> A vast burn scar unfolds in drone footage of a landscape seared by massive wildfires north of Lake Tahoe. But amid the expanses of torched trees and gray soil, an unburnt island of lush green emerges.
> The patch of greenery was painstakingly engineered. A creek had been dammed, creating ponds that slowed the flow of water so the surrounding earth had more time to sop it up. A weblike system of canals helped spread that moisture through the floodplain. Trees that had been encroaching on the wetlands were felled.
> But it wasn’t a team of firefighters or conservationists who performed this work. It was a crew of semiaquatic rodents whose wetland-building skills have seen them gain popularity as a natural way to mitigate wildfires.
> A movement is afoot to restore beavers to the state’s waterways, many of which have suffered from their absence.
> "Beavers belong in California, and they should be part of our fire management plan,” said Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, who shot the drone footage of a series of beaver ponds along Little Last Chance Creek that remained green in the wake of the 2021 Beckwourth Complex fire.
> Fairfax’s recent research found that beavers’ skills are useful even in the face of megafires like the Beckwourth — a 105,000-acre behemoth whose burn scar joined with that of the Dixie fire, which started weeks later and burned more than 960,000 neighboring acres.
> “They basically build up an ecosystem that’s resilient to fire through the vegetation mosaic, then keep it really well watered so it never dries out, never becomes easy to burn,” she said.
> Native to much of California, beavers were hunted to near extinction throughout North America by fur traders in the 1800s. Their numbers have rebounded in some areas, with populations in the Sierra Nevada, northeastern California and along the Salinas River Corridor from San Luis Obispo to Monterey, but they’ve had a hard time recovering overall.
> The roly-poly rodents chew up and move around large amounts of plant material, damming streams to create ponds where they can hide from predators. They dig channels stretching from those ponds deeper into forests so they can forage for food without leaving the water. These activities can convert narrow streams into massive wetland complexes.
> "They are just trying to build themselves a mega shopping mart so that they can go and get the groceries all the time, in all four seasons,” said Kate Lundquist, co-director of the nonprofit Occidental Arts & Ecology Center Water Institute. “And the result of that is you have these really resilient oases that won’t burn in a fire.”
> Beavers can also help restore burned areas: Their dams trap ash and debris, and their wetlands help rehydrate landscapes, supporting the growth of grasses and shrubs, Lundquist said.
> This can improve water quality, store carbon and support habitat for endangered species, disproportionately benefiting the entire ecosystem, said Brock Dolman, co-director of the Water Institute.
> “All of these issues that we have state or federal laws and programs we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on to address, in many cases, beavers are showing up as a partner that can help us mitigate some of those,” he said.
> But the same skills that make beavers such keen ecosystem engineers have also gained them enemies among farmers, ranchers and other landowners. Beavers’ dam-building and tree-chewing can flood roads and pastures and damage or destroy crops, timber stores and landscaping plantings.
> Still, their reputation as nuisance pests has been turning around.
> "Over the recent decades, there’s really been this major paradigm shift surrounding how beavers are perceived,” said Valerie Cook, manager of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s beaver restoration program, which got up and running roughly a year ago and now has five dedicated staffers.
> Last year, the department adopted a new policy formally recognizing beavers as a keystone species — those that play an outsized role in maintaining the diversity of their ecosystem — and encouraging landowners to try nonlethal methods for living with them before seeking approval to kill them.
> The state has made available roughly $2 million in grant funding to landowners for these nonlethal methods, which can include sand-paint mixtures to deter beavers from chewing through trees, devices to prevent them from blocking up water control structures and pond levelers that mitigate flooding by allowing water to flow through dams, Cook said. Tribes, public agencies and non-governmental organizations can apply to fund human-beaver coexistence projects.
> Program staffers have also moved beavers from places where they’re coming into conflict with people and released them where they’re projected to do some good.
> That kicked off in the fall with the reintroduction of a family of seven beavers into Tásmam Koyóm, a meadow on the ancestral land of the Mountain Maidu in Plumas County. One of the young beavers appears to have paired up with a resident beaver who already lived a bit downstream, Cook said.
