The California blackouts are the result of bad policy and poor forest management. Chuck DeVore writes:
To better understand how we came to today’s blackout, it is useful to look to the past. When the gold rush led to modern California, early photographers chronicled the landscape. In George E. Gruell’s 2001 book, “Fire in Sierra Nevada Forests: A Photographic Interpretation of Ecological Change Since 1849” the wildlife biologist depicted a California countryside of grassland with isolated stands of pines and oaks. The native Americans in the region frequently used fire to shape the landscape to increase the food available for them, as not a lot of sustenance grows on a dense forest floor.
In this environment of frequent fire, brush was thinned, and the first pine branches started just out of reach of a typical low-intensity grass fire. But with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Americans came a thriving economy and the order of government. Trees were useful and valuable, and therefore harvested. Fire was a threat to towns and cities, and thus, suppressed.
For decades, up until the 1970s, California would harvest and replant about as much wood as could be grown through an abundance of sunshine, snow, and rain. But in the 1990s, concern over logging’s effect on the spotted owl (largely misplaced, as time would tell) led to a massive slowdown in the timber harvest, especially on the federal lands that make up about 60 percent of California’s forests.
With a decline in the harvest came a decline in the allied efforts to clear brush, build and maintain access roads and firebreaks. This led inexorably to a decades’ long build-up in the fuel load. Federal funds set aside for increasingly unpopular forest management efforts were instead shifted to fire-suppression expenses.
[Chuck DeVore, “The Lights Are Out in California, And That Was the Plan All Along,” The Federalist, October 9]
