California's Wildfire History and Where Governments Went Wrong

With the leftists insisting that California's current wildfire situation is "historical" and is directly tied to "global climate change" and "increased anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions", research would suggest that California has long been a locus of major wildfires that have scorched millions of acres of land on an annual basis.

  

A 2007 study entitled "Prehistoric fire area and emissions from California's forests, woodlands, shrublands and grasslands" by Scott L. Stephens et al summarizes the literature on fire history in the state, examining estimates of the spatial extent of the fires and their resultant emissions prior to the European-American settlement of the region.  

  

The modern state of California has directed its efforts to reducing the negative effects of wildfires in the urban - wildland intermixed zone without giving consideration to wildfire behaviour prior to the expansion of non-Native American settlements.  Prior to the expansion of human population in the state, lightning was the most common ignition source for fires in California's ecosystem.  Once the area was settled by Native Americans, ignition by both lightning and deliberate setting of fires by Native Americans worked together until the arrival of Euro-American settlers in the 19th century.  

  

To reconstruct fire history for the state, researchers use dendrochronology (analysis of tree rings and tree ages) to determine the fire history.  In scrublands and grasslands, dendrochronology cannot be used because of the absence of trees, necessitating the use of charcoal deposit analysis, however, the ability of these studies makes it difficult to determine the temporal and spatial resolution of wildfires.  Native American burning practices can be used to estimate fire frequency in California because the Native American population used fire management in grasslands and woodlands for various purposes including the maintenance of forest structure, sustainable and revitalized growth and biodiversity.  In other words, Native Americans used fire to help a healthy forest ecosystem flourish.  This practice of intentional burning was outlawed under California's 1850 Act for the Government and Protection of Indians because the practice was seen as "primitive".  In the early 20th century, California adopted a policy of fire exclusion which resulted in undesirable impacts on the ecosystem including increased tree density, higher fuel loads and changes to wildlife habitats in ecosystems that previously experienced more frequent, low to medium intensity fires.  Prescribed fires that are used in California today to manage its forests and shrublands are constrained by several factors including smoke production, the impact on endangered species, lack of crew availability and the fear that prescribed fires may escape their boundaries and enter urban areas.

 

The authors of the paper estimated prehistoric fire areas by using two methods:

 

1.) Fire rotation - the time period of interest divided by the proportion of the study area that burned in that time period.

 

2.) Fire-return interval - the time between two successive fire events at a given site or area of a specified size, more specifically the median fire-return interval and the high fire-return interval.

 

These fire metrics were divided into the area of each vegetation type to arrive at estimates of the area burned each year excluding California's desire regions because fire was likely rare in these areas which have limited vegetation productivity.

 

Here are tables showing the annual prehistoric fire estimates for California for various vegetation types:

 

 

To summarize, the amount of area burned annually in California varied from 1,814,614 hectares (4,484,008 acres) to 4,838,293 hectares (11,955,682 acres) during the prehistoric period or between 4.5 percent and 12 percent of the state's lands burning every year.

 

The authors note that in the modern period between 1950 and 1999, wildfires in California have burned approximately 51,000 hectares (126,023 acres) annually and forested areas have burned at approximately 23,000 hectares (56,834 acres) annually.  If one totals the total area burned on an annual basis when grasslands and woodlands are included, approximately 102,000 hectares (252,047 acres) burn in wildfires on an annual basis in California.  This is a very small area (roughly 5.6 percent of what would have been burned in the past) compared to prehistoric levels largely because relatively large areas of grasslands and woodlands have been converted to agricultural and urban use.

This study clearly shows that, in general, the area burned by wildfires in the state of California is far smaller in the modern age than in prehistoric, pre-Euro-American times when fires were often deliberately set by Native Americans to improve the health of the state's ecosystem.  The lack of fires and the changes in the amount of forest cover in the modern age as shown on this graphic:

 

...shows us that it is the buildup of fuel that has resulted in wildfires impacting urban areas that continue to spread into grassland and forested ecosystems that are prone to burning.  In large part, this can be blamed on state and federal regulations that resulted in closely packed forests that are prone to parasitic attacks and crown fires after logging and a lack of controlled burning because of concerns about air quality in urban areas.  While our government leaders love to fear monger and blame any wildfires on global climate change, in fact, history shows us that wildfires of far greater areal extent than we are experiencing today were quite common and, in the absence of human habitation, were actually very healthy and necessary for the environment.