees are always dropping stuff, right? There’s always pine needles or leaves or, you know, dry twigs or even big limbs falling off a tree or a tree dies and, you Falls over and that kind of thing. There’s always grass growing up on the forest floor. There are bushes growing up on the forest floor.
So all that stuff is potentially combustible material. That’s all wildland fire fuel. So it’s always accumulating. Different forests in the American West have evolved to burn at different rates, but they’ve all evolved to burn. So like in the Rocky Mountains, for example, the Rockies, the sort of lodgepole pine forest in the Rockies evolved to burn They seem to have evolved to burn about once every 100 to 200 years. So they’re very wet forests, you know, lots of moisture, but lots of brush growing up. Every one to 200 years, you’d get a really extreme drought.
All that underbrush would dry out. Some lightning strikes would hit and you’d get this just giant conflagration that would burn a whole forest to the ground. And then the forest would grow back. And that’s why the sort of logical pine forests and some of the Rockies tend to be kind of All one species, all one age, because just the whole dang forest burns down all at once. In California, by contrast, particularly the mixed conifer belt forest, so these are the forests at sort of mid-elevations on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada in particular, but other mountain ranges in California, they evolved to burn more like every 5, 10, 20 years, something like that.
You can think about it like this, if you picture a forest and a forest floor and You know, you got these, let’s say you picture an old school forest, we got these big old growth trees, and then along the forest floor, there’s just these kind of light grasses growing up. Well, if a fire comes through when there’s really not much on the floor of that forest, except grass, and maybe it’s late summer, so that grass is dry, the fire really just kind of rips through that grass pretty fast, and those grasses tend to You know, ignite into flame and burn themselves out very quickly, like 30 seconds.
So you get this kind of band of flame that’s just kind of ripping through the forest floor, burning out all that grass and maybe some pine needles and little leaves and twigs and stuff too. So if you have regular fire in a forest like the Forest of California, the fuel just never really gets a chance to get very deep. So yeah, but if you eliminate fire from the system, you know, then nothing’s burning out of that fuel and the fuel is just piling up and piling up and piling up and someday it’s going to burn.
Ross Kenyon: What are the political circumstances that lead to it being impossible for forests as they evolve to burn? I know there’s people who live in the mountains. There’s property damage. They don’t want property to be lost. There’s costs of insuring all of that. That’s a whole separate episode entirely, basically. There’s a lot to that. But also wildfire smoke. I imagine any politician who says, oh, we got to tolerate this. You know, every couple of years, it’s going to be terrible for some of the summer months.
That person would probably not get reelected. I think someone who just tries to suppress this forever until the next guy gets the job. Is that a part of that, too? Am I on to something?
Daniel Duane: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that’s how that works. It’s really the political pressures around it are analogous to the political pressures around it. Climate change itself as the bigger picture of climate change in the sense that it’s just one of these problems that we as humans are sort of terribly structured to our minds are not built right to cope with and the incentives in our society are just all upside down and backwards. Indigenous Californians and indigenous people throughout the West did deliberately light wildfires for millennia. Because they understood the effect that wildfire had on the landscape.
And so they were using fire as a land management tool and very successfully. At one point in, I think in the late 19th century, a survey of California found that fully 30% of the forest land of California was suitable cattle pasture. You know, get your mind around that, right? So 30%. of the Pine Forest of California was carpeted with sufficient grass in essence to be cattle pasture. That was the result of millennia of smart Wildland Management Using Fire by Indigenous People. Okay. You know, enter the National Forest Service.
And I don’t want to oversimplify the story, but we can, you know, we can just, you can sort of basically get a picture of it as somewhere in the early 20th century, a sort of cultural idea took hold that fire is bad for wood. Fire is bad for forests. Fire tends to burn up trees. Trees are valuable. We love our forests. We’ve got to put out all the fires. Lumber companies, paper companies get a little unfairly vilified in this stuff sometimes. The truth is that there were lumber concerns and ranchers in the early 20th century and late 19th century who were well aware of how indigenous Californians had managed the landscape and were well aware that it worked beautifully.
