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Comment by dmoy | Hacker News Reader

It is worth mentioning that many states do significant amounts of controlled burns as a routine thing. Growing up in the Midwest, it was just a common thing, nothing out of the ordinary. I think in the southeast, it's even more common. It really helps limit the damage when an uncontrolled fire does start

For some reason out here in the West Coast, there's an aversion to doing enough controlled burns. I'm not sure why, though someone pointed out a federal vs state thing to me once.

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Is the federal vs. state thing “the federal government controls most of the land at issue in the west and decides policies, not the states”.

Because that's actually the situation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_lands#/media/File%3A...

Yea I think that's it

Though I don't know the exact details on that w.r.t. controlled burns, because parts of the federal government are definitely very on board with controlled burns (like say the US Forest Service). I dunno what's going on there.

i believe one of the issues with controlled burns is that there are specific conditions necessary for them to be controllable - and with the current state of the california fire season, it's actually really difficult to set them up.

here's a study on how climate change is reducing the window for prescribed burns: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00993-1

Grew up in national forest, and my grandfather was a logger in the 70s. I remember him and the other old timers complaining the newer PhD's the forest service was bringing in were making dumb excuses for not doing control burn.

I'll never forget my thoughts at the time: "Those PhD's are so smart, surely they are right and these old-timers are just being curmudgeonly"... then years later the forest went up and over 450,000 acres burned, and then not many years later, another roughly 538,000 acres went up.

It was then when I realized how my putting of academia on a pedestal was a major mistake, and then I went and apologized to my grandfather for being dismissive.

My terse summary is that the forest service likes to ship people around, so they aren't in their local forest, so they end up in ecosystems they don't understand as well as the locals but because of their tendency to look down their nose at the locals, they would dismiss knowledge that was trying to be given to them.

I love the forest service, don't get me wrong (much rather have that than BLM!!!) but there are some major flaws in the forest management bureaucracy. To their credit, those fires basically forced change on them because it became too obvious their previous methods were so wrong.

For a while, the plan really was, as the article states, suppression. My grandfather (and great grandfather) worked for the FS and it was only later in his career that they started doing controlled burns again.

Where I live in Oregon, part of "why don't they do more?" is that there simply wasn't the money to do it, from what I understand, along with some of the other technical reasons mentioned in other comments.

well, there may be layers to this.. those PhDs are on the front line to make statements, but the driving force was policy. And that policy was in the original bargain of USA forest lands, and that is that forests are primarily for timber harvesting, and also bring other benefits.

You can see this for yourself by reading the laws and policy discussions that created the US National Forest system.

The obvious follow up to that is why don't the feds do controlled burns?

See my comment elsewhere: money.

Also, they need to be careful. There was a controlled burn in New Mexico that got out of control and caused a lot of damage.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/05/2...

Local authorities can be very distrustful of government types. Here's a situation where a Forest Service employee was arrested and indicted after a prescribed burn went slightly awry:

https://wildfiretoday.com/2024/04/01/93539/

In California to do a controlled burn you needed(need?) to schedule it way in advance because of environmental review.

Sounds fine, except that CARB can declare that day a clean air day and ban burns on the same day.

Both of these things individually are fine but together it's a problem.

The difference is, of course, rain. The entire Southeast is wet, wet, wet, and most of the Midwest isn't much drier. The idea that you might go a whole year without suitable conditions for controlled burns is, well, essentially implausible. A summer, maybe once a decade. But starting around Thanksgiving and running into May or even early June, it rains and rains and rains. At some point during winter, you will be able to burn.

The federal-state coordination, the federal interagency coordination, the CARB hold over things... trying to do that stuff out West is far more difficult.

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