Smokey Bear is Partially Right
Graphic: Ad Council, National Association of State Foresters, and US Forest Service.
Smokey Bear tells us “only you can prevent wildfires.” That has been Smokey’s simple message since 1944, but nevertheless he has been long associated with the policy of immediately suppressing all wildfires. This policy was called the 10 AM policy, and it meant that all wildfires should be suppressed by 10 AM of the morning after the wildfire was ignited. The 10 AM policy resulted in over-suppression of wildfires and disrupted the beneficial role of wildfire in forest ecosystems, so the policy was rightly discontinued in 1978. The fire suppression policy is sometimes known as the “Smokey Bear Effect.” In actuality, Smokey did not make any comments about fire suppression.
Smokey is correct that a greater focus on preventing unwanted human-caused wildfire ignitions will help to mitigate our wildfire management dilemma. Western forests are being heavily cut and burned for a primary purpose of moderating wildfire behavior, with substantial adverse impacts to both forests and communities. It would be much more direct and cost-effective to put greater emphasis on avoiding unwanted human-caused wildfire ignitions in the first place. This can be done while still allowing lightning strike fires to fulfill their natural and beneficial role on our forest landscapes, when safe to do so. This can be supplemented by judicious implementation of prescribed burns, only during the safest burn windows.
However, Smokey needs to clarify at whom he is pointing a rather accusatory paw. Who all needs to prevent wildfires? Does he just mean the public, or does he also include the Forest Service? The Forest Service and other land management agencies are responsible for a significant amount of wildfire ignitions and acres burned on our forest landscapes, and at times their actions have exacerbated wildfires. We need to consider all the sources of wildfire ignitions and hone our prevention strategies accordingly.
The primary ignition source of wildfire in the US is human-caused ignitions. According to a 2023 report by the Congressional Research Service, nationally 89% of wildfires from 2018 to 2022 were human-caused. According to a research paper by Balch et al., human-related ignitions have increased, resulting in larger and hotter wildfires, and the length of the wildfire season has more than tripled. University of Colorado Professor Virginia Iglesias wrote in a recent article that wildfires ignited by human activities pose a greater risk to people and cause more severe ecosystem effects than lightning-started fires. She states:
Lightning-started fires often coincide with storms that carry rain or higher humidity, which slows fires’ spread. Human-started fires, however, typically ignite under more extreme conditions – hotter temperatures, lower humidity and stronger winds. This leads to greater flame heights, faster spread in the critical early days before crews can respond, and more severe ecosystem effects, such as killing more trees and degrading the soil.
Human-ignited fires often occur in or near populated areas, where flammable structures and vegetation create even more hazardous conditions. As urban development expands into wildlands, the probability of human-started fires and the property potentially exposed to fire increase, creating a feedback loop of escalating wildfire risk.
The three primary elements that cause wildfire to ignite and spread – known as the wildfire triangle – are an ignition source. dry fuel, and hot, dry and windy weather. While all three elements are necessary, a wildfire cannot occur without an ignition. So considering ignitions of undesired human-caused wildfires, and finding ways to avoid such ignitions, is paramount for wildfire management.
Because it is now widely agreed upon to allow a certain amount of wildfire to burn on our landscapes instead of immediately suppressing all fires, the Forest Service’s focus in recent decades has been to aggressively log, “thin” and apply prescribed fire to forest landscapes in order to allow wildfires to burn more safely. This change of focus caused Smokey and his original campaign slogan, “Remember, only you can prevent forest fires,” to become obsolete, as the Forest Service itself was sometimes essentially setting forest fires during implementation of prescribed burns. As a result, the slogan was changed in 2001, to “Only you can prevent wildfires.” “Wildfires” means fires other than agency intentionally-set fires that remain within the intended containment perimeters.
The primary strategy has shifted from reducing wildfire ignitions to reducing fuels (trees and other vegetation). Since the number of forest wildfire ignitions and of acres burned at high severity have been overall steadily increasing, the fuels reduction strategy appears to not be very effective.
Additionally, the aggressive “cut and burn” strategy has caused an enormous amount of ecosystem damage in our forests, and in a few cases it has resulted in escaped prescribed fire burning entire communities, such as occurred during the Hermits Peak and Calf Canyon Fires. Implementing much lighter and more targeted cutting and burning treatments, focusing more on genuine restoration projects that support the retention of moisture in forest ecosystems, and refocusing on reducing unwanted human-caused wildfire ignitions, may be the best route for moderating the amount and severity of fire burning in our forests. It may also be the best way to protect our communities and infrastructure. This strategy should be combined with fire hardening homes and reducing fuels in the 100 feet surrounding structures.
