In 1965, a group called The Mamas & the Papas came out with a song, “California Dreamin’. The lyrics describe a New York winter and a nostalgia for Los Angeles, a place described as safe and warm.

Photo: dominik.kreutz, Creative Commons, Flickr

This year, nostalgia meets reality and that supposed haven is a little too warm and far from safe, as more than 700 fires raged through California, wreaking havoc on homes and lives from Big Sur in the south to Redding in the north.

Fire in California is nothing new. California, and much of the West, is a land designed by Nature to experience periodic, cleansing fires. U.S. Forest Service policies, which extinguish small fires to protect homeowners and as a consequence leave behind acres of combustible material, have not helped. Throwing money at the problem is not the answer, either. Spending has risen by $1 billion in the last decade, and the fires are worse than ever. This summer has seen the loss of 265,000 acres, or more than 400 square miles.

In 2006, Science Magazine conducted a study and found that the incidence of large wildfires in western forests increased from 1970 to 1986 by a factor of four, and the area burned by these fires was more than six times as great. The length of the wildfire season itself also increased by 78 days. Overall, the report suggests that global warming trends are likely to intensify threats to humans and ecosystems, as forests’ carbon sinks are converted to carbon dioxide by burning, and restoration becomes increasingly difficult due to the changing nature of these ecosystems.

In Northern California, in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, not far from the small, wealthy retirement town of Graeagle, a road – designated by the Forest Service as C Road – wends its way through the heart of the Sierra wilderness.

People build and live there because it is one of the most spectacular stretches of accessible wilderness in the mountains. But they do so at their own peril. Each year, through Feather Publishing and the local newspapers, the Forest Service issues protocols for protecting properties in places like C Road.

These include removing all brush in a 100-yard swath around the home, trimming the pine trees up to six feet above the ground, spreading gravel or other noncombustible material around the perimeter of the home and three feet out from the foundation, planting low-growing trees that will not connect with power lines, providing irrigation and appropriate, noncombustible, plantings to the 100-yard perimeter around the home, posting clearly visible house numbers for emergency responders, providing turnarounds for fire vehicles, and having emergency water supplies to dampen roofs in the event of a forest fire.

These measures, called Defensible Spaces, rely on a “lean, clean, green” philosophy. During the years I lived in the area, C Road never burned, but much of the rest of the area did from a spectacular local fire that almost took out a propane depot to the Walker Mine Fire that ate 475 acres just across the ridge of mountains to the north – a fire that was let burn out of control because the area was too inaccessible. As a reporter, I chased fire. It wasn’t until I witnessed a crown fire that I developed a deep respect for this phenomenon of nature, which is also human’s most ancient and indomitable enemy.

Despite the danger of fire, people continue to build and live in places like C Road. In fact, more than 88,000 people settled in the Sierras, in remote, unprotected and indefensible spaces, between 1990 and 2000. By 2040, the population is expected to triple, to about 1.5 million residents – potential development that seems almost perverse in the face of rising global warming, which has dried the Sierras in particular, and California in general, to the ecological equivalent of a pile of kindling waiting for a match.

California firefighters got control this past week, defeating a fire that threatened to overtake Paradise – a real location, not a celestial one. Paradise, on the edge of the mountains, is a lovely little town whose residents are returning, but not without a renewed respect for fire and, in some cases, a perspective that leads them to consider moving closer to the relatively fireproof Sacramento valley. It may not be as pretty, but the valley is wet, flat and largely free of combustible pines.

With California in another year of drought, and a lack of measurable precipitation in the Sierras depleting a record snowpack (180 percent) to 67 percent of normal, more fires later this summer are highly likely. These future fires, spiked in mass and ferocity by continued rising temperatures, will gobble C Road and other pristine California locations like a tasty bit of nougat, and there won’t be enough firefighters, air tankers or fire suppressant to stop them.

Perhaps it’s time to stop building in non-defensible areas like forest wilderness, earthquake zones and floodplains. The Louisiana Supreme Court has already ruled that insurance companies aren’t liable for Katrina flooding as a result of levee failure. I have no fondness for the insurance industry, but paying for the effects of global warming is likely to bankrupt them, removing them as a resource for millions of people living in defensible spaces.

Site Disclaimer