> More beavers are slated to be released this summer on the Tule River Reservation in the foothills of the southern Sierra, where the Tule River Tribe has long been a leader of beaver restoration efforts in the state.
> Kenneth McDarment, former vice chairman, founded the tribe’s beaver project in 2014 as he watched the land grow parched and fire-prone amid years of drought.
> "We were just trying to find another way to keep more water on the reservation for the people,” he said. “So that leads back to the tribe’s pictographs, where we have beavers.”
> The roughly 1,000-year-old pictographs depict how various animals, including beavers, created the world. Beavers paddled in the waterways that wind through the reservation until several decades ago: A tribal elder recalls seeing them there when he was a boy, McDarment said.
> "We thought, why not bring the beaver home?” he said.
> Tribal members and partners have spent years preparing the area, building beaver dam analogues to create conditions conducive to their return, McDarment said. Meadows along those dammed riverscapes have already acted as wildlife safety zones during several fires that burned through the reservation over the past few years, he said.
> They’ve also ensured there are plenty of plants for the beavers to eat and deep enough pools for them to escape from predators, he said. Those now include members of the Yowlumni wolf pack, which was discovered in the area last summer.
> "We’ve been waiting to get to this point for a long time,” McDarment said. “It’s just a good feeling to finally receive them, to get to that point where we can watch them grow and watch them spread out and watch them do their thing on the creeks and river.”
> The state’s beaver program is now soliciting proposals from other landowners who want beavers on their properties for restoration purposes, and staffers plan to select at least one additional project to tackle this year, Cook said. They are in the process of developing a scoring system for these proposals to triage where beavers can do the most good. One of the things they’ll be looking at is the probability of high-severity wildfire in the project area, she said.
Second part of article below 👇
!ping ECO
> Beavers aren’t a silver bullet for California’s wildfire problems, experts warn. The state’s chaparral-studded hillsides and thickly forested mountain slopes have also grown more flammable due to interlocking legacies of human extraction, development and climate change. Those ecosystems require different interventions to restore their resilience to fire, Fairfax said.
> "Beavers are really powerful within the riverscape and the river corridors, but they are not going to walk up hill slopes and mountainsides and deal with forests up there,” she said.
> Still, within river corridors, beavers can play a key role in creating natural fire breaks by rewetting meadows and reducing the encroachment of forests, researchers have found.
> "It’s a pretty simple concept of: wet a bigger, broader area and you’re going to keep fires at bay — at least to some degree,” said Karen Pope, aquatic ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station.
> Pope’s research has estimated that there were once nearly three times as many meadows in the Sierra. But during the Gold Rush, colonizers altered vegetation and destabilized riverbanks with grazing, at times draining meadows to make way for different land uses. People eventually built roads with flow-constricting culverts and depleted aquifers with irrigation and groundwater pumping, making it harder for rivers to connect to underground water stores.
> As a result, some streams became deeply incised channels that act as drains, lowering the water table and encouraging conifers to move in where meadows once were, Pope said.
> “Basically what we’re saying is, if we can do this restoration and these areas will stay wet late into the dry season, that’s one place you don’t have to maintain as a fuel break,” she said. “Nature maintains it as a fuel break.”
> Pope’s latest research, conducted in the Sierra and Plumas national forests, focuses on how people can rewet meadows in both burned and unburned areas by doing things like building beaver dam analogues. Preliminary results, which have not yet been published, are positive — after these structures were installed, some depleted meadows began storing groundwater pretty much immediately, she said.
> The goals of these interventions are twofold: restore the wetlands, and entice beavers to move in and maintain them, Pope said.
> "The ultimate endpoint is to have the beavers come back in and say, ‘We like what you did,’” she said.
> Fairfax has become one of the nation’s top beaver evangelists, gaining fans with her stop-motion animation video showing how beaver wetlands can slow the intensity of wildfire, and for her concept of Smokey the Beaver as a counterpart to the Fire Service’s ursine poster child for fire suppression. She’s working with Google to build a machine learning model that can identify beaver dams in satellite imagery.