You know, those surface fires ripping through grass tend not to kill big mature trees. They leave big mature trees alone. So there was a period in the 20s In particular, when there was kind of a debate going on between the pro-burning, anti-burning crowd. By the 30s, the anti-burning culture had really taken hold. And let’s say by the 40s, by the 50s, it was becoming apparent, even to people in the Forest Service, that, hey, this thing we’re doing of putting out every single wildfire everywhere is really bad news.
All it does is just delay the inevitable fire and make that fire, when it does break out, way more destructive and harder to control. But by that point, as you put it really nicely, these kind of various political forces are starting to come into play, and there’s a lot of different ones. But I really believe that all of us bear some responsibility for this. It’s not as simple as lumber companies were on the right side of it. Lumber concerns tend not to manage forest in quite the way we would if we were trying to preserve biodiversity.
It’s the big mature fire resistant trees that are also really worth a lot of money for lumber. But environmental regulation actually has some things to answer for here. The wilderness ideal of our national forest is something that should be left completely alone. You know, that might work if leaving it completely alone meant also letting it burn. You know, if you try to create a wilderness space in which no intervention is allowed, including burning, you end up allowing fuels to pile up. Air quality boards across California, you know, nobody likes smoky air.
So there are communities across California that if you approach the air quality board and you say, hey, we’d really like to do a prescribed burn on this chunk of national forest, you know, that’s just Upwind of your community. What do you think? You know, you’ll get it. How about not? How about you don’t light that forest on fire? How about you don’t inundate my community with smoke? There are many different perverse incentives. And then, like you said, also, you know, another problem is like, let’s say you’re the local forest service guy.
And this gets to what you said about a politician. Let’s say you’re the local forest service guy who wants to do the right thing. You schedule a burn and You get this grant money and there’s a big chunk you’re going to light on fire and you got to talk to all these interest groups and stakeholders and communities and get everybody to agree. Well, nobody’s really all that excited to have you burn. The chances are real good that your burn will get shut down at the last minute over some complaint.
And even if it works, you will never get the thanks for it, right? No, it’s one of these things, you know, it’s like, No one’s ever going to say 10 years from now, hey, wow, look at that. This forest didn’t catch on fire this year. We should go look up that guy who scheduled the controlled burn and give him a pat on the back. So all the incentives are kind of against doing the right thing, and we all bear some blame for that.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. There’s so much there that we need to talk about. I’m going to try and take it one at a time. In particular, this comment about indigenous fire management, I’m very interested in. We’ve had Charles C. Mann on the show previously, and we’ve spoken a little bit about just how managed our quote-unquote wildlands were when they were indigenously managed. And my understanding is that quite a lot of indigenous fire management was because the Hunting is much easier in grasslands. That’s the grassland for large herbivores.
And it wasn’t about making sure that the fires weren’t burning down development or causing smoke in certain areas so much as trying to create certain types of ecosystems that benefited indigenous people who were managing this land. I imagine there are many different reasons for burning, but I know that played a role in it. Is that how it is? And what other reasons might they have had for doing so?
Daniel Duane: Well, I don’t want to pretend to be an expert on this subject because I’m really not. But I have read some of and enjoyed the work of Kat Anderson, who’s really... One of the kind of leading minds and researchers on this subject. She’s great on this topic. And my sense of it really from her work is in line with what you’ve just said. And that sort of, you could say that connects to that thing I was just saying about, you know, about forest land being good cattle pasture.
So yeah, so the effect of burning out the underbrush in a forest is to bring up New growth, tender growth, grasses, young shrubs, new leaves on shrubs. And the effect of that is to provide great forage for gain. I can also say, I did have a chance to visit an experimental forest. So a big, I think it’s 4,000 acre chunk of forest, just west of Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada foothills, owned by the University of California. It’s used by the University of California Forestry Departments to run various kinds of forestry studies.