Forest management strategies need to be considered differently in different ecosystem types. In wetter forests, wildfire is still in a historical deficit, including high severity fire. However in some drier forests, such as the Santa Fe National Forest, there has been too much wildfire, including too much high severity fire. And post-fire conifer regeneration in this dry forest appears to be either delayed or not occurring at all in some locations. The Santa Fe National Forest could be considered the “canary in the coalmine” of climate effects on forests, and we need to learn from what is occurring in this area and quickly develop climate-appropriate conservation strategies.
The New Mexico State Forester Laura McCarthy recently authored an op-ed, “Let’s bring back a proven campaign to prevent wildfires.” In it, she calls for a New Mexico wildfire prevention campaign built on New Mexico’s Smokey Bear program and modeled after Utah’s successful FireSense Program. She states that “the [FireSense] campaign reduced human-caused wildfires by 75% within three years.” Such campaigns can be an important conservation strategy, as avoiding human-caused ignitions has fewer adverse impacts on ecosystems and communities than heavily treating millions of acres of forest to moderate the effects of such ignitions.
However, State Forester McCarthy’s op-ed and the research papers and articles referenced above do not mention that much more comprehensive measures need to be taken to prevent wildfires ignited by the US Forest Service and by other land management agencies prescribed burns escapes. In the Santa Fe National Forest during the past 25 years, the majority of acres burned by wildfire were ignited by Forest Service and National Park Service escaped prescribed burns.
Out of a total of over 784,000 acres burned by wildfire in the Santa Fe National Forest during this time period, almost 435,000 acres were burned due to escaped prescribed fire ignited by these two federal land management agencies, as opposed to just over 253,000 acres ignited by all other human-caused ignitions. Less than 97,000 acres were burned due to natural ignitions (lightning strikes). Also, the largest wildfire that burned due to a lightning strike ignition was just over 17,000 acres — a relatively small area compared with the enormous areas burned by escaped prescribed fire. None of the lightning strike fires caused significant damage to either communities or infrastructure. If the large agency-ignited wildfires had not occurred, wildfires in the Santa Fe National Forest would have occurred well within a natural range.
The Forest Service claims that nationally less than 1% of their prescribed burns escape, which amounts to about seven wildfires per year. However escaped prescribed burns often result in very large and hot wildfires, and are often ignited near communities and infrastructure. So the impacts of prescribed fire escapes can be much greater than this Forest Service statistic suggests. Much more valid and meaningful statistics would be the total acres burned due to escaped prescribed burns, and the amount of damage to human resources. It’s also necessary to consider that as the climate becomes warmer and drier, the risk of escaped prescribed burns will inevitably increase, especially in dry forests.
It’s critical to reevaluate the Forest Service and other agencies’ prescribed burn practices in order to reduce wildfires caused by prescribed fire escapes. The Forest Service has made some efforts to do so, but its analysis is limited, its assumptions are sometimes unproven and controversial, and its new policy recommendations are not nearly enough to adequately improve prescribed burn safety.
Logging and “thinning” practices need to be also reconsidered, as such practices can at times exacerbate wildfire risk, wildfire size, and burn severity, instead of reducing them. Aggressively cutting trees and opening up forest canopies often results in drier forests with more flammable fuels and can allow wind to blow more intensely and drive fire up into the tree crowns. This occurred during the 2022 Santa Fe National Forest Calf Canyon Fire which was ignited by a pile burn escape. This fire was largely fueled by windthrow of trees due to aggressive logging and “thinning” having opened up the forest canopy, along with unburned slash piles.
There are a number of other strategies that can be employed by the Forest Service to reduce human-caused fires. These include closing and decommissioning unneeded forest roads (as road density has been linked with increases in human-caused wildfire), increasing forest closures during extremely hot, dry and windy weather, enacting more restrictive regulations concerning campfires, and increasing law enforcement in national forests.
Promoting Smokey Bear to the forefront again in order to educate the public about prevention of human-caused wildfire ignitions is a good strategy – or to implement vigorous alternative fire prevention campaigns. However, Smokey Bear needs to get real and be more honest about what else is necessary to prevent human-caused wildfires. We all need to do what we can, but this must include a major wildfire policy shift by the Forest Service and other land management agencies.
Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire near Highway 518 in Sapello, NM Photo: Inciweb.
