Lovely post Alpha. Two things: In the context of sponges, one of my favorite sound bites when talking to farmers is that "There is no point in praying for rain, unless you give God somewhere to put it". i.e. a soil that can receive it. Storing water in the soil is the best place for it because, as you say, it keeps everything hydrated. The second point is that when we discuss groundwater, I believe it is a similar situation faced by fisheries that have learned that, if you protect between 1/4 and 1/3 of a fishery as a breeding reserve, everyone catches more fish. I believe the same thing could be shown for groundwater. If we, as a society, allow the groundwater back to a level where it helps hydrate the vegetation (say within 20m of the soil surface) then we will all get better rainfall/snowfall and we will ALL have more freshwater to use. Bruce Danckwerts, CHOMA, Zambia
Excellent post, Alpha. I like how you bring in ground water. I don't think people realize the importance of ground water. It's been portrayed as something deep underground which kind of just sits there, rather than being actively involved in above-ground moisture.
Yeah solar arrays may indeed be a factor in causing the heating of the winds.... And in regards to groundwater, I am realizing how big of a role it plays in everything. Groundwater couples to surface water, which couples to atmopsheric water. But because its one step away in the coupling we forgot how groundwater affects atmospheric water. However groundwater is soo much more than surface water, that if we have vegetation, thats the way the surface water gets replenished.
Maybe if people have an idea for an action plan, they can comment here. Didi Pershouse, who I dialog-ed in previous post with about the LA fires, is organizing some Rehydrate California workshops https://didipershouse.substack.com/
Alpha, thanks for all the work you are doing. I grew up in Lake Tahoe and spent my youth hiking the Eastern Sierras and fishing for trout in their streams and lakes. The draining of Owen’s lake is a travesty that hopefully can be rectified in my lifetime.
I have a lot of experience walking through forests in the Sierras and my observations concur with your hypothesis that virgin forests are more resistant to fire. However, as your map shows, there are almost no virgin forests left (I do dispute that slightly as there are many more acres of virgin forest that are inaccessible to logging than the map represents). The vast majority of forests in the western US generally are non virgin. And this is why they are all falling to disease.
If we timbered forests in the past, as has been done in the Sierras at least twice for a clear cut and other areas even more, you get forests that are too dense and actually can draw down water tables because the homeostasis for the water table is for a less water hungry forest. And these trees become more susceptible to disease and bugs because they don’t have adequate water, minerals and sunlight. This creates excessive amounts of deadfall. And this deadfall is dry.
These are the current states of our forests. If we were to leave them undisturbed as is they will all burn in the next 50 years and the forest that will replace them would eventually become “virgin” forests with natural amounts rotting carbonaceous material seeding humidity over vast tracts of land.
In the East the return of tilled land to virgin mature Oak forest is 500 years. I don’t know what it would be in the Sierras, but at least 150 years. My point is that yes, returning land to it’s virgin state is a good goal in the long term, but if we don’t touch land (and i believe that should be done selectively) it will burn in its current state, so we have 2 choices with any given forest: choose to let it burn and begin the slow process of returning to a healthy “virgin” state (great choice for a lot of forest), or manage the forest to encourage the return of native ecologies while preventing catastrophic wildfire. I think the latter is a necessary part of the solution in order to manage the urban/rural interface. I am not saying that there aren’t vast improvements that can and should be made in forest managers’ decision making processes, but there are significant acerages of forest that need to be actively managed because their burning is too grave a risk to human life and property.
I think there is great progress to be made on the integration of your work with forest managers. Any forest that is actively managed, should be managed to encourage beavers, the slowing of waters and the proper selective thinning of forests (and use the junk timber as dams to slow water, create wetlands, and provide humidity from rotting carbonaceous material).
I think that your evidence of virgin Siberian forests resistance to fire is convincing, however I would like to point out that deadfall in current Sierra forests is a net negative and not positive. In the long run, yes, natural forests benefit from deadfall, it provides humidity and a recycling of nutrients. But the current state of the Sierras are tinderboxes. If we leave it alone, it will burn, and burn catastrophically, because of our centuries of mismanagement. Unfortunately for some of the land, we need better management, not wilderness conservation, to get us out of the pickle we are in.
