The moment I knew the scale and intensity of wildfires in California had changed came in 2015. I was driving my little white Prius — aka Guy — through the Rough Fire burning in the Sierra and Sequoia National Forests. The chief of the hotshot crew I’d been following turned to me and said, “You either leave now or you’re with us for a couple days” as the fire encircled the lake we were staged at. As I meandered through the flames, smoke and fallen pine trees, Miranda Lambert’s Mama’s Broken Heart came to mind. In the song, she sings “Can’t get revenge and keep a spotless reputation,” and amid the flames, I felt Mother Nature was saying the same thing.
I’ve covered fires in California since 2012, but after the Rough Fire everything changed for me — I now have boots and safety gear placed in my trunk at all times. But it wasn’t just the frequency of fires happening. These blazes are getting so big so fast because of drought, humans, bark beetles killing millions of trees and nearly a century of fire suppression practices on the state’s more than 48 million acres of forests and chaparral.
I began to understand the scale of wildfires in the state is attributable to many things, but two things stand out: fire suppression and climate change. The fires, floods, sea level rise and droughts are the result of just one degree of global warming since the pre-industrial revolution. Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford climate change scientist I recently spoke with, says another degree of global warming means “we can be confident it will increase the occurrence of extreme wildfire weather further.”
We’re now feeling the impact of climate change and wildfire directly. Even in places like Sacramento, pollution in the air we breathe caused by wildfires miles away is creating hazardous conditions. Sitting around a light instead of a campfire in late August, my friends discussed how real the impacts of climate change are. Five years ago, the idea that climate change would disrupt our daily lives wasn’t part of the conversation.
A comment from Char Miller, a Pomona State environmental analyst, kept running through my head as my friends wondered if there’ll be any reprieve in coming years from wildfires. Miller says every time a fire ignites, “we’re looking at our future” and that wildfires are a “smoke signal” of what’s to come.
With more than 1.2 million acres burning this summer alone, scientists anticipate fire season growing later and later into autumn. The number of days perfect for fires to ignite in the fall has doubled since 1980. It could nearly double again by mid-century if the climate crisis isn’t taken seriously. Wildfires are expected into at least late October this year, says UCLA Climate Scientist Daniel Swain. He blames an autumn forecast that is “looking significantly warmer than average, and most likely drier.”
After talking to people like Nick Pike, who lost everything but his truck, his Crocs and hole-filled socks on his feet after a fire near Vacaville burned his family home last month, it can be easy to feel like there's no digging ourselves out of our new fire reality. “This sucks,” Pike said. “We have four kids. Everything’s gone.”
But climate and fire scientists say there is a way. Regular people have the opportunity right now to determine what our future looks like in terms of wildfire. Our government and local agencies would need to end fire suppression and deliberately bring fire back on the landscape in a healthy way. That’s called a prescribed burn. A recent study suggests that around 20% of the state’s land area would need to be burned for any measurable change.
Burning this land that’s packed with fuels along the coastal range and the Sierra Nevada is something the state and federal government are thinking about. In August, the two entered a pact to clean up a million acres of forest by 2025 and are currently creating a 20-year plan. Despite California being a frontrunner in creating policy and rules to curb human-caused warming, the pace is too slow. As I alluded to before, Mother Nature isn’t waiting for us to get our act together. In the meantime, that means California will likely experience large-scale wildfires for many years to come until climate change and fire suppression are taken seriously.
A source that I turn to often about fire behavior and how to protect homes summed this up clearly for me on a Zoom call last week. Lake Tahoe based UC system forestry advisor Susie Kocher says the cascading effects we're seeing are “here to stay, unfortunately, until we can try to get the climate under control.”
Over the years, Kocher has opened my eyes to the beneficial nature of fire. When talking to her about the fires raging in California this summer, she listed all the usual woes behind the blazes: fire suppression, climate change, too many people living in fire-prone areas, etc. But what sticks in my mind is our conversation about the negative value judgments we have about fire.
She says the scale of this summer's wildfires showcase how big of an issue fire suppression and climate change are. From a landscape perspective — not to diminish people who lost their lives and homes to the fires — fire can be good and a chance to reset management of lands that haven’t burned in a century. While the smoke-filled air we’re all breathing reminds us of wildfires’ human tragedy, Kocher says it’s time to “suspend judgment about whether or not this is a disaster for the landscape.”
Five years after I drove through flames during the Rough Fire, Guy (my dusty Prius) is still my escort for months out of the year into fire zones. What’s different now is the intensity of fires has grown. What’s not different is the apathy toward the climate crisis that remains unchanged even as fires ignited every summer are lasting longer and becoming more intense.
Ezra David Romero
Environment Reporter
