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Fire, chaparral, and survival in southern California

P. Zedler

Published 2005 in Unknown venue

ABSTRACT

Mother Nature has lavished many gifts on California, but she has made mistakes. Some were easily corrected. Grizzly bears were too fierce and unpredictable, but they trouble Californians no longer. Water was poorly distributed, but it now flows freely into the semi-arid southern counties. Other imperfections of the California environment have resisted easy correction. Two in particular continue to bedevil the state—earthquakes and fire. As is pointed out in the volume under review, the popular response to these two challenges has been strikingly different. Few expect the earthquake problem to be solved any time soon. It is understood that if you want to live in the land where the lemon tree flowers and the laurel sumac perfumes the air you must run the risk of being buried under a collapsing building. The public accepts the costs of the precautions which reduce risk, and they also accept that although the risk is small, it’s there and nothing can make it zero. Like earthquakes, fires are a recurrent phenomenon in California that shows no signs of going the way of the grizzly bear. On the contrary, as measured by damage to life and property, the wildland fire situation seems to be getting worse. One might therefore expect that people would accept it as a fact of life, pay the costs necessary to reduce its impact, and adjust their affairs accordingly. In the opinion of Halsey (chief author and editor) and probably most of the contributing authors of this volume, the contrary is true. The public seems to view fire not as an act of God, but as the act of fools and criminals—a bad thing which has happened to them because of the incompetence or negligence of others. It is the premise of this volume that this attitude must be changed if we are to find a workable solution to the chaparral fire problem, and that education is the key. Halsey clearly believes that if people only understood how the natural system works and came to respect it, they would see the way to deal with fire. This puts him firmly into the camp of those who think the fire problem is not a fire problem, but a people problem. A notable achievement of the author/editor was to have moved the book from conception to publication in a very short time after the 2003 fires. Halsey accomplished this by writing much of the text himself, but also soliciting contributions for others and gluing these together with introductory remarks and bridging commentary. The timely appearance is commendable and significant. Anyone who has lived through past fire disasters knows that the sharp spike in public interest immediately after a disaster drops faster than a Phacelia brachyloba population. There is the disaster-awareness equivalent of the ‘‘teachable moment’’. The book is grouped into eight chapters with a total of 16 authors (including the author/editor). Another six persons made other contributions. There are indeed, as the author states ‘‘many voices in this book’’. As the title indicates, the book focuses on southern California, and therefore on the brush-woodland systems that are the main vegetation associated with the fire problem. Montane forest types are only touched on lightly, as is appropriate. The most important parts of the book are those that expose the weaknesses in the simplistic thinking behind the ‘‘kick butt and take names’’ approach to reforming wildlands management—the approach that calls for mass firings in government agencies, or burning everything on a 5 year rotation (but not hiring any new people to do it), or clearing all vegetation to mineral soil for 500 ft into adjacent publicly owned areas (but not requiring any removal of eucalyptus or pines in their own landscaping), or doubling the number of pilots and fire-fighting planes (but not increasing taxes). Such views assume that a naturally friendly system has been mismanaged to become a menace. But what does science tells us? Contributions of Keeley and Fotheringham and Moritz, as representatives of the science community, cast very serious doubt on this assumption. Keeley and Fotheringham present historical data that show that fire size is either getting smaller or staying roughly the same. If there is mismanagement, it hasn’t manifested itself by making burns significantly larger. But what has definitely changed is the human population, which has increased by a factor of 30 over the last century. How can anyone doubt that this huge increase has something to do with our present dilemma, in which people and fire seem to intersect more often and more disastrously than they did in the past? From this follows one of the main points emphasized in the book—that the intrusion of poorly planned developments into wildlands is a major part of the problem. What is frustrating is that everyone knows this, but little is being done about it. Moritz, who has made interesting contributions to our understanding of fire as a stochastic process, stresses the importance of concentrating our hazard reduction efforts in the places where they will have the most effect. This idea is not new1, but it deserves to be stated again—as it is in several other places in the book. The resistance to the work-the-edges concept can be compared to the widespread refusal to grasp the realities of global climate change. Research scientists who are familiar with shrubland fire problems are near unanimous in advocating this approach, but because the message is not what people want to hear, and because in the short run they see no consequences of inaction, they refuse to listen. This fact justifies the premise of this book. Managers of wildlands adjacent to urban areas are on the front lines of the struggle to deal with chaparral fire, and are in the best situation to tell us what works in practice. This makes the contribution of Witter and Taylor, relating the programs at the Santa Monica Mountains of particular importance. Wildland islands in an urban sea are now cut off from regional fires, but simultaneously are susceptible to arson and accidental ignition. Thus, a laissez-faire approach to fire is not an option. Although complete fire exclusion would in the long run be bad for the

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