If they were originally virgin thats good. But now that we've messed with them, we probably need to manage and guide them back into healthier states. I'm not yet sure what to do about the deadfall in non-virgin forests. Not sure what the research says about that. It might depend on how well we can hydrate those forests.
What you say makes sense, yet that doesn't seem to be what's happening. Rather, the USFS uses the fire threat to conduct mass logging, not careful thinning. Thinning is expensive, so to pay for it they log larger commercial timber. There are also examples, such as the Camp Fire, where thinning only made the fire travel faster, because there was less wind block. Home hardening, management immediately around towns and such, make sense, but leaving the backcountry to burn may be the quickest route to restoration. At present, I am deeply skeptical of state and federal agencies' claims around "restoration." Though I don't claim to be an expert. Chad Hanson, in Smokescreen, shows how even high severity wildfire is a boon to the local ecology.
Also I am curious on your position on the panoply of desalinization plants in various stages of development in CA. I think nuclear SMR powered desalinization is the way we can refill the Owen’s Valley and rewater the Great Basin and Colorado River watersheds. I don’t see how San Joaquin and SoCal can get their water needs with the Ocean. I know this is environmentally sensitive and I think there are much better ways to return the brine to the Ocean than is currently done. The Moss landing plant comes to mind for Salinas Valley.
Desalinization plants use a lot of energy, and thus causes global warming. I dont think they are a good idea... The sun is already naturally talking the salt out of the ocean water when it evaporates it. If we just make our lands absorbent, then we have no need for human-made desalination. Nature is already doing it. And no need for so many aqueducts to pipe that water everywhere, nature is already providing free transport on the wind..... Nuclear is not a good idea, because you are creating toxic waste that last tens of thousands of years. Nuclear plants are not infallible, there is a non-zero percentage chance that they spill their waste onto the earth.
Lovely post Alpha. Two things: In the context of sponges, one of my favorite sound bites when talking to farmers is that "There is no point in praying for rain, unless you give God somewhere to put it". i.e. a soil that can receive it. Storing water in the soil is the best place for it because, as you say, it keeps everything hydrated. The second point is that when we discuss groundwater, I believe it is a similar situation faced by fisheries that have learned that, if you protect between 1/4 and 1/3 of a fishery as a breeding reserve, everyone catches more fish. I believe the same thing could be shown for groundwater. If we, as a society, allow the groundwater back to a level where it helps hydrate the vegetation (say within 20m of the soil surface) then we will all get better rainfall/snowfall and we will ALL have more freshwater to use. Bruce Danckwerts, CHOMA, Zambia
thanks for the comment. yeah i agree.
Excellent post, Alpha. I like how you bring in ground water. I don't think people realize the importance of ground water. It's been portrayed as something deep underground which kind of just sits there, rather than being actively involved in above-ground moisture.
There is also the issue of massive solar arrays which lie directly in the path of the Santa Ana winds, heating the air above them by up to 7F. This, as reported by Natalie Flemming, of Ecosystem Restoration Alliance. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/los-angeles-ablaze-tragic-solar-array-wake-up-call-natalie-fleming-4zhnc/
Yeah solar arrays may indeed be a factor in causing the heating of the winds.... And in regards to groundwater, I am realizing how big of a role it plays in everything. Groundwater couples to surface water, which couples to atmopsheric water. But because its one step away in the coupling we forgot how groundwater affects atmospheric water. However groundwater is soo much more than surface water, that if we have vegetation, thats the way the surface water gets replenished.
Great post. How can we implement an action plan for saving the hydrology?
Maybe if people have an idea for an action plan, they can comment here. Didi Pershouse, who I dialog-ed in previous post with about the LA fires, is organizing some Rehydrate California workshops https://didipershouse.substack.com/
Alpha, thanks for all the work you are doing. I grew up in Lake Tahoe and spent my youth hiking the Eastern Sierras and fishing for trout in their streams and lakes. The draining of Owen’s lake is a travesty that hopefully can be rectified in my lifetime.
