• Feral Fire History of California

  • Jan 25 2025
  • Length: 1 hr and 15 mins
  • Podcast

Feral Fire History of California

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  • Summary

  • "Most of California is built to burn: it has fires to match its mountains." -Stephen Pyne, Fire Historian

    *ERROR CORRECTION: At 20:40 into the episode, I made a reading error by reporting "Cost of Fire Suppression" in CA mistakenly as the total volume of "Acres Burned." The specifics for "Costs of Suppression" in CA for the three years I mentioned were: 2019=$447 million; 2020=1.23 million; and 2021=$1.17 million. Sorry for the error. (Source: "History of California Wildfires," November 2022; Western Fire Chiefs Association)

    Like many, I was overwhelmed by the catastrophic fires recently in Los Angeles. I felt obligated to dive into the actual history of fires in my home state of California. While I thought I had a decent understanding of Native wisdom of forest management to clean the forest and prevent mega-fires, I quickly realized during my last couple of weeks of research that there was a lot more to understand. I hope this episode helps you to better understand the long history of California fires and how important native wisdom was to prevent the current biblical force fires by having more "good" (significantly smaller) cultural burns.

    "We need more burning by good fire-a lot more-while pushing for less by bad fire." -Stephen Pyne

    In summary, it's not a water problem; it's a fuel problem.

    Here are some important references I mentioned in the episode:

    Fire Historian, author, and Arizona State University emeritus professor Stephen Pyne's "Fire Fundamentals: A Primer on Wildland Fire for Journalists"

    Coalition of Prescribed Fire Councils (great source of graphics for statistical summaries per year for US fires)
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