The Coming Fires
Mount Hood through a skein of smoke from wildfires near Portland. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
Sometime in the 1980’s, as a young college dropout living somewhere in the Boston area, and spending a lot of time hanging around the hub of activity of all sorts that was Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day I got word that Pete Seeger was going to be speaking at a class. Back then you didn’t need an ID card to enter a building, you could just walk in. Maybe the public were welcome to that class, I don’t remember, but it was just me and a couple dozen students, in any case.
I think Pete might have played a song or two, but all I remember was the story he told. Maybe I remember the story in particular because he cried a bit in the course of telling it.
It was a fictional story, about how some scientist had discovered that by mixing together several commonly-found, easily-available compounds of the sort you might use to clean your bathroom floor, you could create a powerful bomb.
There were efforts to suppress the information but eventually word got out, and humanity braced for impact. In Pete’s tale, what happened next was both sides of the civil war in Peru that was then very violently ongoing used the new bomb recipe, to apocalyptic effect.
The whole country was just destroyed, with a staggering death toll. Watching the millions of refugees streaming out of their ruined land, in Pete’s tale the rest of the world came together and made a plan to prevent this kind of thing from happening anywhere else.
Realizing that if any disgruntled person could so easily just make a bomb that would destroy the neighborhood, the only way forward was radical equality and empathy, with societies focused on taking care of each other, and making sure no one wanted to blow up the neighborhood.
For days now I’ve been glued to the news even more than usual, watching these hurricane-strength winds blow flames all over the Los Angeles area, with thousands of homes destroyed already, and so many people, including friends of mine, waiting to find out what will become of theirs.
As I hear the horror stories from a burning megalopolis, I’m reminded of Pete’s little parable, in so many ways.
Of course, it’s the combination of the parched Earth, steep hillsides, and fast winds, all in an urban setting, that make the LA area so susceptible to fire, along with poor infrastructure and other factors. But most of the fires start out with either some kind of accident, like a cigarette butt, or a chain dragging behind a car, or with arson.
At a juncture like this, especially, every individual has the power to blow up the neighborhood, essentially, either by accident or on purpose, with no particular effort at all.
Not only does everyone have the power to burn down the neighborhood with a cigarette, but every individual’s home or business is completely interdependent on everyone else’s homes and businesses, in terms of how their properties are prepared for fire. It’s no good if just some of the homes in a neighborhood are well-designed for fire. They all need to be, in order for the fire not to have a foothold to spread from.
At times when there isn’t such a crisis going on, I hear frequent news reports about the difficulties they have up and down the west coast trying to retain sufficient numbers of firefighters. The firefighters are chronically underpaid — pay that never nearly keeps up with the ever-worsening housing crisis — and the departments are chronically understaffed, as a general rule.
LA completely embodies the concept of the endless American suburb, where people have historically gone to buy their little patch of paradise, or their big patch of paradise, depending on how wealthy they may be. But now paradise has burned, again. And whether you’re one of the estimated 70,000 people in Los Angeles County living on the streets (some of whom may be staying warm in the winter with propane heaters in their tents), or a movie star in a mansion with a nice, safe, fireplace, we’re all equal under the Santa Anna winds, just as prone to the errant cigarette butt as everyone else, just as strong as the weakest link in the chain.
As terrible as the ongoing burning of LA continues to be, if we don’t radically change course as a society, the future is absolutely guaranteed to be astronomically worse.
If we continue to follow our current path here in the USA, which can mainly be characterized as what they call the “free market,” then after the fires in LA, just like after the fires in Santa Rosa, Paradise, Talent, Phoenix, Detroit (Oregon), and so many other cities and towns, what comes next is fire insurance becomes either far more expensive or unavailable, while the cost of buying or renting continues to increase far beyond most anyone’s earnings do, forcing people to move further and further away from urban centers, into more fire-prone rural areas.
Here in Portland, Oregon, so far away from Los Angeles, we can be sure that the housing crisis will continue to worsen, as we welcome our friends who will be moving here from LA. Anyone from Portland can tell you that that’s going to happen, because most of the people that most of us know around here these days are from southern California. I would also have moved here if I were from southern California, I understand completely, and hasten to add I certainly don’t harbor the least bit of ill will towards people from California, Mexico, China, or anywhere else.
But as soon as someone who does blame people from California or Mexico for the rising cost of housing around here — and someone will — then they will be playing the game of the land-owning banks and hedge funds anyone who rents or bought a house in the past two decades or so is probably deeply beholden to right now.
Yes, what comes next along with the rising cost of housing and more migrants from LA and wherever else will be more of the blame game accelerating. Some will blame the migrants for the rising costs — deport them! Others will blame the racists for attacking the migrants.
