I own roughly 40 acres of Douglas Fir forest in Northwest Oregon, and let me tell you — there’s no black and white answer to this. This is a long post, so buckle up.
Start with invasive shrubs like blackberries. They spread wildly and require a ton of work to maintain. (And before people say “use goats”, know they are not a magic bullet.) Limbing trees, where you remove branches under 10’, can help prevent “ladder fires”, but it’s time consuming or costly if you need to hire someone to do it.
Forests need to be thinned, invasive species kept at bay, and fuel in general needs to be removed or burned. And this stuff is alive so it’s a perennial thing to deal with. Even with grants, profit from timber, etc, it’s a lot of work, time, and money.
In retrospect it’s easy to point fingers at the National Forest Service and criticize their policy of putting fires out. Imagine for a second the opposition they’d face had they just let fires burn for the past half century. Even if it’s the “right” thing to do, it would be a very hard sell. People generally want to see action, and have a hard time seeing inaction as “doing something.”
Similarly with controlled burns. I’d love to burn our land every year the way that Native Americans used to — but it’s not without risk. There’s simply too much fuel.
Up in Oregon things have historically been very wet. Comically so. The result is a lot of lush vegetation. Which dries out in a drought and becomes fuel. As these unprecedented burns happen more and more frequently, they push forests into new phases of succession, where a new cycle of shrub-drought-fire becomes the norm. These firestorms are a different breed from the mild creeping forest fires that are part of a natural forest ecosystem.
All of that said, forest management is incredibly important. We need a new approach, and I’d argue we need more grants for the landowners who can’t afford to do the work necessary to prepare their land for this new climate. We also need to take a serious look at all of the development in the wildland-urban-interface and figure out how we’re going to address it. And yes, to the chagrin of many here, we need to address Climate Change.
But, all of that said, none of that IMHO absolves PG&E from gross negligence in failing to properly maintain equipment in areas of known heightened risk.