Forest in California may be disappearing
On a steep mountainside where walls of flames torched the forest on their way toward Lake Tahoe in 2021, blackened trees stand in silhouette against a gray sky. “If you can find a live tree, point to it,” Hugh Safford, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of California, Davis, said touring damage from the Caldor Fire, one of the past decade's many massive blazes. Dead pines, firs, and cedars stretch as far as the eye can see.
Many researchers say the canopy of the Sierra Nevada has changed dramatically since heavy Gold Rush logging. Before the mid-1800s, fire sparked by lightning or set by Indigenous people burned millions of acres a year. It kept undergrowth in check, allowing low-intensity flames to creep along the forest floor and remove smaller trees competing with big ones.
To tackle the problem of huge wildfires, the federal government, which owns nearly 60% of California’s 51,560 square miles of forest, agreed with the state in 2020 to jointly reduce fuels on 1,560 square miles a year by 2025. While a fraction of the land needing treatment, it's considered a promising development after years of inaction, though not without controversy.
Last fall when Safford led two graduate students up a rutted fire road through charred forest, they came upon a patch of life where large pines and cedars towered overhead and seedlings sprouted. A “nirvana” is what Safford called it. Smaller fire-intolerant trees had been harvested and other vegetation removed before the fire. The space between the trees allowed the fire to creep along the ground, only charring some trunks.
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