I have a lot of experience walking through forests in the Sierras and my observations concur with your hypothesis that virgin forests are more resistant to fire. However, as your map shows, there are almost no virgin forests left (I do dispute that slightly as there are many more acres of virgin forest that are inaccessible to logging than the map represents). The vast majority of forests in the western US generally are non virgin. And this is why they are all falling to disease.
If we timbered forests in the past, as has been done in the Sierras at least twice for a clear cut and other areas even more, you get forests that are too dense and actually can draw down water tables because the homeostasis for the water table is for a less water hungry forest. And these trees become more susceptible to disease and bugs because they don’t have adequate water, minerals and sunlight. This creates excessive amounts of deadfall. And this deadfall is dry.
These are the current states of our forests. If we were to leave them undisturbed as is they will all burn in the next 50 years and the forest that will replace them would eventually become “virgin” forests with natural amounts rotting carbonaceous material seeding humidity over vast tracts of land.
In the East the return of tilled land to virgin mature Oak forest is 500 years. I don’t know what it would be in the Sierras, but at least 150 years. My point is that yes, returning land to it’s virgin state is a good goal in the long term, but if we don’t touch land (and i believe that should be done selectively) it will burn in its current state, so we have 2 choices with any given forest: choose to let it burn and begin the slow process of returning to a healthy “virgin” state (great choice for a lot of forest), or manage the forest to encourage the return of native ecologies while preventing catastrophic wildfire. I think the latter is a necessary part of the solution in order to manage the urban/rural interface. I am not saying that there aren’t vast improvements that can and should be made in forest managers’ decision making processes, but there are significant acerages of forest that need to be actively managed because their burning is too grave a risk to human life and property.
I think there is great progress to be made on the integration of your work with forest managers. Any forest that is actively managed, should be managed to encourage beavers, the slowing of waters and the proper selective thinning of forests (and use the junk timber as dams to slow water, create wetlands, and provide humidity from rotting carbonaceous material).
I think that your evidence of virgin Siberian forests resistance to fire is convincing, however I would like to point out that deadfall in current Sierra forests is a net negative and not positive. In the long run, yes, natural forests benefit from deadfall, it provides humidity and a recycling of nutrients. But the current state of the Sierras are tinderboxes. If we leave it alone, it will burn, and burn catastrophically, because of our centuries of mismanagement. Unfortunately for some of the land, we need better management, not wilderness conservation, to get us out of the pickle we are in.
If they were originally virgin thats good. But now that we've messed with them, we probably need to manage and guide them back into healthier states. I'm not yet sure what to do about the deadfall in non-virgin forests. Not sure what the research says about that. It might depend on how well we can hydrate those forests.
What you say makes sense, yet that doesn't seem to be what's happening. Rather, the USFS uses the fire threat to conduct mass logging, not careful thinning. Thinning is expensive, so to pay for it they log larger commercial timber. There are also examples, such as the Camp Fire, where thinning only made the fire travel faster, because there was less wind block. Home hardening, management immediately around towns and such, make sense, but leaving the backcountry to burn may be the quickest route to restoration. At present, I am deeply skeptical of state and federal agencies' claims around "restoration." Though I don't claim to be an expert. Chad Hanson, in Smokescreen, shows how even high severity wildfire is a boon to the local ecology.
Also rice farming can’t occur in CA.
Also I am curious on your position on the panoply of desalinization plants in various stages of development in CA. I think nuclear SMR powered desalinization is the way we can refill the Owen’s Valley and rewater the Great Basin and Colorado River watersheds. I don’t see how San Joaquin and SoCal can get their water needs with the Ocean. I know this is environmentally sensitive and I think there are much better ways to return the brine to the Ocean than is currently done. The Moss landing plant comes to mind for Salinas Valley.
Desalinization plants use a lot of energy, and thus causes global warming. I dont think they are a good idea... The sun is already naturally talking the salt out of the ocean water when it evaporates it. If we just make our lands absorbent, then we have no need for human-made desalination. Nature is already doing it. And no need for so many aqueducts to pipe that water everywhere, nature is already providing free transport on the wind..... Nuclear is not a good idea, because you are creating toxic waste that last tens of thousands of years. Nuclear plants are not infallible, there is a non-zero percentage chance that they spill their waste onto the earth.
*without the ocean