💾 Archived View for gemini.onedimension.net › thought › fires-in-california.gmi captured on 2021-12-17 at 13:26:06. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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California's[1] landscape needs to burn.
Building more infrastructure means more suppression, meaning hotter and more destructive fires. It's estimated 4.4 million acres per year[2] burned before 1800, and 2020's 4.5 million acres was seen as some sort of apocalypse. The orange skies were supposedly the first sign of some future climate-dystopia, it seems events like that historically would have been the norm for a California summer.
I don't see a good solution here other than better management with controlled burns, as was done by Indigenous Californians. Building less infrastructure in high-risk areas[3] (which is pretty much everywhere) might also be good to consider, as would thinking about how to live and build in such a way where a fire sweeping though every so often would not be the end of the world. It implies the need for a new architecture and culture built around fires.
Last updated Tue Oct 12 2021 in Berkeley, CA
2: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378112707004379
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildland%E2%80%93urban_interface