Every hiker in Los Angeles knows that sinking feeling.
You look up at the mountains (because that’s what we do when we have a moment) and see a column of dark smoke. Almost instantly, you get a good idea of what paths could burn and, depending on whether it is warm, dry and the right time of year, whether the fire will eventually reach your place.
In 2020, the Bobcat fire I burned some of my family’s favorite places with a blowtorch in the Angeles National Forest. Now, four years later, the 50,000-acre Bridge Fire is destroying some of the mountain refuges adjacent to Los Angeles, upending forest communities like Wrightwood and endangering mountain lions, bears, bighorn sheep, frogs and other wildlife.
To say it’s heartbreaking is to underestimate the loss. Imagine an earthquake destroying Disneyland or Dodger Stadium: devastating, yes, but fortunately rebuilt. But when a mountain forest burns in wildfires as extreme as the ones we’ve recently experienced, nature probably won’t be able to rebuild it in my lifetime. The fact that most of these disasters have preventable human causes makes the loss shameful.
Human causes? Although climate change gets most of the attention, simple human carelessness or malice often lights the first spark, and then drought and extreme heat take over.
Investigators have not determined what sparked the bridge fire. But police Arson suspect arrested in connection with the Line Fire in the San Bernardino Mountains (39,000 acres) and the Airport Fire in Orange County (24,000 acres) has been triggered by a public works team moving rocks with heavy machinery.
Other major fires have had more benign origins. In 2018, the Carr Fire near Redding burned more than 1,000 structures and an area of forest the size of the city of San Diego, killing eight people. That fire started on National Park Service land after a driver’s trailer was swept away by the car. had a flat tirecausing the rim to scrape on the road and sparks to fly into dry brush like tinder.
There’s no doubt that humans represent the most obvious and present fire danger in wildlands. And in the Los Angeles area, about 18 million of us live near more than 2 million acres of government-managed forests.
So here’s what the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, and California State Parks should do when conditions are predicted for a cataclysmic fire: close their forests.
When a major heat wave hits us — as we did it before all the fires that are burning around us now, and before the Bobcat fire in 2020and before the Carr Fire in 2018 — tell motorists, hikers, hunters and anyone who turns to the mountains for relief: Don’t come herebecause it’s too dangerous and we don’t want you to start another fire.
It wouldn’t be unprecedented. Just before Labor Day weekend in 2021, the Forest Service temporarily closed Almost all of its territory was in California. Although the mountains around Los Angeles remained calm at the time, the rest of the state was experiencing its second-worst fire season on record, after 2020, when more than 4% of California’s total land area burned. At a time of extreme danger, the Forest Service wanted to ensure that resources could be used to fight fires rather than evacuate visitors.
For Southern California and other places spared another year of disaster, the closure was precautionary, the Forest Service said at its Sept. 10 meeting. announced his order“The closure order will also reduce the risk of new fires at a time when firefighting resources are extremely limited.”
I do not recommend such preemption lightly. Access to public lands is a boon to nature-loving urbanites like me, not to mention the right of every American. The fact that we in Los Angeles have so much accessible wilderness in our backyard is a tremendous privilege.
I also don’t think it would prevent all or most fires. The Line Fire in San Bernardino County burned mostly Forest Service land, but investigators believe an arsonist started it in an adjacent suburb. Power lines and lightning have also wreaked havoc on our forests.
But the management of access to forests must reflect the The reality of climate change. That includes telling people to stay outside for a week or two when the foliage is dry and another hellish heat wave appears in the weather forecast. We’ve long had tools to predict extreme fire danger conditions; it would be a shame not to use those tools to better protect our struggling forests and our way of life from going up in smoke.
