Biden and the governors are wrong.
Wildfires have been common throughout the West historically, often burning more acres than they’ve burned in recent years. To the extent that wildfires have increased in intensity recently, it isn’t due to modest warming, but rather to decades of federal and state mismanagement of publicly owned forests throughout the Western United States, leaving those forests in tinderbox conditions.
Had Brown studied history a bit, she would have found Oregon has suffered large fires throughout its history.
Forests grew thicker.
With the rise of widespread federal and state ownership of forests in the West, management with the ax, firehose, firebreaks, and roads replaced regular widespread forest fires. For nearly 80 years, the U.S. Forest Service, an agency within the Department of Agriculture, drove thousands of miles of roads deep into the forests to allow logging. The roads also created artificial fire breaks and allowed access for firefighters into the backwoods to fight fires when they started, typically far from settled areas.
This has resulted in overcrowded forests and the easier spread of insect infestations, such as bark beetles, which have killed an untold number of trees. Many federal forests now contain more dead and dying timber than living trees. And since loggers can no longer clear large areas of forests and firefighters can’t get to fires, except from the air if conditions are right, wildfires are on the rise again. Sadly, hundreds of towns, homes, and businesses are being burned out.
With so much fuel, these fires are different. Rather than replenishing the soil, they burn so hotly that they often kill key microbes in the soil. This leaves millions of acres of land denuded for decades, looking like moonscapes. Under the current federal policy of letting nature take its course, loggers usually can’t even get into burnt-over areas to clear fallen burnt timber and replant new trees in areas where, with human help, they might possibly take root and flourish.
So, for political reasons, Biden and the governors want to blame modest recent warming for the scope and intensity of wildfires in Western states in 2020 and 2021. The true culprit is more than 30 years of forest mismanagement.
Contrary to Biden and the governors’ assertions, state and federal efforts to address racial disparities, increase electric vehicle usage, and stop using fossil fuels to generate electricity will do nothing to prevent wildfires.
Wildfires are natural. They can’t be stopped. They can be managed. The damage they cause to the forests and the people living near them can be dramatically reduced.
Wise management of forests is required, either through regular, widespread, low-intensity burning, as the Native Americans did, or through active forest management, including intensive logging and brush clearing and firefighting efforts, as governments did prior to 1990. These tools, not massive, misdirected spending on climate change, are the best hope of preventing Westerners’ lives and livelihoods from being consumed by flames.