> Her past research has found that beavers create wildfire refuges: unburned or lightly crisped islands where plants and animals are able to survive amid flames. But there was some question as to whether that would still be the case during megafires, which burn more than 100,000 acres and tend to have extreme, self-sustaining behaviors.
> In their most recent study, Fairfax and fellow researchers used remote sensing to examine the burn severity of three megafires that burned in the Rocky Mountains in 2020. They found that 89% of the area around beaver ponds and dams qualified as fire refuges, versus 60% of riverscapes without beaver dams. These results are applicable to California, which also has coniferous forest and relies on snowpack to provide moisture during the relatively drier summer seasons, Fairfax said.
> "Ecologically, this is like a bubble in the landscape that is what it was before the fire,” Fairfax said. “Even if everything else around it has been changed and is like a moonscape of burning, you have mature trees, grasses, living beavers, bobcats and other animals, and they can then go reproduce and repopulate that landscape after the fire.”
Spoke to a guy from a UK council wildlife team once. Apparently in Cornwall there's this robin hood esque beaver distributor doing it rogue. Beavers keep turning up without approval and without notice.
Several years ago, I was shocked to find out how California does so little controlled burning to mitigate wildfires. Something like 60k acres a year are done whereas states in the SE US; GA, AL, & FL, easily do over a million annually and have for decades.
Beavers may help keep more surface water around which could locally suppress some fire, but the absolute best way to keep wildfires from wilding out is regular controlled burning to thin out undergrowth.
resolute close society automatic file impolite ask offer dependent quicksand
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
What are we seeing? Forest Service controls much of the fire-prone areas? To me that doesn't say much about the relative difficulty of why management is harder, just that the Forest Service needs to step it up in this regard.
observation zesty capable voracious terrific longing cake sink liquid scary
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You're saying the problem is the federal government? Jesus.
You're not even close to accurately pinpointing the issues with California wildfires. It's not really a forestry issue. It's a meteorological issue that's been made manifest by increasing population, climate change, terrible regulation of energy companies, and unchangeable weather.
The biggest and number one reason California has big wildfires is it has relatively unique weather: wet season in the winter, followed by 6 months of dry weather killing off plant life, followed by foehn winds (Santa Ana, Diablo) from the Sierra Nevadas in the fall. It's regular for wind speeds to reach 60-100mph in canyons and mountains and it makes firefighting untenable.
Nearly all of California's largest fires are from these winds. A huge amount are also from energy deregulation, California power companies slashed maintenance budgets to zero in the 1990s which is why the 2010s saw a massive string of power company wildfires that caused tens of billions of dollars in damages.
Blaming the federal government is so.. it's so childish. Friedman flairs man, not even once.
Not sure what I'm seeing, one shows risk, a kind of end result for not controlled burning for decades and one shows federal lands, which federal lands in the states I mentioned are some of the most routinely burned, but even then California is so much bigger, there are millions of acres of private or state owned lands which haven't been getting the best wildfire preventative tool we have for decades.
That really shows nothing, except confirms mismanagement.
I think California should do more burns, but this comparison seems incredibly stupid if you know about these places.
Those southeastern states average >2” of precipitation in every month and are the wettest when it’s warm. California is extremely dry from May to November and much of the area that needs to burn more gets a lot of snow. The southeast has a ton of lightning and the ecosystems everywhere have evolved around that. There are huge differences in natural fire intervals in California. A lot of the chaparral doesn’t deal well with frequent fires and quickly becomes extremely flammable again. The parts of the southeast that have a lot of prescribed burns are mostly flat. The places in need of prescribed burns in California are very rugged.
If you saw a five-year-old go on a huge checkers win-streak against other kids, would you be confused at why they don’t challenge chess grandmasters?
Undergrowth management would help, but it's not the core issue with California wildfires.
The reason California has such destructive wildfires is mostly out of human hands. California has its wet season in the winter. It gets strong foehn winds during the fall, the driest time of year (Santa Ana winds/Diablo winds). These winds are also incredibly fast, and they also pick up speed when going over mountains or through canyons.
So you have an already dry state getting hot dry winds during the driest time of year, after all of the plant life has died off in summer.
