In early September 2020, a wall of flames whipped through Big Creek Canyon northeast of Fresno, Calif., approaching Shaver Lake and the small village on its western shore.

The Creek Fire was one of the most aggressive wildfires that many of the state's firefighters had ever battled. Over several months it burned more than 379,000 acres, making it one of the largest single fires in California history, according to news accounts.

But while Shaver Lake was directly in the fire's path that September, the village and the forest surrounding the lake were mostly spared from its wrath.

Land and fire experts say they know why: For decades, leaders with the utility responsible for maintaining the forest have been actively engaged in what is called "total-ecosystem management" — they remove dead trees and set small, prescribed burns to thin the ground cover, greatly reducing the fuel available for mega-scorchers like the Creek Fire.

More than four year later, massive fires around Los Angeles have burned more than 35,000 acres around the nation's second most populous city, killing at least ten people and destroying thousands of homes, businesses, and public buildings.

And while the topography is different — the fires around L.A. are burning the chaparral landscape in the mountains and foothills around the city, not in forests — the lesson is the same, said Edward Ring, director or water and energy policy at the conservative California Policy Center: The L.A. fires have gotten out of hand largely due to poor land management.

"Historically, that land would either be deliberately burned off by the indigenous tribes or it would be grazed or it would be sparked by lightning strikes," said Ring, an advocate of continuing to manage the chaparral land's oaks and scrub brush with grazing animals, mechanical thinning, and controlled burns.

But that hasn't happened, he said, due to public policies, bureaucratic resistance, and pushback from environmental activists. The result: The L.A. foothills were primed to burn.

"If those things had been done, or were being done regularly, you're still going to get fires in Los Angeles if something happens with the wind and a spark," Ring said. "But you're not going to get something like this horrible disaster that we're dealing with now, because there just wouldn't be as much fuel."

There has been plenty of blame assigned in the days since the fires erupted. President-elect Donald Trump, in posts on Truth Social, has accused California governor Gavin Newsom and President Joe Biden of "gross incompetence and mismanagement." Trump's primary concerns revolve around a long-standing feud he's had with "Newscum" over a plan to move "beautiful, clean, fresh water" from the state's north to the drier south; he's seemingly arguing that with more water, firefighters and residents would have more ammunition to fight the flames.

Newsom's office has accused Trump of "playing politics" while L.A. burns.

Others have taken aim at Los Angeles County Fire Department leaders for shipping surplus firefighting gear to Ukraine in 2022, and for allegedly prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion over technological innovations and enhancing community resilience.

To many on the left, there is only one real culprit for the fires: climate change.

Of course, the cause of the fires and the reasons why they've been so destructive are multi-faceted; the strong and dusty Santa Ana winds that blow from the east "have nothing to do with climate change" and are part of L.A. mythology, Ring said.

And while mainstream media outlets have largely dismissed Trump's concerns as mostly noise that have little to do with actually fighting the fires, Ring said the president-elect isn't necessarily wrong. The state, he said, does need to send more water south, and because it hasn't, Southern California operates on what could be described as a just-in-time water system. "They don't have the pumps and pipes necessary to deliver surges of water to these mountain neighborhoods and these foothill neighborhoods," he said.

But Ring and others say the biggest problem that has allowed the fires to do as much damage as they have is tied to a lack of land management in the L.A. Basin. He blames the problem on state and local government bureaucracies, lawmakers in the pocket of environmentalist and renewable energy lobbyists, and legal challenges from activist groups that can grind the ability of landowners to manage their property to a halt.

Environmental groups, including the California Chaparral Institute, the Sierra Club, and the California Center for Biological Diversity, have aggressively fought against thinning and burning that state's chaparral landscape. In a 2020 letter to lawmakers, they argued that "adding even more fire to native chaparral shrublands" is not an acceptable policy.

"They make it virtually impossible to do controlled burns of any kind. They make it virtually impossible to do mechanical thinning. And they make it very difficult and in many cases impossible to even have grazing on your property," Ring said.

"Everything requires an environmental impact statement, and everything requires permits from the [South Coast] Air Quality Management District," he continued. "All of these things are just impenetrable bureaucracies. They just tie everybody up in knots."

Ring said a focus on single-species management, rather than total-ecosystem management, makes it easy for environmentalist lawyers to find a single bird or lizard that could be affected by a land management project to put the project on hold.

"The Endangered Species Act and the California Environment Quality Act have both turned into monsters that have not only prevented any kind of rational land management, but they've actually had the perverse, opposite effect in many respects," he said.

In addition to roadblocks thrown up by government bureaucracies and environmental groups, there's also a lingering distrust among the public of using fire to fight fire.

While fire is part of the natural ecosystem, for much of the 20th century even wildland firefighters viewed it as an unwanted evil, hence Smokey Bear, created in the 1940s, warning that "Only YOU Can Prevent Forest Fires." While wildland firefighters have since changed that perspective, urban firefighting still largely prioritizes extinguishing fires fast.

Getting buy-in from a now traumatized public to do more controlled burns in the urbanized foothills around L.A. will likely require "a remarkable change in mentality," said Stephen Pyne, an Arizona State University fire historian.

"People who live in cities have the urban fire service mentality, and they're very suspicious of prescribed burns or other kinds of fire management programs," Pyne said. "It may be okay in Alaska or Yellowstone, but they don't want it in their backyards."

Before the 20th century, wildfires burned millions of acres in California every year on average because people couldn't' do much to stop it. "California is built to burn," Pyne said.

"I have no doubt that climate change is amplifying the effects. That's a given," he added. "But all of the fundamentals have been in place there for millions of years."

Pyne said Californians and their leaders need to seriously grapple with the reality that they've built big cities and dense communities in a region prone to fire.

Marc Joffe, a policy analyst and fellow with the California Policy Center, said he gets frustrated by people who argue the fires are "because of climate change. We've got to fight climate change because we're having more and more of these horrible events." He called it a "toxic" argument that doesn't allow for actionable in-the-moment solutions.

"There is absolutely nothing that California politicians can do to meaningfully impact the rate at which the climate is warming," he said, adding that in the meantime wildfires are happening and "they will continue to happen."

In addition to deregulating land management, Ring said California leaders should prioritize burying powerlines — which can be the source of fires. "Instead of spending money on renewables, they could spend that money on undergrounding powerlines in fire-prone neighborhoods."

He also said building a more robust water infrastructure would be worthwhile, though he noted that "you can't drown a fire" as big as the biggest L.A. blazes.

Pyne added that hardening homes and developing an energy system where power can be more easily be rerouted would be valuable. Biden said Thursday that one reason some L.A. fire hydrants were dry this week was that power was cut to some water pumps.

Pyne compared the partisan finger-pointing to "dueling banjos going back and forth."

"What you need to do is a bunch of stuff. It's no one thing," he said.

But, he added, simply building up fire departments to respond when massive fires break out in densely-populated area won't cut it anymore.

"We can't just rely on emergency response," he said. "We've crossed that threshold."

THIS NEWS ITEM IS PRESENTED BY
Putnam BOOKS

California’s ‘Impenetrable’ Environmental Bureaucracy Left L.A. Hills Primed to Burn

Nearby Fresno avoided disaster a few years ago when a deadly fire threatened. The difference? Fresno practices ... READ MORE

A message from Putnam Books

The newest NUMA Files® novel

A new, terrifying world order is being plotted…Unless the NUMA crew can stop this code of desolation in the latest in Clive Cussler's #1 New York Times bestselling series.

Shop Now