And a guy named Brandon Collins, who Who’s a scholar in that program, a researcher in that program, took me out. He showed me a few different chunks of forest that had been managed in these different ways. And it was pretty fascinating to see. He walked me into a chunk of forest that had been managed in the old way. So it had been allowed to burn with some real regularity or they had done prescribed burns through it with real regularity. When we walked into it, one of the things that really struck me about it was, I mean, just, well, first of all, just at a sort of descriptive level, the trees were mostly fairly old.
There was some diversity of trees. They were pretty far spaced apart. The forest floor had a kind of gentle carpeting of grass. And I could really see quite far through the forest. And you could walk quite comfortably through it. And it had a kind of Intuitively calming feeling. There was something kind of intuitively welcoming about it. And then he took me to another chunk of forest that had not been permitted to burn in a very long time. So that had been completely protected from fire from a very long time.
And also from logging and for quite a while, it had been logged in the, I think up through about the eighties maybe, but not since. It was dreadful. I mean, it was sort of like you walk in through the initial You know, outer row of trees and then you’re in this kind of dark, gloomy world of, you know, deeply piled, fallen, dead brushes and brush and fallen trees and heaped up logs. And it’s very uncomfortable to walk in and kind of scary, you know, sort of like a, I don’t know, you know, like in the bad, like the forest in the scary fairy tale.
That’s nowhere you’d want to be.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that is... Provocative imagery there. You’ve hinted a fair number of times about the politics of this, that some of the blame is on force management practices, which I was very disappointed to see this broken into such neat partisan lines. The left wanted to say this is about climate change. The right wanted to say it’s force management, which is a way of saying that government did a bad job of managing the force. And of course, it’s a bit of both. I think they both play a role here.
How are you attributing the blame between these two meta-causes?
Daniel Duane: I guess I, you know, share your feeling. We all know we live in this polarized political and media environment right now in which, you know, everybody’s got whatever their hobby horse is and they sort of cherry pick. I shouldn’t say everybody, but a lot of our sort of bad faith actors in the media space cherry pick information that supports their own view of things. So I too have seen voices. There are good sane people on both sides of the political spectrum, but I too have seen the, I guess my interpretation of that is, you know, the impulse to say, ah, hallelujah.
See, it’s, we told you it’s not climate change, it’s forest management. And that seems to me really just to be, you know, maybe it does have to do with that, well, government is the problem view. It sounds to me more like my take on it anyway is that it has more to do with just any excuse to somehow continue living in this delusion that human-driven climate change isn’t the thing. But at the same time, you know, it’s also been pretty chastening, I would say, for me to come to understand the role that California environmentalism has played in all this, all these years.
Health of the natural environment is dearly important to me. I spend a lot of time in the ocean. I spend a lot of time in the mountains. That’s really where my heart lies. And so it’s been kind of, and the wilderness ideal has been very important to me in my life. So it’s been Sort of fascinating and discouraging, but also kind of enlightening and interesting, you know, to poke into this and discover, wow, the wilderness don’t touch it ideal. I don’t know, it has some things to answer for in this case.
And I also think that this guy, Brandon Collins, the way he explained it to me, I found this kind of fascinating that, you know, part of our predicament is the function of the fact that we had pretty aggressive commercial logging in California through the 80s. So we had a not sort of wholesale clear cut, but in some places wholesale clear cut logging or pretty close in places. And yes, you’re unlikely to get a massive forest fire conflagration and a clear cut. It’s true. But when we then sort of, you know, when the commercial timber industry kind of collapsed in California, we have this kind of commercial logging, clear out the forest, and then we put this hard stop on it.
All of a sudden, we’re not going to do that anymore, but we’re also not going to allow burning. Well, now the whole forest can grow back very, very dense with shrubs and young trees very, very close together. So we end up making kind of worst of all possible fuel conditions together. You know, it’s like we kind of, we all got together, you know, right and left. We held hands and blew it. That’s kind of how I see it,
Ross Kenyon: you know. It does seem just an incredibly tough nut to crack because we can’t just say, cool, well, the Santa Monica Mountains are all going to burn down. It’s going to be terrible in LA for some weeks and many people are going to lose their homes, but it’s for the greater good of a forest. What kind of management practices might get us out of this pickle?
