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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15239 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 6, 2025

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What's the story on them apparently not doing routine controlled burns? What considerations are at play?

The Forest Service tried to get what's called a Categorical Exclusion from NEPA for controlled burns and other brush removal. The Sierra Club sured (Sierra Club v Bosworth, 2007).

Of course, the court case never actually turned on (or even entertained) the object-level question of whether those actions were a good idea. It was all procedural -- whether the Forest Service performed the administratively-appropriate reviews and so forth.

The result of all that is that the Forest Service needs to perform an EIS with lamentably predictable results.

lamentably predictable results.

I personally wouldn't have predicted the magnitude of the results. I was imagining situations like "this year's rainy season was wetter than average and spawned too much growth, but by the time we get a months-long analysis done it'll already be the dry season again and it'll be too late until next year". Reality is "paying attention to particular seasons is pointless because the average time between the beginning NEPA analysis and beginning a prescribed burn is (pdf warning) 4.7 YEARS". If there's an EIS required then the lead-up to a controlled burn is 7.2 years. The NEPA phase of the delay is about 1.3 years in the average case and 2.5 in the average EIS case, but then there's more years of delay before the NEPA approval turns into forest service activity and more years before the treatment begins.

I do get that there should be some analysis. I grew up visiting Bandelier National Monument, where we learned from the rangers about how the old policy of trying to squelch every small forest fire had contributed to the undergrowth buildup that led to the devastating La Mesa Fire (fun fact: the fire only got to Los Alamos chemical explosives labs, and the nuclear material got lucky). But even after paying attention to undergrowth buildup, they still later had an equally large fire in 1996, a bigger fire in 2011, and most horrifyingly a bigger fire resulting from a "controlled" burn going out of control in 2000. It's really hard to keep hundreds of thousands of acres from occasionally becoming a tinderbox without preemptively burning a lot of the buildup in huge swaths, and yet it's also really hard to safely start and manage huge fires in an almost-tinderbox, and even in a location where the worst-case scenario is a radioactive forest fire we're having trouble getting it right.

What I don't get is how a years-long analysis could possibly be useful. The important timescales here are days and weeks (as weather conditions change), months (as seasons change), and decades (as climate and construction patterns change). Anything in the years-long category seems like it should be too slow to keep up with any of the former changes, in which case why can't we just just reuse the last scheduled-every-couple-decades analysis immediately upon noticing a problem, rather than commissioning and waiting for a new one? I'm a big SpaceX fan, and always tempted to unfairly rag on the FAA when they take months to approve a Starship test flight, but at least when they're slow there's always some flight change or prior-test analysis to justify taking a "long" time; the FAA has also approved a launch license almost immediately after the previous test, in a case where the previous test had no unanticipated failures and the next test wasn't adding any massive changes. Is that kind of turnaround just completely unimaginable for environmental review for the Forest Service?

What I don't get is how a years-long analysis could possibly be useful.

It’s not useful, but that doesn’t matter. The text of NEPA requires agencies to describe “any reasonably foreseeable environmental effects of the proposed agency action.” Try sitting down for 30 seconds to think about all of the reasonably foreseeable environmental effects of setting the environment on fire.

Photos taken seconds (months) before disaster: https://www.kqed.org/science/1994972/forest-service-halts-prescribed-burns-california-worth-risk

This week, the U.S. Forest Service directed its employees in California to stop prescribed burning “for the foreseeable future,” a directive that officials said is meant to preserve staff and equipment to fight wildfires if needed.

“I think the Forest Service is worried about the risk of something bad happening [with a prescribed burn]. And they’re willing to trade that risk — which they will be blamed for — for increased risks on wildfires,” Wara said. In the event of a wildfire, “if something bad happens, they’re much less likely to be blamed because they can point the finger at Mother Nature.”

You can only backburn at certain times of year. It worsens air quality. There are risks of it getting out of hand. But if you don't do it...

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