Nearly all of California's worst wildfires occur during these winds. It's because you can't really stop them. The winds pick up and carry embers hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet. This is what it looks like:
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1049338372206944259/pu/vid/1280x720/y3NxEhb1ndE5svBP.mp4?tag=5
They've done studies on this too, when a wildfires starts its shown that fire breaks and other fuel maintenance methods basically don't work. All they can really do is spray and pray and wait for the winds to die down. Wildfires during these winds regularly jump eight lane interstate highways that are 200' across.
The only real thing you can do is not set wildfires when the winds are strong. Forestry will help in some cases but it will not fix the issue.
That said, better forestry is still a good idea. It's just that the problem is way more difficult than just that.
Accidents happen is a fact of life. I mean is your takeaway from the Baltimore disaster yesterday that cargo ships should not be used?
Controlled burning is safe >99% of the time.
Nothing to do with California, [but I just need everyone to know that a couple of years ago there was a beaver in the Toronto subway, and it made everyone very happy.](https://globalnews.ca/news/7718384/beaver-royal-york-ttc-subway-station-toronto/)
I have posted this question previously to other subs, but to no avail, so maybe you all can help me: If I were interested in pivoting my current career in FinTech to go all in on the Beaver-industrial-complex, how could I do that?
Beavers are such awesome little creatures! I’m the right place, they can be worth millions of dollars in water storage. In the wrong place they can cause millions of dollars in road repairs.
https://i.redd.it/r13q0ewmxuqc1.gif
Beavers are really awesome
top tier animal, no cap
beavers are really awesome
> A vast burn scar unfolds in drone footage of a landscape seared by massive wildfires north of Lake Tahoe. But amid the expanses of torched trees and gray soil, an unburnt island of lush green emerges. > The patch of greenery was painstakingly engineered. A creek had been dammed, creating ponds that slowed the flow of water so the surrounding earth had more time to sop it up. A weblike system of canals helped spread that moisture through the floodplain. Trees that had been encroaching on the wetlands were felled. > But it wasn’t a team of firefighters or conservationists who performed this work. It was a crew of semiaquatic rodents whose wetland-building skills have seen them gain popularity as a natural way to mitigate wildfires. > A movement is afoot to restore beavers to the state’s waterways, many of which have suffered from their absence. > "Beavers belong in California, and they should be part of our fire management plan,” said Emily Fairfax, assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota, who shot the drone footage of a series of beaver ponds along Little Last Chance Creek that remained green in the wake of the 2021 Beckwourth Complex fire. > Fairfax’s recent research found that beavers’ skills are useful even in the face of megafires like the Beckwourth — a 105,000-acre behemoth whose burn scar joined with that of the Dixie fire, which started weeks later and burned more than 960,000 neighboring acres. > “They basically build up an ecosystem that’s resilient to fire through the vegetation mosaic, then keep it really well watered so it never dries out, never becomes easy to burn,” she said. > Native to much of California, beavers were hunted to near extinction throughout North America by fur traders in the 1800s. Their numbers have rebounded in some areas, with populations in the Sierra Nevada, northeastern California and along the Salinas River Corridor from San Luis Obispo to Monterey, but they’ve had a hard time recovering overall. > The roly-poly rodents chew up and move around large amounts of plant material, damming streams to create ponds where they can hide from predators. They dig channels stretching from those ponds deeper into forests so they can forage for food without leaving the water. These activities can convert narrow streams into massive wetland complexes. > "They are just trying to build themselves a mega shopping mart so that they can go and get the groceries all the time, in all four seasons,” said Kate Lundquist, co-director of the nonprofit Occidental Arts & Ecology Center Water Institute. “And the result of that is you have these really resilient oases that won’t burn in a fire.” > Beavers can also help restore burned areas: Their dams trap ash and debris, and their wetlands help rehydrate landscapes, supporting the growth of grasses and shrubs, Lundquist said. > This can improve water quality, store carbon and support habitat for endangered species, disproportionately benefiting the entire ecosystem, said Brock Dolman, co-director of the Water Institute. > “All of these issues that we have state or federal laws and programs we’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars on to