Expert Veterans Of California Wildfires Say Media Again Misses Real Culprit Behind

Experts who have studied California’s wildfires for years say the media is once again blaming climate change and ignoring the role of poor forest management in sparking the Canadian wildfires that have sent a haze of smoke drifting south over at least a dozen states in the U.S. this week.

More than 100 million people live in areas where air quality alerts have been issued caused by over 400 wildfires reportedly burning in Canada. Bad forest management driven by misguided environmentalism, not just climate change, is the cause, the critics claim.

“I do not feel the media is educating us about the science that affects fires,” Jim Steele told Cowboy State Daily. “They’re just trying to push a catastrophe narrative that’s been going on way too long.”

Steele, an ecologist who served as director of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada field campus, said the forest fires in Alberta appear to be driven by weather patterns, forest management practices, and population increase akin to California wildfires over the past two decades.

According to The Globe and Mail editorial board, Canada’s forests had been filled with kindling-like deadfall after years of fire suppression, logging, and replanting that have left the area in an unnatural state and resulted in widespread wildfires. Rather than using tools available to mitigate and contain the damage caused by disastrous wildfires, policies from federal and state officials stripped control to limit the accretion of flammable vegetation in the name of environmentalism.

But such problems have persisted in California for decades, primarily due to poor forest management lobbied by climate alarmists who litigate to prevent practices like timber harvesting, underbrush removal, and controlled burns. Instead, millions of acres of forestry in the state have been blackened by wildfires while damaging or decimating thousands of homes. 

Prehistoric California used to annually burn anywhere between 4.4 million to 11 million acres, according to Pro Publica. Between 1982 and 1998, state land officials burned an average of about 30,000 acres a year. By 2017, the number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres per year. The state would need to burn 20 million acres to reach manageable levels again, according to Nature Sustainability.

California’s forests are overgrown by design. 

State officials regulate forest management tactics while environmentalists in California push policies to increase forest area to help draw more carbon from the atmosphere without a plan to clear dead, decaying trees and undergrowth, leading to a massive increase in forest density and fuels.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom glosses over the idea that climate change may have nothing to do with the state’s wildfire problem, and common-sense measures that could impact the state’s ability to prevent massive infernos. Instead, the fault either lands on climate change, the utility companies, or most recently The California Globe heard Newsom blame the state’s annual wildfires season on fossil fuel companies.

In 2018, Reuters reported that California’s land management and human encroachment on natural forest land contributed to the uptick in visible damage caused by nearly 8,000 wildfires across approximately 2 million acres.

In 2020 alone, over 1,000 wildfires statewide reportedly killed at least 33 people, 10,000 homes and other structures were destroyed, and more than 4 million acres burned, which the state has not seen since the 1800s, according to reports. 

An analysis from the University of Davis showed fuel load-related variables, with dryness and wind, also played key roles. Nearly 60% of the fires were reportedly caused by human arsonists, vehicles, power lines, campfires, or unknown causes, while lightning sparked the rest.

“In these ecosystems, reducing burned area is a cause of the current catastrophic trends, not a solution to them,” the authors said.

Overall economic losses amassed more than $19 billion, and firefighting costs totaled approximately $2.1 billion reported.

State officials spent an estimated $1.2 billion on wildfire suppression costs in the fiscal years ending June 30, 2020 — a significant cost above the years between 2012 and 2020 as forest and wildland fires have grown in scale and intensity.

Last year, however, California saw the fewest acres burned during its peak wildfire season since 2019, Cal Matters reported. State emergency and fire authorities attribute roughly the 363,000 acres that burned in 2022 were due to fair summer weather and $2.8 billion spent over the last two years on forest management.

Still, about 46% of California’s land area — or about 48 million acres — is owned by federal agencies, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis of local, state, and federal public land ownership data. Much of which agencies like the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management use for preservation, recreation, and natural resources.

In 2020, Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of the Sierra Nevada mountain communities in Northern California told the California Globe the U.S. Forest Service used to be a profitable federal agency until the mid-1970s, shortly after Congress enacted the National Environmental Policy Act. 

Often referred to as the “Magna Carta of environmental policy,” the law required more bureaucracy to assess the potential impacts new projects could have on the environment.  

“The U.S. Forest Service used to be a profitable federal agency,” McClintock told Grimes. “But 40 years ago, we replaced these sound management practices with what can only be described as a doctrine of benign neglect.” 

McClintock worked for years to reform the law, which took effect at the turn of the decade, to require government officials to use well-established and time-tested forest management practices for responsible forest management.

“Ponderous, Byzantine laws and regulations administered by a growing cadre of ideological zealots in our land management agencies promised to save the environment,” he added. “The advocates of this doctrine have dominated our law, our policies, our courts, and our federal agencies ever since.”