Daniel Duane: One of the, you have yet another bummer of a tidbit of information about all this. It’s that areas that burn at very high severity, Tend to burn again at high severity. So intuitively we’re inclined to think, I’m inclined to think, well, gee, I mean, at least these places that have had these huge fires aren’t going to burn again. You know, they probably won’t for five or 10 years or something like that. But when they burn again, they will burn at very, very high severity again. Because when you have a massive conflagration like we’re having, you just, all of a sudden you kill every living thing.
What does grow back will grow back. It will get so much sunlight that it’ll grow back very dense. You’ll get really dense shrubs, whether it’s manzanita, willow, whatever it is. So that by the time 5, 10, 15 years, 20 years rolls around, we get another fire there. We’ve got a very dense fuel bed again. And then on the question of logging, mechanical thinning, you know, I hear different things about this. The main thing I’ve heard is that this gets into this slightly other issue, but another huge problem we have in these forests in California, of course, which is related to everything we’ve talked about is, you know, during the last drought, we had this mass tree mortality event.
So somewhere in the neighborhood of 140 to 150 million trees in California died between about, well, whatever it was, through the drought ending in about 2015, 16 years. It’s too late for any of that to be commercially useful lumber. These fuel beds are so dense that there’s no really commercially viable way for lumber companies to go in there and drag out these fallen logs and mill them and sell them and make a buck. So it looks to me the only way out of this is we have to do controlled burns.
We have to accept smoky air. We have to accept I think that what that means, though, I don’t think that means we have to accept hideously toxic smoky air that makes it look like we’re all on Mars, right? That’s not really what that means. It means that in the springtime, when the ground is still somewhat wet, maybe in the middle of winter, we have to let our land management agencies know Burn out surface fuels really regularly all over the state every year for decades to come. And we all have to put up with some smoke in the air in order to gradually sort of draw down the risk that we currently have of these massively destructive firestorms.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I was really hoping, given that you write it wired, you know, there’s sort of a techno-optimist vibe there. You got nothing for me, Daniel?
Daniel Duane: What a techno-optimism. Well, you know, there is some techno-optimism, I suppose, which is there are a lot of very smart people in the fire behavior science and fire science and atmospheric chemistry, people working on these problems. And there’s a big, you know, consortium of Scientists working together on this, partly with grants from the state of California. And, you know, one of the sort of optimistic ways of looking at this is that we don’t need to just light the entire state on fire in a controlled burn to burn down our ridiculous fuel beds.
There are targeted ways to do this. So with some of the new simulation and modeling tools that should come online in the next year or two, there is a real hope that we could run Very complex and really quite good simulations of, you know, let’s say there are these sort of these big simulation engines in which we could conceivably, they’re under development, in which we can conceivably say, okay, let’s run climate change scenario three, sort of, you know, doomsday level climate change scenario. So, okay, so let’s have this simulation engine run the climate of California for the next, or the climate of the American West for the next hundred years based on, Worst possible climate change outcome, or best possible, either one.
Then let’s run into that, the following fuel management practice. Let’s say California decides to do fuel management, which is to say prescribed burns in California. These kinds of places every year for the next 20 years, what do the fires look like? And those kinds of simulations can allow us to, they should allow us to make really smart and targeted decisions about where we do burns and how we do burns so that we may be able to really draw down the risk of these horrible fires without just lighting the whole state on fire prophylactically.
Ross Kenyon: Well, I wanted to give us a little note of optimism there, but now tonally, I need to bring it back down because we still need to talk about fire tornadoes. I mean, your article hinges around this phenomenon, which somehow I had missed. What exactly are they? How do they work? What happened?
Daniel Duane: Right. So fire tornado is kind of what it sounds like, you know, a tornado of fire or a tornado partly composed of fire. So I want to be careful not to overstate my understanding of the physics involved. So I want to make a distinction between fire whirls and fire tornadoes. And I have to, fires often do, many fires, even fires that don’t become gigantic will produce sort of small Sort the dust devil equivalent of a tornado. These little sort of whirling vortexes here and there.