No one will blame the corporations doubling and tripling our rents. The algorithms won’t promote that sort of thing, and the FBI doesn’t want to promote it, either, and neither does the corporate media.
That’s what’s coming — more of the same repercussions from the fires, along with more fires. At least, that’s what’s coming if we continue along the route of housing as an investment market for people to do whatever they want with.
It could all be radically different, but then we’d have to first collectively acknowledge that there’s such a thing as society, and that we need to live in a country that makes policies accordingly. And then we’d need to build a social movement powerful enough to force the political class to implement those policies, starting with things like real rent control, and a real plan for adapting to climate change, and to implement the other sorts of policies one can commonly find in so many other, more functional countries where there is a widespread belief in the existence of society.
Where it’s not just talk about everyone having an “equal shot,” as our outgoing president loves to say, but having actual equality — the kind of equality that is not just morally right, but that our future absolutely depends on.
The Fires in Gaza are the Fires in LA
Altadena, photo by Aaron Giesel.
Earlier on Wednesday, January 8th, I saw a prominent Zionist commentator and Twitter/X User post, “Has Greta Thunberg taken her keffiyeh off to address the fires in LA yet or are there too many Jews living here for her to be concerned?” The weird implications about a mythical antisemitic malice that climate activist Greta Thunberg has to supposedly fuel her anti-genocide and ecocide beliefs aside, the post is equally embarrassing in its lack of understanding about the exacerbators of Los Angeles’ most destructive fires in the metropolitan area’s history. Sadly, the disconnect that this post showcases is representative of many people and institutions, not only in explicitly pro-Israel spaces but also in the environmental movement. The US military is the #1 institutional polluter in the world. Cities across the country have been sacrificed by the local and federal prioritization of militarism and policing. Our endless wars have pushed forward the climate crisis, and now its catastrophic results are once again terrifyingly visible inside the belly of the beast.
For decades, the military-industrial complex has been destroying ecosystems, cities, and nations across the SWANA region for the sake of dominance in the oil industry. For 15 months, the US-Israeli bombing unleashed on Gaza has released insane amounts of fossil fuel into the atmosphere while poisoning the soil with each shell. Israel recently detonated an “earthquake bomb,” which some reports have suggested could have been possibly nuclear. The genocide in Gaza has devastated the ecosystem and will make agricultural survival in any eventual rebuilding effort extremely difficult. The war in Ukraine has resulted in explosions of the Nordstream pipeline. Bases around the world, expanded for meaningless escalation with China, have resulted in soil contaminated with toxic PFAS chemicals, harming the soil. Biodiversity is at risk globally.
Forest fires are a natural part of California’s ecosystem. They are needed to survive. The long-time development in inevitable natural burn zones, combined with the suppression of these natural cycles for the sake of billionaire Malibu homes, has not helped this situation at all. This disregard for a balanced ecosystem has historically and continuously come at the expense of middle and working-class neighborhoods in LA vulnerable to preventable fires. The threat to LA is only further magnified by the extra dry air and almost 100mph wind speeds created by the war economy’s climate crisis.
This local neglect of the natural environment comes from a similar place as the Jewish National Fund’s planting of non-native pine trees across Palestine, often above bulldozed Palestinian villages, at the expense of crucial biodiversity. In both instances, the interests of the war economy that prioritizes those in power are what remain above respect for Indigenous caretaking practices and life. And the results in both cases are catastrophic. Amidst a world that has gone through imperialist ecocidal war for decades, the world’s biodiversity, much of which is in sovereign Indigenous land, has been decimated.
This climate-sacrificial militarism isn’t just on the international stage either. In Atlanta, the proposed “Cop City” police training facility is supposed to be built on the Weelaunee Forest: sacred indigenous land also described as the “lungs” of the city. Not only does the forest provide crucial air quality, but it also acts as flooding protection. Recently, Appalachia and Atlanta suffered extreme flooding. Cop City will only make this worse as the forest is destroyed. Those prioritizing these military training facilities and exchange programs with Israeli Occupation Forces are doing so at the expense of the city itself. LA’s Mayor, Karen Bass, recently proposed allocating an extra $123 million to the police while cutting the budget of the fire department by $23 million. Now, the city is burning uncontrollably, and the fire department can only attempt to save residents.
This was avoidable. The flooding in Appalachia is avoidable. Future devastating flooding in a post-cop city Atlanta, NYC, and the entire coastal region is avoidable. Did anyone really think that we could continue to wage ecocide across the world without it coming back to us? Or prioritize militarism at home that trains with our genocidal proxy above human services? The fires in Gaza are the fires in LA. They are brought about by the same institutions and are fixable through overlapping measures. The former was intentional, and the latter is a ricochet. Both are devastating, heartbreaking, terrifying, and infuriating.
