On restoring our forests so they are more resilient in the face of fire

The following Op Ed by Steven Frisch of the Sierra Business Alliance was shared today on Facebook. Steve has kindly given permission to share here on the CAP Webpage:

Let me state unequivocally, as one who has and likely will live in the wildland urban interface again, I don’t want a 30 year old father of four risking his LIFE for my accumulated sentimental baubles. We love our firefighters, they put their lives on the line to save our families lives, not our stuff. We who live in the Sierra Nevada need to work on restoring our forests so they are more resilient in the face of fire, so they do not burn as quickly and hot as they are now, and the way to do that is to restore the historic composition of our forests.

A first step is to stop subdividing rural forest land for poorly planned rural second home development. We need to create incentives for public and private land forest thinning (biomass utilization for things like biomass to electrical energy generation and other products is a good start, creating an economic driver for restoring forest health.) We need to re-introduce controlled fire into forested landscapes to restore the historic fire patterns; these burn slower, cooler, and eliminate accumulated understory. We need to create funding streams that can be applied to these purposes as the stewards of our forests; large scale federal (and private) ownership of land comes with a management responsibility, which is too often traded away through partisan battles over funding.

We are prioritizing reacting to fire rather than the preventative measures that would reduce risk to everyone. There are solutions out there if we take the responsibility to support them.