The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2020 by Michio Kaku

Author:Michio Kaku
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358074243
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2020-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

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There’s a dismaying randomness to how a megafire can start: the tire on a trailer goes flat and scrapes against the pavement, producing sparks; the DIY wiring job on someone’s hot tub melts. (These were the causes of the 2018 Carr and 2015 Valley Fires, respectively. More than 300,000 acres burned, combined.) But by now, there is also a feeling of predictability: in 2017, for example, seventeen of twenty-one major fires in California were started accidentally by equipment owned by Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), which, as California’s largest electrical utility, is in the precarious business of shooting electricity through 175,000 miles of live wire, stitched across an increasingly flammable state. Under state law, the company may be liable for damage from those fires, whether or not the initial spark resulted from its negligence. And so, PG&E found itself looking for ways to adapt.

Two days before the Camp Fire, as horrendously blustery and dry conditions began settling on the Ridge and the risk of fire turned severe, PG&E began warning 70,000 of its electricity customers in the area, including the entire town of Paradise, that it might shut off their power as a precaution. This was one of the new tactics that the company had adopted—​a “last resort,” PG&E called it: in periods of extreme fire danger, if weather conditions aligned to make any accidental spark potentially calamitous, PG&E was prepared to flip the switch, preventively cutting the electricity from its lines. Life would go dark, maybe for days—​whatever it took. It was clear that the unforgiving environment in which PG&E had been operating for the last few years was, as the company put it, California’s “new normal.”

Wildfires have always remade California’s landscape. Historically, they were sparked by lightning, switching on haphazardly to sweep forests of their dead and declining vegetation and prime them for new, healthier growth. Noticing this cycle—​the natural “fire regimes” at work—​Native Americans mimicked it, lighting targeted fires to engineer areas for better foraging and hunting. But white settlers were oblivious to nature’s fire regimes; when blazes sprung up around their towns, they stamped them out.

Those towns grew into cities; the land around them, suburbs. More than a century of fire suppression left the ecosystems abutting them misshapen and dysfunctional. To set things right, the maintenance once performed naturally by fire would have to be conducted by state and federal bureaucracies, timber companies, private citizens, and all the other entities through whose jurisdictions that land splinters. The approach has been feeble and piecemeal, says William Stewart, a co-director of Berkeley Forests at the University of California, Berkeley: “Little pinpricks of fuel reduction on the landscape.” We effectively turned nature into another colossal infrastructure project and endlessly deferred its maintenance.

Then came climate change. Summers in Northern California are now 2.5 degrees hotter than they were in the early 1970s, speeding up evaporation and baking the forests dry. Nine of the ten largest fires in state history, since record-keeping started in 1932, have happened in the last sixteen years.

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