Climate organizations are warning about what the fires in LA represent. Some amount of federal funding left over from our shiny new nearly $1 trillion military budget will be allocated to helping the people of L.A. But the same organizations releasing these statements and the same politicians allocating emergency funds are the ones fanning the flames. Either by the silence that deliberately or neglectfully hides the crisis or warmongering that actively drives it further.
So no, Greta Thunberg should not “take off her keffiyeh” to talk about the fires. The only way to fight the fires is through the understanding that should come with wearing one.
Santa Ana Winds and the New Normal
James Village, Altadena. Photo by Aaron Giesel.
There are plenty of people lining up to lay blame for the thousands of buildings destroyed during the recent firestorms, fueled by Santa Ana winds. The incoming president blames the governor who is supposedly more interested in saving Sacramento river smelt than anything else, resulting—so it is claimed—in water shortages in Southern California. Wait, what?
Others blame the mayor of Los Angeles, who was attending a state funeral in Africa when things turned for the worse. Then there are other critics who blame the LA Fire Department for a slow response time, or LAPD for telling people to get out of their cars on Sunset Blvd., later to have their BMWs and Teslas bulldozed to clear space for fire rigs. Why didn’t they leave key fobs in the car? Let’s blame the bulldozer driver instead.
Having lived in Southern California nearly all my life, this was hardly my first encounter with Santa Ana winds. They come pretty much every year, usually during the fall and winter months, usually with heightened temperatures and clear skies. When fire erupts, however, it’s a different story. The winds push the flames, usually in the more mountainous areas where people have built homes right up against the brush which has evolved to burn every few years. Carbon returns to the soil, and seeds germinate when it starts to rain.
This year, two things have made the situation exceptionally dangerous and left Southern Californians even more vulnerable to wildfires during a Santa Ana episode. First, there has been almost no rain since the spring. There was some drizzle before the holidays, barely measurable in backyard rain gauges. Second, the winds were even stronger than usual. The winds blew for two days straight at 60 mph-plus, with gusts much faster than that. It can be windy in the Santa Ana season; this was plain old crazy-windy.
As a result, wildfires did break out, as they often do, but this was not limited to the hillsides. The stronger-than-usual winds pushed embers into relatively flatland areas normally too far to be affected by burning brush. We’re talking embers that traveled for miles, landing in places like the flatter areas of Pacific Palisades and Altadena, seemingly safe distances from where fires normally burn.
Once the embers got into these neighborhoods, the fire skipped from house to house, business to business, resulting in devastation that longtime SoCal residents have never seen before. There are thousands of buildings destroyed from Pacific Palisades, all the way up Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu. There are thousands of homes and businesses burned to the ground in Altadena, known for its craftsman bungalows, tree-lined streets, and its racial/ethnic diversity. This is not where fires are supposed to go, but in this exceptionally dry period with exceptionally strong Santa Anas, that’s exactly what happened.
As a result, fire and emergency services did the very best they could under especially harsh conditions. On top of all else, the winds were so severe that water-dropping aircraft were also unable to assist in the first day of the fire. Things have fortunately changed in the several days since. A fire in the heart of the Hollywood Hills got extinguished in hours; another grass fire in Calabasas was similarly stopped with the help of helicopters dropping H2O.
LA Mayor Karen Bass is not going to hold on to the end of a firehose. Claiming that smelt survival has been prioritized in California is laughable, but some believe it to be true because they see it on their social media feeds. Still others think that SoCal would be better protected if we went back to firemen who are white, not the recent LAFD that has tried to diversify its ranks as California has become more diverse. That viewpoint has apparently been propagated across Fox News, though we in this area have been glued to fire coverage. We are terrified.
It used to be that Santa Ana conditions would be a hassle for those of us not living in the hills. Lots of leaves (it’s fall-winter, after all), the house would shake and rattle if the wind gusted at night, and patio furniture would fly into the corner of the yard. This is worse. The winds were about as fierce as they have ever been, and it wasn’t just the gusts. This was consistent over several days, with more apparently to come.
Moreover, this is no longer just a threat to wealthier people living where (probably) they shouldn’t be. The embers from fires can get you from a distance, and the fire can spread, house to house, not from brush to overhanging eaves.
You see, this is what climate change does. Extreme weather events happen with more frequency and intensity. This is the new normal.
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