prescribed burns – Enviro Updates

California tribes could help oversee ancestral redwoods again

May 12, 2026

Lila Seidman, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Daniel Felix, 10, looks out from atop a gargantuan stump of an old-growth redwood on his tribe’s ancestral land. Once, this forest on California’s North Coast was replete with the ancient behemoths that can live beyond 2,000 years.

Only a fraction are left now, depleted by a logging company before the state acquired the forest in the 1940s.

This is unique public land, Jackson Demonstration State Forest, spanning 50,000 acres in Mendocino County. Trees are plentiful here, but they might not live a millennium. California’s 14 demonstration forests are required to produce and sell timber to show — or “demonstrate” — sustainable practices. Money from logging — roughly $8.5 million a year — pays for management of the forests by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire.

Daniel’s tribe, the Coyote Valley Band of Pomo Indians, has pushed to rein in the cutting — spearheaded by his late great-grandmother, Priscilla Hunter. They’re part of a diverse coalition that includes environmental activists, local politicians and other tribes.

Now they may finally get their wish. Assembly member Chris Rogers, D-Santa Rosa, has introduced a bill that would nix the forests’ logging mandate, instead prioritizing values such as carbon storage, wildfire resilience and biodiversity.

ForestsAB2494, carbon sequestration, forest management, forest regeneration, Jackson Demonstration State Forest, logging, Pomo, prescribed burns, redwoods

Seasonal ban on outdoor burning begins Monday across Sonoma County

June 22, 2025

Marisa Endicott, PRESS DEMOCRAT

Sonoma County officials announced a seasonal ban on all outdoor burning in the unincorporated county starting Monday.

The residential burn permit suspension was set in response to a similar burn ban set by Cal Fire, according to Permit Sonoma’s Fire Prevention Division.

Burn restrictions will remain in place until Cal Fire declares the end of peak fire season.

Forestsfire season, prescribed burns

Two California fires in the Sierra Nevada have very different outcomes. Why?

July 30, 2022

Alex Wigglesworth, LOS ANGELES TIMES

The two fires started just 17 miles apart in the rugged terrain of California’s western Sierra Nevada — but their outcomes couldn’t have been more different.

The Washburn fire, which ignited July 7 along a forested trail in Yosemite National Park, was nearly contained, with no damage to structures or to the famed Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias.

But the Oak fire, which sparked almost two weeks later in the foothills near Midpines, confounded firefighters as it exploded to four times the size of Washburn and forced thousands to flee as it destroyed at least 106 homes. At times, the wildfire’s smoke plume could be seen from space.

Why was one fire so much more destructive?

Experts attribute the difference to variations in weather, vegetation and topography. The management history of each landscape also played a role: Yosemite boasts decades of active stewardship, including prescribed burns, while areas outside the park bear a legacy of industrial logging and fire suppression.

The Washburn fire started along a trail on the edge of the Mariposa Grove, just downhill from the road used by shuttle buses to ferry tourists from a parking lot.

Forestsfire ecology, fire resilience, prescribed burns

As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management

August 23, 2021

Hayley Smith and Alex Wigglesworth, LOS ANGELES TIMES

As he stood amid the rubble of the town of Greenville, Gov. Gavin Newsom this month vowed to take proactive steps to protect California’s residents from increasingly devastating wildfires.

“We recognize that we’ve got to do more in active forest management, vegetation management,” Newsom said, noting that the region’s extreme heat and drought are leading to “wildfire challenges the likes of which we’ve never seen in our history.”

Yet despite a universal desire to avoid more destruction, experts aren’t always in agreement about what should be done before a blaze ignites. Forest management has long been touted as essential to fighting wildfires, with one new set of studies led by the University of Wisconsin and the U.S. Forest Service concluding that there is strong scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of thinning dense forests and reducing fuels through prescribed burns.

But some ecologists say that logging, thinning and other tactics that may have worked in the past are no longer useful in an era of ever hotter, larger and more frequent wildfires.

“The fact is that forest management is not stopping weather- and climate-driven fires,” said Chad Hanson, a forest and fire ecologist and the president of the John Muir Project.

Many of California’s most devastating recent fires — including 2018’s deadly Camp fire and the Dixie fire, now the state’s second largest on record — seared straight through forests that had been treated for fuel reduction and fire prevention purposes, Hanson said.

