181–190 of 241 posts
One of the big problems is that controlled burns can and do become uncontrolled burns. The largest ever wildfire in New Mexico was started as a planned burn (more honest label) just last year. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...
How often do they get out of hand? Like in terms of percentage?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a good idea but it doesn't address the pollution problem. If a prescribed burn will increase pollution beyond the EPA's acceptable limits then the burn will be against the law. We need the EPA's emissions/particulate rules to be adjusted to give priority to prescribed burns by certified firefighters and foresters. They don't do burns often enough that the EPA should be limiting their power to manage fire susc…
Being the devil's advocate, when my mother was dying of cancer there were forest fires here. She had to leave the area and stay at a hotel far away at great cost/physical discomfort (at that point she had a hospital bed at home). There are people who physically can't handle the higher particulate amount, what do you propose we do with them? Let them suffer/die?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another example is how many people advocated for (and how many countries essentially adopted) letting covid spread throughout the population (either like wildfire or via "flatten the curve") to get natural herd immunity because letting a poorly understood (but known to be quite deadly) virus spread through the population was doable but giving out vaccines that hadn't been through phase 2 trials wasn't.
Was preventing the spread of covid throughout the population possible once China failed to contain the virus? Can you name one country that managed to do that? Even China eventually gave up.
The fundamental problem that controlled burns face today is that there has been a huge and irresponsible increase in development on "Urban-wildland border". Here in the California Sierras, you have a uniform peppering of (often luxury) houses outside of the various small urban areas. Those forests naturally burn on a regular basis but with this situation, any controlled burn is going to threaten some number of houses…
This is true, but even where it's not, the biggest issue in doing controlled burns is simply funding . Controlled burns aren't just "light it up". You may need to create a firebreak. You may need to cull some trees as too many areas have lots of spindly, unhealthy trees that are going to make a controlled burn much harder to control. etc. All of this costs manpower which translates to money.
My guess is there's no funding where there's no people and where there are people, there's funding but the people's arrangement prevents controlled burns.
This illustrates a more generic problem with our legal system. When the option for positive action to mitigate a problem exists, we often don't do it because the action creates legal liability for any and all negative externalities of the action, even if the negative externalities as a whole are drastically less than what would happen doing nothing. We resist permitting prescribed burns because when they cause uninte…
In other words, these are situations where the incentives for individuals are not aligned with incentives for the group.
The system is broken.
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This was my first thought as well. The title should be "Regulations make them nearly impossible [in Colorado]"
It's not Colorado's land to burn, though. Most of the issue is fuels load on federally-managed land.
One of the big problems is that controlled burns can and do become uncontrolled burns. The largest ever wildfire in New Mexico was started as a planned burn (more honest label) just last year. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...
Yes, and this is (at least today) unsolvable. It's still got a much higher expected value to do prescribed burns have some of them turn uncontrolled than do nothing, or do what is happening now (pretend we can control for every variable).
The fundamental problem that controlled burns face today is that there has been a huge and irresponsible increase in development on "Urban-wildland border". Here in the California Sierras, you have a uniform peppering of (often luxury) houses outside of the various small urban areas. Those forests naturally burn on a regular basis but with this situation, any controlled burn is going to threaten some number of houses…
This is true, but even where it's not, the biggest issue in doing controlled burns is simply funding . Controlled burns aren't just "light it up". You may need to create a firebreak. You may need to cull some trees as too many areas have lots of spindly, unhealthy trees that are going to make a controlled burn much harder to control. etc. All of this costs manpower which translates to money.
At the time, the story told about the Cerro Grande fire was an inexperienced Forestry agent started a prescribed burn in the heart of the Spring wind season, leading to an inevitable wildfire that no local NM understanding local conditions would have approved. Probably the most expensive fire in NM history.
The story told of the Hermits Peak fire is another outsider Forestry agent tried to squeeze a prescribed burn into a very narrow “safe” time slot to stay “on schedule”. To no one’s surprise, the fire didn’t care much about the narrow slot of safety and the largest wildfire in NM history resulted.
I think giving a State powers to selective delay any specific prescribed fire within their borders (State, Fed, tribal) would have prevented both destructive NM fires. Local wisdom counts for something and at least the Feds don’t come off looking like idiots when things get out hand. Maybe the Feds and the State together would look like idiots, but not just those outsider Feds.
http://nationnews.ca/community/fire-keepers-bring-back-cultu...
It especially makes sense in the context of BC where pretty much the whole province is actually unceded first nations territory; the indigenous groups there never signed it away to the Crown like they did here in Upper Canada.