The state needs to liquidate 90% of its forests ASAP, because reducing carbon emissions and blaming political enemies aint gonna turn California into a tropical climate. It's an arid state prone to hundred-year droughts, and it's not the place where you want to see lots of trees, not unless you also enjoy seeing the occasional massive wall of flame devouring the countryside.
Agricultural and Prescribed Burn Notices are currently approved in the vast majority of the state [1]. and you can see from the historical data [2] that only Aug - Oct have significant restrictions.
To those downvoting - this is a town-owned parcel in my neighborhood, just a few miles down the hill from the CZU complex evacuation zone. https://i.imgur.com/PVUoUVg.jpg
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres[...] California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."
https://massivesci.com/articles/megafire-california-climate-...
Seems like you're talking out your ass about something you don't understand. To make the claim that "90% of California's forest shouldn't exist"(paraphrasing, correct me if I misinterpreted) as you did in one of your other comments is absolutely absurd. It illustrates a complete lack of understanding regarding the extremely varied and countless ecosystems present in California. California is not "a desert", California "has a lot of desert".
To be clear though: It definitely HAS been proven that the absurd amounts of fire suppression California has engaged in over the past several decades has indeed increased the severity of wildfires[1].
[1] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES14...
Been thinking of trying to organize something to clear out some of that crap. I know our neighbors take it upon themselves to cut park trees that encroach on their properties.
Given the close calls I'm really surprised that there isn't a strong rallying around removing fuel.
Can't build housing in cities with MASSIVE housing shortages because we need to "preserve historical character" of the laundromats that's currently there wasting space.
Can't cut down trees or do controlled burns to prevent turning much of California into a hellfire for months because "conservationism"
All of this is of course mainly tied to maintaining property values. And keeping the wrong people out of the community.
Why are people such selfish assholes?
(Rolling eyes).
Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. This tunnel vision is defeatening. Enough is enough.
This is like claiming that the solution to remove computer bugs is to smash the computer against the floor. See?. No bugs survived.
And now the myth of the good savage.
I don't think that what (maybe) worked for a population of, lets say, 20.000 Ohlone Indians with bronze age tools will be scalable to solve the problems of the entire LA population. Do you think that we have the same complexity of problems, same longevity, or that we use the land in the same way that indians did?
We have better tools now. Ecology, science, knowledge based in facts, satellites without turtles added, scientific police. Maybe we just could try to use it instead?
California is no longer as big a source of lumber as it once was.
"According to the California Forestry Association, tree density in the Sierra Nevada is too high when compared with the region’s historical rates, creating an elevated fire hazard. It estimates there was an average of 40 trees per acre in the Sierras roughly 150 years ago but puts that number today at hundreds of trees per acre [...] The U.S. Forest Service estimates that California has 129 million dead trees, most in the central and southern Sierras. Insects and drought are to blame for the high numbers."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/03/california-timber-firms-mayb...
But California makes this incredibly costly and difficult to do, even on private land. You need to submit 500 pages of paperwork for each cut, and the state has been notorious in dragging its heels to approve these harvesting plans.
In terms of the fascination with "old growth", an old growth tree is just a tree of a certain diameter, and these tend to survive forest fires.
Really the problem in California is that a lot of people from the East Coast have moved here and decided that forests were some precious resource that needs to be preserved as in Maine, rather than the dangerous pest that trees are in arid climates.
They just never got the memo that California is not New England and the role played by trees in our ecosystem is very different. California needs trees like Australia needs rabbits.
And so now we have 130 million dead trees, ready to kill hundreds of people, cause billions in property damage, and destroy air quality in the state, just so people can preserve these unscientific romantic notions of "preserving forests", when our top public policy priority should be to reduce the amount of land covered by forests back to safe levels.
The wounded souls crying about greedy timber companies clear cutting forests in the 17th Century or whatnot are strangely silent about the Ohlone regularly burning down 10 million acres a year. Because the Ohlone realized that in the arid western U.S. (what used to be called "the great American desert"), trees were dangerous elements that needed to be suppressed.
this is for large-scale harvesting. I'm seeing <2 months from public comment close to THP approval, usually 2 weeks [1]. how long do you think is reasonable?
individual lot tree removal is a pretty straightforward form [2]. provide reason, site plan, maybe arborist report, etc.
[1] https://caltreesplans.resources.ca.gov/Caltrees/Report/ShowR...
[2] https://www.placer.ca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/40240/Tree-Per...