Climate Change & Energy, Forestsfire resistant, forest management, house hardening, prescribed burns, vegetation removal

Local tribal citizens are advocating for more cultural burns

August 8, 2021

Katherine Minkiewicz-Martine, SOCONEWS

As smoke from the massive Dixie Fire made its way to Sonoma County, the Healdsburg Fire Department convened a group of fire ecologists, land management experts and stewardship specialists on Aug. 4 to provide a presentation to the community on fire ecology and how certain burns can help restore the land and work to help prevent devastating wildfires.

Clint McKay is a tribal citizen of the Dry Creek Band of Pomo and Wappo Indians. He’s a retired parks superintendent for the city of Santa Rosa and he spends much of his time giving fire ecology talks and working as an Indigenous education coordinator at the Pepperwood Preserve.

He also refuses to use the term “land management.”

“Management invokes that you control something, that you can control it and command it. Obviously we cannot,” McKay said. “I chuckle to myself every time I hear ‘natural resource management,’ ‘fire fuels management,’ ‘vegetation management.’ If we begin to think that we can manage fire, we’re in for a whole lot more of what we’ve been experiencing the past decade and what we are continuing to experience today.”

McKay has been advocating for cultural burns for a long time, however, the idea of using fire to prevent fire can sometimes be tenuous among fire fatigued Sonoma County residents.

Forests, Local OrganizationsDry Creek Band, fire, fire resilience, forest resilience, prescribed burns

‘Good fire’ revival: How controlled burns in Sonoma County aim to curb risk of catastrophic wildfires

May 13, 2021

Mary Callahan, THE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Such burns are an efficient, inexpensive option in many cases, compared to labor-intensive manual thinning and mechanical treatments, which can cost $2,500 to $4,000 an acre and up, depending if equipment like a wood chipper or pile burning is needed.

Che Casul, a seventh-generation Sonoma County rancher, badly wanted to see his woods on fire. With three others, he walked along the edge of a 33-acre patch of oak woodlands on his family’s Bodega Highway ranch. They carried drip torches filled with diesel fuel and gasoline. As they paced their way through the forest, they released small flaming droplets meant to coalesce into a wider curtain of flames creeping along the earthen floor — a prescribed fire.

But it was a damp December day, with light rain falling by afternoon across this corner of southwestern Sonoma County, so the flames that did spread were subdued, producing a blue smoke that hovered just above the ground, swirling around the two dozen men and women clad in yellow firefighter gear and spread throughout the woodland.

Casul, 34, had invited the firefighters onto the property, part of a controlled deployment of fire that had been in the works many months earlier — as catastrophic wildfires once again overtook California, burning a record 4.2 million acres, including more than 290,000 acres of Sonoma and Napa counties.

For Casul and the team of firefighters and volunteers assembled on his 213-acre spread just inland from the Sonoma Coast, conditions were less combustible, partly by design.

Forestsfire danger, forest resilience, prescribed burns

California unveils sweeping wildfire prevention plan amid record fire losses and drought

April 8, 2021

John Myers, LOS ANGELES TIMES

California Wildfire and Resilience Action Plan

After the worst fire season in California history and as drought conditions raise fears of what’s to come, Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislative leaders unveiled a $536-million proposal Thursday to boost efforts at firefighting and a variety of prevention measures, including vegetation management and the construction of fire-resistant structures across the state.

The proposal, which the Legislature could send to the governor’s desk as soon as Monday, marks an early agreement by the governor and lawmakers to spend more than half of the $1 billion in wildfire funding Newsom called for in his state budget proposal in January. The gravity of the issue became clear last week after state officials reported the water content in the Sierra Nevada snowpack stood at 59% of the average for early spring.

“The science is clear: Warming winter temperatures and warming summer temperatures across the American West are creating more challenging and dangerous wildfire conditions,” said Wade Crowfoot, the governor’s secretary of natural resources.

According to an outline provided by legislative staff, more than $350 million will be spent on fire prevention and suppression efforts, including prescribed fires and other projects designed to reduce the vegetation growth that has fueled California’s most devastating fires. The package also includes $25 million for fortifying older homes that weren’t built using fire-resistance methods required during construction over the last decade.

Climate Change & Energy, Habitats, Waterdrought, fire danger, fire prevention, fire resilience, prescribed burns