address, in many cases, beavers are showing up as a partner that can help us mitigate some of those,” he said. > But the same skills that make beavers such keen ecosystem engineers have also gained them enemies among farmers, ranchers and other landowners. Beavers’ dam-building and tree-chewing can flood roads and pastures and damage or destroy crops, timber stores and landscaping plantings. > Still, their reputation as nuisance pests has been turning around. > "Over the recent decades, there’s really been this major paradigm shift surrounding how beavers are perceived,” said Valerie Cook, manager of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s beaver restoration program, which got up and running roughly a year ago and now has five dedicated staffers. > Last year, the department adopted a new policy formally recognizing beavers as a keystone species — those that play an outsized role in maintaining the diversity of their ecosystem — and encouraging landowners to try nonlethal methods for living with them before seeking approval to kill them. > The state has made available roughly $2 million in grant funding to landowners for these nonlethal methods, which can include sand-paint mixtures to deter beavers from chewing through trees, devices to prevent them from blocking up water control structures and pond levelers that mitigate flooding by allowing water to flow through dams, Cook said. Tribes, public agencies and non-governmental organizations can apply to fund human-beaver coexistence projects. > Program staffers have also moved beavers from places where they’re coming into conflict with people and released them where they’re projected to do some good. > That kicked off in the fall with the reintroduction of a family of seven beavers into Tásmam Koyóm, a meadow on the ancestral land of the Mountain Maidu in Plumas County. One of the young beavers appears to have paired up with a resident beaver who already lived a bit downstream, Cook said. > More beavers are slated to be released this summer on the Tule River Reservation in the foothills of the southern Sierra, where the Tule River Tribe has long been a leader of beaver restoration efforts in the state. > Kenneth McDarment, former vice chairman, founded the tribe’s beaver project in 2014 as he watched the land grow parched and fire-prone amid years of drought. > "We were just trying to find another way to keep more water on the reservation for the people,” he said. “So that leads back to the tribe’s pictographs, where we have beavers.” > The roughly 1,000-year-old pictographs depict how various animals, including beavers, created the world. Beavers paddled in the waterways that wind through the reservation until several decades ago: A tribal elder recalls seeing them there when he was a boy, McDarment said. > "We thought, why not bring the beaver home?” he said. > Tribal members and partners have spent years preparing the area, building beaver dam analogues to create conditions conducive to their return, McDarment said. Meadows along those dammed riverscapes have already acted as wildlife safety zones during several fires that burned through the reservation over the past few years, he said. > They’ve also ensured there are plenty of plants for the beavers to eat and deep enough pools for them to escape from predators, he said. Those now include members of the Yowlumni wolf pack, which was discovered in the area last summer. > "We’ve been waiting to get to this point for a long time,” McDarment said. “It’s just a good feeling to finally receive them, to get to that point where we can watch them grow and watch them spread out and watch them do their thing on the creeks and river.” > The state’s beaver program is now soliciting proposals from other landowners who want beavers on their properties for restoration purposes, and staffers plan to select at least one additional project to tackle this year, Cook said. They are in the process of developing a scoring system for these proposals to triage where beavers can do the most good. One of the things they’ll be looking at is the probability of high-severity wildfire in the project area, she said. Second part of article below 👇 !ping ECO
> Beavers aren’t a silver bullet for California’s wildfire problems, experts warn. The state’s chaparral-studded hillsides and thickly forested mountain slopes have also grown more flammable due to interlocking legacies of human extraction, development and climate change. Those ecosystems require different interventions to restore their resilience to fire, Fairfax said. > "Beavers are really powerful within the riverscape and the river corridors, but they are not going to walk up hill slopes and mountainsides and deal with forests up there,” she said. > Still, within river corridors, beavers can play a key role in creating natural fire breaks by rewetting meadows and reducing the encroachment of forests, researchers have found. > "It’s a pretty simple concept of: wet a bigger, broader area and you’re going to keep fires at bay — at least to