Was Trump Right about California’s Forest Management? No, but He May Have a Point
Layout by Jackie Ng
This summer, forest fires continued to rage across the western United States; for the fifth consecutive year California experienced a record-breaking fire season. Clearly, there is no simple solution to prevent or even limit these yearly catastrophes. In 2018 President Trump famously and callously called upon the State of California and Governor Gavin Newsom to better manage its forests to prevent these huge recurring fires. Trump was quoted saying that the State needed to “rake” and “clean” the forest floors, something he claimed the President of Finland told him they do in their “forest nation” to prevent fires. This statement was mocked and admonished by scientists, firefighters, and late-night hosts. Much of what Trump had prescribed to California was misleading: a majority of forest land in California is federally managed or privately owned as opposed to by the state so he is in effect criticizing the job his own administration is doing. In addition, Trump was incorrect for primarily blaming forest management because most of the land burned by the fires is not forest but grassland and chaparral; additionally other American states experience just as bad fires just as bad if not worse than California. However, it is undeniable that poor forest management in California is part of what’s causing the current mega blazes.
This past summer I had the opportunity to see for myself California’s forests and see if Trump’s comments had any truth to them. And to be fair his comments did make some sense: the forest was so dry it felt like a matchbox. A lot of this is due to the drought California is currently suffering from and has been for the last few years. In fact, California has been in drought-conditions for eight of the past ten years leading some experts to call the current situation a “megadrought”. The reality is that California, with its Mediterranean climate, has always been prone to droughts and by extent fires, but the role humans - and by extension, climate change - are having on the lack of consistent rain cannot be ignored. Heavy rains in the winters of both 2017 and 2018 helped relieve a reservoir crisis but did not sufficiently add enough moisture to the forests, seeing as both those years were followed by record fire seasons. While hiking through the Tahoe National Forest, it was noticeable just how many dead trees there appeared to be. Everywhere trunks were fallen and the wood from these trees was splintered and appeared to have rotted – the wood powdered to the touch. Noticeable as well was just how combustible this wood was, when attempting to start a campfire we found that this wood while effective for starting a fire burned extremely quickly, not providing the desirable embers wood with more moisture would. The cause of these tree mortalities and subsequent wood rot can once again be attributed to drought, which denies the tree much needed moisture and aids insect infestations (such as the bark beetle) that are extremely effective at felling trees.
So what can be done to address California’s increasingly worse fire season and the damage it brings? The type of forest management most often prescribed to the forest of California is not raking the forest but thinning it out and using prescribed burns to lessen the amount of potential “fuel” for a fire. Experts now criticize the National Forest Service's expensive fire suppression strategy that had been in place for decades. This plan has led to packed forests with too many trees per square mile and not enough water, leading to an increase in insect infestation. But the reality is that fires have always burned through California and are essential for the ecosystem. Instead of prevention, policy should focus on mitigating the possible damage of fires by preventing rural developments that bring not only housing into fire-prone areas but through the replacement of aging power lines – prime culprits of starting blazes.
The role played by climate change on California fires, however, is similarly unavoidable. More extreme heat and infrequent rain does nothing but exacerbate the fires. Climate change is just as much a political issue as a scientific one. We can see by the way Trump used California’s forest management as a scapegoat instead of addressing climate change. The 2020 presidential election often featured much discourse on climate change with both candidates seeing it as an opportunity to gain supporters. Trump played the role of the typical conservative climate-change denier hoping to inspire support from parts of the nation for whom the fossil-fuel industry is essential. Biden happily leaned into the opposing position describing Trump as a “climate arsonist” and calling for the usual climate reforms Democrats have advocated for such as the Paris Accord. But despite Biden’s strong rhetoric, the reality of the American electoral system has proven too strong a roadblock in the past. The Obama years marked a pattern of big promising plans compromised to the point of futility. The coming years will be telling in determining the direction of climate policy in the nation and may have a lasting impact on the climate we experience for generations to come.
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