Firefighters have been observing that for a long time. But a full-blown fire tornado, so let’s say a tornado of the kind of size, scale, and force that is seen in Oklahoma in tornado season, the kind of thing that just obliterates towns. These have been observed in Here and there over the decades, they were observed, there was one, and in really sort of alarming situations. So there was one observed over the cities of both Hamburg, well, particularly over Hamburg, when the British and US Allied Air Forces firebombed the city of Hamburg.
There was one earlier in the 20s over Tokyo after a tsunami ignited a massive firestorm in Tokyo. There was a gigantic earthquake. Fire tornado with winds whirling fast enough that they lifted boats 15 feet into the air off of a river and apparently even lifted the river’s water itself in places 40 or 50 feet into the air, just made it levitate. So these things have to do with when a fire becomes big enough and burns hot enough over a wide enough area It generates a convective column, so a column or plume of heat rising up from that fire.
If we’re gonna have air rising, something has to replace that air at the bottom, right? So air all the way around that column is getting drawn into the base of the column to replace the air that’s rising up. Well, the air getting drawn into the base of that column, air getting drawn is in essence wind. So there’s a way in which the rising convective column of a large fire Can generate its own radial inbound winds so that the fire can effectively create for itself 360 degree wind field, all blowing hard right into the fire itself, which as you can imagine, raises the heat of the fire, raises the temperature, that temperature increases the speed of that rising convective column, that speed increases the winds.
Okay, so now let’s get to the tornado. So what can happen What can happen in the case of the tornado and what happened in the Carr megafire was that there were pre-existing winds blowing into the base of that fire. There was a wind out of the south and there was a wind out of the northwest. More or less, they just happened to kind of intersect right about where the fire happened to be burning on a particular morning. As that column rises, It begins and sucks air into itself.
It, in essence, is sucking harder and harder on these two intersecting winds, a northwesterly wind and a southerly wind, which are meeting each other at kind of an askew angle. Those winds, as they accelerate, begin to wrap around each other. And as they wrap around each other, they start to create this tornado. As this plume of heat is rising rapidly, Ever faster up into the atmosphere. It is in essence stretching itself thinner and thinner and tighter and tighter, kind of like if you were to stretch a rubber band.
Okay, so we have these winds intersecting at the bottom. Wrapping around each other, creating this vortex in the middle of a plume. The rising plume is itself stretching that vortex upward with it. It’s sort of pulling that vortex upward with it. As it pulls that vortex upward with it, it causes that vortex to spin faster and faster and faster. And in the case of the Carr Megafire, which was this fire in Redding, California in 2018, As that thing accelerated, it drew flame into itself and hot gases and hot ashes until it produced a full blown fire twister that was literally 17,000 feet tall.
And about a half a mile wide that was rotating it. I think it was like 60 plus meters per second. So about 130, 143 miles per hour was the rotational speed of this thing. So that adds up to what they call like an EF3 tornado. That is literally the kind of tornado that obliterates towns, except this one is made of fire. As that thing moved through a subdivision called Land Park, It’s simultaneously, you know, you can imagine that thing shredding homes the way it does in the way it would out in the prairie.
But as it’s shredding homes, it is also igniting all the pieces of those homes. So it’s simultaneously shredding and igniting them and then launching all those shredded, ignited bits or large pieces, boards, roof rafters, whatever it is, up to 17,000 feet, 18,000 feet, 20,000 feet up into the sky. And somewhere up there, whatever goes up must come down. So eventually all that burning material came raining down on a nearby neighborhood like so many firebombs dropped from a wave of bombers in the Second World War.
Ross Kenyon: That’s terrifying. Many people died. The beginning of your article in particular is horrifying. One would hope to never see that in one’s lifetime. Well, on the plus side, I guess, did we learn anything? This is the ending of Burn After Reading comes up sometimes on the show of the whole like, well, what did we learn? I don’t know. I guess not to do it again. Did we actually learn anything or is this just going to keep happening over and over again?
Daniel Duane: No, I mean, I think a lot has been learned. You know, the main thing that has been learned is that, well, I don’t know, has anything, I guess that’s a fair question.