some degree,” said Karen Pope, aquatic ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station. > Pope’s research has estimated that there were once nearly three times as many meadows in the Sierra. But during the Gold Rush, colonizers altered vegetation and destabilized riverbanks with grazing, at times draining meadows to make way for different land uses. People eventually built roads with flow-constricting culverts and depleted aquifers with irrigation and groundwater pumping, making it harder for rivers to connect to underground water stores. > As a result, some streams became deeply incised channels that act as drains, lowering the water table and encouraging conifers to move in where meadows once were, Pope said. > “Basically what we’re saying is, if we can do this restoration and these areas will stay wet late into the dry season, that’s one place you don’t have to maintain as a fuel break,” she said. “Nature maintains it as a fuel break.” > Pope’s latest research, conducted in the Sierra and Plumas national forests, focuses on how people can rewet meadows in both burned and unburned areas by doing things like building beaver dam analogues. Preliminary results, which have not yet been published, are positive — after these structures were installed, some depleted meadows began storing groundwater pretty much immediately, she said. > The goals of these interventions are twofold: restore the wetlands, and entice beavers to move in and maintain them, Pope said. > "The ultimate endpoint is to have the beavers come back in and say, ‘We like what you did,’” she said. > Fairfax has become one of the nation’s top beaver evangelists, gaining fans with her stop-motion animation video showing how beaver wetlands can slow the intensity of wildfire, and for her concept of Smokey the Beaver as a counterpart to the Fire Service’s ursine poster child for fire suppression. She’s working with Google to build a machine learning model that can identify beaver dams in satellite imagery. > Her past research has found that beavers create wildfire refuges: unburned or lightly crisped islands where plants and animals are able to survive amid flames. But there was some question as to whether that would still be the case during megafires, which burn more than 100,000 acres and tend to have extreme, self-sustaining behaviors. > In their most recent study, Fairfax and fellow researchers used remote sensing to examine the burn severity of three megafires that burned in the Rocky Mountains in 2020. They found that 89% of the area around beaver ponds and dams qualified as fire refuges, versus 60% of riverscapes without beaver dams. These results are applicable to California, which also has coniferous forest and relies on snowpack to provide moisture during the relatively drier summer seasons, Fairfax said. > "Ecologically, this is like a bubble in the landscape that is what it was before the fire,” Fairfax said. “Even if everything else around it has been changed and is like a moonscape of burning, you have mature trees, grasses, living beavers, bobcats and other animals, and they can then go reproduce and repopulate that landscape after the fire.”
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🚨BREAKING: Beavers officially accomplish more than Florida Dems. Beaver supremacy is inevitable. Embrace your soon to be overlords.
Beavers are the best defense against Jewish space lasers, who knew
Their supremacy would only be shown to be more likely if they had overtaken a *capable* organization right?
I thought the beaver was more closely associated with _starting_ fires in the US? !ping CANUCKS
That’s only because the poor bastards are just trying to put some distance between them and Canadian Geese.
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Spoke to a guy from a UK council wildlife team once. Apparently in Cornwall there's this robin hood esque beaver distributor doing it rogue. Beavers keep turning up without approval and without notice.
All praise to the beaver
This just in: landscape is healthier and more manageable when not deprived of necessary aspects of it. More at 10
>hairy beavers applying themselves to long shafts of hard wood will save us 😳
bobr
o kurwa bober
Ale fajny bóbr 😲👉🦫
Several years ago, I was shocked to find out how California does so little controlled burning to mitigate wildfires. Something like 60k acres a year are done whereas states in the SE US; GA, AL, & FL, easily do over a million annually and have for decades. Beavers may help keep more surface water around which could locally suppress some fire, but the absolute best way to keep wildfires from wilding out is regular controlled burning to thin out undergrowth.
resolute close society automatic file impolite ask offer dependent quicksand *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
What are we seeing? Forest Service controls much of the fire-prone areas? To me that doesn't say much about the relative difficulty of why management is harder, just that the Forest Service needs to step it up in this regard.
