Job Development Opportunity From the Ashes

“Regardless of the possible errors in this study, we have to conclude that prehistorically a large amount of California burned every year. From 1950-1999 the average annual area burned by wildfire in all vegetation types in California was approximately 102,000 ha/year. This amounts to 5.6 percent of what would have burned during a similar period of time during the prehistoric era …” 

Stephens, Scott L., Robert E. Martin & Nicholas E. Clinton. “Prehistoric fire area and emissions from California’s forests, woodlands, shrublands, and grasslands.” Forest Ecology and Management 251, 2007.

The statement above, from a 2007 paper by researchers at UC Berkeley’s Division of Ecosystem Science, confirms one of the two insights I’ve gleaned during the long season of smoke inhalation we’ve experienced in Northern California. The insight is something that Native Americans have known for millennia. It is simply this: our landscape was meant to burn.

I had long known this in theory, of course, but as I’ve read a bit during this season of fire I realized I had been willfully innocent about matters of scale. If we are to believe the Berkeley researchers quoted above, and I see no reason not to believe them, millions of acres used to burn every year in California. Doing some simple math, if 102,000 hectares is 5.6 percent of some larger number of hectares that “ought” to burn, then that number of hectares is approximately 1.8 million, which converts to – get this – 4.5 million acres. There were newspaper headlines declaring four million acres as a record this summer, but apparently, fire on that scale should be seen as normal for California even if fires in the style we’ve just experienced should not.

Much of the burning in prehistoric times, moreover, appears to have been through fires actively fostered by native people. And Native Californians continue to set fires as part of their traditional cultural practices. As Yurok basket weaver Margo Robbins puts it in a January 24 New York Times article, “The land needs fire in order to be healthy.”

But this year’s huge, uncontrolled fires have felt anything but healthy. The miasma of smoke appalled and depressed me, as it did everyone I know. Still, through the miasma comes the realization that we need to see a very great deal more controlled burning, starting right away, to avoid the uncontrolled, terrifying burns of the current fire season. Government leaders seem to increasingly “get” the need to burn, and to otherwise reduce fuel sources. In fact, an MOU between the State of California and the US Forest Service signed just this August commits both parties to “scale up vegetation treatment to one million acres of forest and wildlands annually by 2025.” Whether this will be possible in lawsuit-happy California is an open question, but it’s a laudable goal.

So, once again, that’s the first insight. We need to see a whole lot more controlled burning to avoid uncontrolled fire catastrophes like the one this year. The second insight brings me closer to the central topic of this blog, and here it is. In order to get anywhere close to the amount of prescribed burning we need, or, as the recently signed State and Forest Service MOU puts it in such a wonderfully anodyne way, in order to get to “scaled up vegetation treatment” (the scale is millions of acres, folks), we are going to need more people out there working to manage the land.  

In early September, as you can see in the first photo connected to this post, I had the chance to look from on high at the fire smoke enveloping the entire northern half of our state. But as I looked out the airplane window, I was thinking mostly about a labor issue. The labor issue had to do with the use of prison inmates to fight fires in California. Much like I had been unaware of the sheer scale of fires during prehistoric times in California, I had been equally unaware, until I started reading, of just how dependent the state has become on prison labor to contain fires. It turns out that crews from 43 prison “conservation camps” have been allowed to become indispensable to California’s firefighting operations. As efforts are rightly made to reduce prison populations, the State’s access to inmates it can pay a pittance to fight fires has also been greatly reduced. COVID has not helped, either.

I had also never really thought about the difficulties faced by former inmate firefighters unable to deploy their dangerously won skills upon release from prison. The video by McClatchy’s Ryan Sabalow attached to this Sacramento Bee article provides some vivid footage of what it looks like to fight fires in California on the ground. The video also centers the voices of inmate firefighters and in particular the clear voice of former inmate firefighter Fernando Herrera, who, now that he is a free man, has been barred from the important work he was trained to do in prison. In Herrera’s words, “I honestly care about my community and I want to help change the world, you know, but I can’t because I’m bound by my past, by my childhood, not even my past but my childhood.”

It’s heartbreaking to hear this man speak. It’s been painful to put up with this summer’s smoke and the lurid orange daytime skies just down Interstate 80 in the Bay Area. But here’s the hopeful piece. If millions of acres in California need to burn in a controlled way each year, as seems to be the case, and if we’ve gotten to the place where we’ve underinvested enough in forest management that we need to rely on prison labor to fight fires, which is definitely the case, then it seems obvious that there is a job to be done.

I’m not just saying that things have to get better (they don’t). Instead, I mean literally that the situation in the forests is a huge job development opportunity during a time of widespread unemployment. Why not get more people, and in particular more youth, involved with forest management? Why not expand the California Conservation Corps? Why not make forest management one of the pillars of a national service plan of the type former South Bend Mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has suggested? Why not clear the debris of labor market barriers from the feet of the aforementioned Fernando Herrera (and many like him), so that they can have a chance to apply their hard-won fire management skills? Why not really listen, for a change, to Native American leaders like Margo Robbins when they advocate for more burning in the right locations and in the right seasons? We have a deeply troubled forest landscape right now in California, but one way of looking at this is as an opportunity for healing, for employment, for enterprise development, and for youth service.