Ross Kenyon: Is anything actionable? I mean, the political incentives, it seems, this is a doer episode overall. Yeah, right.
Daniel Duane: I guess what’s actionable, you know, there are some things that are actionable here. One, I mean, are there things that are really actionable in the really short term? The thing that is most sort of near term actionable, like I said, is, you know, Encourage your local politicians to support the prescribed burn on that mountainside above your town. If you’re, you know, call up your local air quality board and say, don’t get in the way of this. We need them to do this. These fires are getting scary.
That’s the best we can really do near term. The other thing we can do near term is actually take serious all that, at least for those of us who live in, you know, in rural areas or exurban areas and even in the suburbs, take very, very seriously the admonition of your local, whatever it is, firefighting agency, if you’re in California, it’s your local unit of Cal Fire saying, telling you how to structure your backyard. Like, you know, these wooden fences that you can go by at, you know, we’ve all seen them at Home Depot or Lowe’s, right?
You can go by these sections of fence that you put up along your property line. We all love them all over America. We love these fences. They’re kind of good looking. They’re made often Western red cedar or whatever it is. Well, like these things couldn’t be done. These things are basically perfectly purpose-built ember catchers. These fences that we all love between our homes sort of couldn’t be better designed to catch fire and spread fire house to house to house. So there are things like that we don’t have to do that.
We could actually just stop doing that. Anyway, those are some near-term things. There’s some longer-term solutions too.
Ross Kenyon: I like in particular the first solution proposed, which is basically a YIMBY movement for forest fire. Yeah, it is a YIMBY movement for forest fire. That’s right. That’s in my backyard if you’re listening and not familiar. Yeah.
Daniel Duane: Yeah. Yeah. We need that. YIMBY for forest fire as well.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Okay. That’s an interesting suggestion. And climate change involves some degree of collective sacrifice. So maybe... Maybe people are willing to pick up on that. It does seem like a hard sell. I could imagine so many conversations with people who would say like, well, why, why me? Like, why would I have to do this? And I get it. I would probably want to punt to the next person if they were willing to do it instead of me. But at some point it sounds like someone has to do this.
I don’t know. Those are tough problems to solve. Agreed.
Daniel Duane: And the longer term, Problems have a real, I mean, the longer term solutions have a real YIMBY component as well in the sense that there’s studies of fire severity and the likelihood of having severe fire behavior in the landscape sort of looking at the relationship between severe fire behavior and the built environment show that fire severity goes up with density of human development. So you start adding houses, As soon as you start adding houses to a landscape, the likelihood of extreme fire behavior starts to go up. And it goes up pretty steadily with the addition of houses and human structures to a landscape to a certain point.
And then as you can imagine, it kind of peaks and then starts to fall way off. So we’re much less likely to have the extreme urban firestorms that we used to. American cities don’t. I mean, let’s all cross our fingers. It could still happen. But American cities don’t just light on fire and burn down with the frequency that they did. You know, the Great Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Firestorm after the big earthquake. These things aren’t as common as they used to be.
But what that teaches us about wildland fire is that if we really want this to not happen, we kind of have to discourage the degree of sprawl that we have. And, you know, again, like you said, that’s the kind of thing that’s like, well, okay, so that degree of sprawl isn’t really just the fault of people who end up living in those places or want to live in those places. It’s also the fault of all of us, like in cities or older suburbs, who refuse that high-density housing, that high-density apartment building down the block from us.
You know, I mean, I guess what I’m just trying to say is in a weird sort of way Encouraging urban density is actually part of the solution to our wildfire problem.
Ross Kenyon: I love that too. That’s a fun, somewhat counterintuitive solution. And I was going to ask about that. I imagine it’ll just continue at current rates, both domestically and abroad. That I think a lot of people will continue moving to more and more and denser cities as time goes on. And maybe if there’s less stakeholders who live in some of these environments that desperately need regular burnings in order to not create fire tornadoes and other massive fire damage and smoke, that maybe there’s just less opposition to it as time goes on.