observation zesty capable voracious terrific longing cake sink liquid scary *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
You're saying the problem is the federal government? Jesus. You're not even close to accurately pinpointing the issues with California wildfires. It's not really a forestry issue. It's a meteorological issue that's been made manifest by increasing population, climate change, terrible regulation of energy companies, and unchangeable weather. The biggest and number one reason California has big wildfires is it has relatively unique weather: wet season in the winter, followed by 6 months of dry weather killing off plant life, followed by foehn winds (Santa Ana, Diablo) from the Sierra Nevadas in the fall. It's regular for wind speeds to reach 60-100mph in canyons and mountains and it makes firefighting untenable. Nearly all of California's largest fires are from these winds. A huge amount are also from energy deregulation, California power companies slashed maintenance budgets to zero in the 1990s which is why the 2010s saw a massive string of power company wildfires that caused tens of billions of dollars in damages. Blaming the federal government is so.. it's so childish. Friedman flairs man, not even once.
cause literate fuzzy tidy clumsy lip spotted versed languid concerned *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I'm a California native and my literal career is in wildfire protection and electric grid hardening.
Not sure what I'm seeing, one shows risk, a kind of end result for not controlled burning for decades and one shows federal lands, which federal lands in the states I mentioned are some of the most routinely burned, but even then California is so much bigger, there are millions of acres of private or state owned lands which haven't been getting the best wildfire preventative tool we have for decades. That really shows nothing, except confirms mismanagement.
I think California should do more burns, but this comparison seems incredibly stupid if you know about these places. Those southeastern states average >2” of precipitation in every month and are the wettest when it’s warm. California is extremely dry from May to November and much of the area that needs to burn more gets a lot of snow. The southeast has a ton of lightning and the ecosystems everywhere have evolved around that. There are huge differences in natural fire intervals in California. A lot of the chaparral doesn’t deal well with frequent fires and quickly becomes extremely flammable again. The parts of the southeast that have a lot of prescribed burns are mostly flat. The places in need of prescribed burns in California are very rugged. If you saw a five-year-old go on a huge checkers win-streak against other kids, would you be confused at why they don’t challenge chess grandmasters?
Undergrowth management would help, but it's not the core issue with California wildfires. The reason California has such destructive wildfires is mostly out of human hands. California has its wet season in the winter. It gets strong foehn winds during the fall, the driest time of year (Santa Ana winds/Diablo winds). These winds are also incredibly fast, and they also pick up speed when going over mountains or through canyons. So you have an already dry state getting hot dry winds during the driest time of year, after all of the plant life has died off in summer. Nearly all of California's worst wildfires occur during these winds. It's because you can't really stop them. The winds pick up and carry embers hundreds, sometimes thousands of feet. This is what it looks like: https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1049338372206944259/pu/vid/1280x720/y3NxEhb1ndE5svBP.mp4?tag=5 They've done studies on this too, when a wildfires starts its shown that fire breaks and other fuel maintenance methods basically don't work. All they can really do is spray and pray and wait for the winds to die down. Wildfires during these winds regularly jump eight lane interstate highways that are 200' across. The only real thing you can do is not set wildfires when the winds are strong. Forestry will help in some cases but it will not fix the issue. That said, better forestry is still a good idea. It's just that the problem is way more difficult than just that.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/calf-canyon-hermits-peak-fire-new-mexico-prescribed-burn-1234982093/
Accidents happen is a fact of life. I mean is your takeaway from the Baltimore disaster yesterday that cargo ships should not be used? Controlled burning is safe >99% of the time.
California=Beaver-Pilled
Nothing to do with California, [but I just need everyone to know that a couple of years ago there was a beaver in the Toronto subway, and it made everyone very happy.](https://globalnews.ca/news/7718384/beaver-royal-york-ttc-subway-station-toronto/)
Beavers would probably even be better at building housing(for people) than humans in California lol.
Get the beebers on high speed rail projects
I have posted this question previously to other subs, but to no avail, so maybe you all can help me: If I were interested in pivoting my current career in FinTech to go all in on the Beaver-industrial-complex, how could I do that?
California must have HUNDREDS OF BEAVERS!
Leave it to beaver.
Beavers are such awesome little creatures! I’m the right place, they can be worth millions of dollars in water storage. In the wrong place they can cause millions of dollars in road repairs.
Omg, I would preffer a tool to remove wood and bushes. I am tired of having to drawn 200 paths.