Maybe that’s a fun solution. In fact, that’s the kind of thing that you would write a book about or kind of like pitch because it’s so... It’s got that, no one would have expected the solution to forest fires is denser or urban living. Yeah, right. I agree. Yeah.
Daniel Duane: And it’s, you know, the story in California has really been, I mean, our cities are growing more populous too, of course, but the story in California is not the developing world story, right? It’s in terms of demographics. It’s not a story of people moving from the countryside to the cities. I mean, that is happening, but it’s also... The opposite in that our cities have been so anti-growth in terms of density in the past 20, 30, 40 years, particularly in Northern California, that it has forced this sprawl ever further out from the cities, ever more into this wildland urban interface where fire danger is really greater.
Those of us in pretty coastal enclaves that shot down the condo development, Sadly, we’re part of the problem. And those of us who didn’t want light rail extended into our suburb because we were afraid of people from the city come to town, we are part of the problem because we’ve contributed to a California or to a West Coast that is all about freeways and remote sprawling suburbs. And those remote sprawling suburbs end up out in these places that are more likely to burn.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. When I think about this problem, I don’t think about it in terms of the people who are at this nexus between the wildlands and the exurbs or suburbs. I think about it as people who are distinctly rural, many of which may be second homes, people who are living in the Tahoe area or Mammoth or Eastern Sierras or some of these places that are truly remote. You’re not on the fringes of Sacramento or something. You’re decidedly Rural at that point. Am I thinking of this all wrong?
Daniel Duane: No, I think, I mean, I think it’s, it’s both and, you know, but, you know, the big population explosion in the wildland urban interface in California has been right has been east of Sacramento. So, you know, Sierra Nevada foothills. I mean, if you’ve, if you’ve driven up, you know, if you’ve driven like from Sacramento up to Tahoe in recent years, you drive up 80. I mean, There’s strip malls almost the whole way, right? Or a lot of it. And then if you come up to Route 49, which is that north, so 80 runs east-west from Sacramento up to Tahoe in the mountains.
49 is this sort of much smaller kind of country highway that runs north-south at a kind of mid-low elevation in the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Well, and it’s the old Gold Rush Highway. Particularly sort of just north and south of 80 on Route 49, towns like Grass Valley and Placerville and Nevada City. These towns have seen phenomenal population growth in the past 20, 30 years. There are enormous sprawling exurban and suburban neighborhoods through there. And they’re great places to live. They’re beautiful towns.
I mean, I’m not knocking it, but it’s... You know, that is, that is population growth in those places is part of what’s gotten us into this, gotten us into trouble like this, because those are parts of the state that, and I, you know, CAL FIRE guys have told me this. They’ve said, you know, look, 40 years ago, 50 years ago, when a big fire erupted in the Stanislaus National Forest, you know, we did our best to put it out, but it just didn’t threaten that many structures. Well, now that, now there’s, you know, a hundred thousand people living in the path of that fire.
And that means we got to get in there and stop that fire out and It means fighting that fire is complicated because all those 100,000 people are trying to flee in a big hurry. It’s a little bit of a mess.
Ross Kenyon: I think this is a really good framework for understanding the basics of how and why and where these fires take place. And if you’re listening to this and you like this topic, you should absolutely read this article. And also, it’s on the cover, which congratulations. That’s a nice little feather in your cap, Dan. Yeah, thanks. I think this will be time to come out either when the actual physical copy of Wired is out or very soon after. Where can people follow your work and learn more of what you’re doing?
Daniel Duane: Well, I have a website, DanielDwayne.com, but that’s a good question. I’m on Twitter. I’ve never really had a great answer to that question, but I’ll work on it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, fair enough. You’ve written a bunch of books, which if I had a little bit more lead time, I’d be interested in reading all of them. You’ve also written for the New York Times Magazine, Outside, a bunch of books on surfing and climbing. It just seems like a fun life you had the pleasure of leading. Yeah, it’s all the good California stuff. All the good California stuff, yeah. Well, thanks for being here, Daniel. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, it’s my pleasure.
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