Three months ago, I worked the fireline in New York’s Sterling Forest, fighting what’s commonly known as the Jennings Creek fire. I was only on the line for a day, but rotating crews battled that monster for two weeks. In the end, it burned 5,000 acres — the largest and most destructive fire in the Hudson Valley in recent memory.
I spent most of my time cutting trees with a small electric chainsaw, felling them before they could become fuel bridges, allowing the fire to escape. I was shocked to learn that New York State Parks officer Dariel Vasquez was killed by a falling tree shortly after I came off the line, and wondered if he had died doing similar work.
For the rest of the time the Jennings Creek fire burned, I ran local calls for other fire companies whose crews were denuded working in the forest. Complaining to a friend that I couldn’t do more (I’m a volunteer who serves when I’m not working my day job), he replied, “Don’t worry, with climate change, you’ll get another chance and sooner than you think.”
Indeed, this mirrored a warning I sounded just six months ago.
And then Los Angeles burned, and I realized that we’re just getting started. Worse, I discovered that so much of the discourse around what to do to prevent this in the future is pointed in the wrong direction.
When last we had an update, the death toll in the Los Angeles fires stood at 27, with 40,000 acres burned and the largest portions of the blaze still not contained. The number of people under evacuation orders at one point stood at nearly 200,000. With more than 17,000 structures destroyed so far, this fire has “jumped the wildland urban interface. This means the fire moved from the wildland fuels that built and grew it and consumed structures where urban meets rural.
That didn’t happen in the Jennings Creek fire, but this “was a miracle,” per a local town supervisor. Jennings Creek wasn’t even close to being as wind-driven as what’s happening in Los Angeles, but there were certainly moments. I’d be working the fireline a safe distance from the flames, the wind would pick up briefly, and within seconds, I’d be standing in them. Fires like these, starting in the wildland and threatening habitations, need to be addressed — and urgently.
The press is rife with recriminations. President Trump has blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom (calling him “Newscum”) for the disaster. A lot of hay is being made of the fact that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who promised not to travel internationally while serving, happened to be in Ghana at a state event when the fires broke out.
Newsom has ordered an investigation into why hydrants ran dry. Foreign countries have sent help, and rich folks are hiring private crews.
Manpower and water dominate the headlines, and those things are important for combatting fires, but I am not seeing much conversation about fire prevention, specifically about building the kind of resilient forests that will prevent fires from taking off like this in the first place.
Take Bend, Ore. The city butts up against the tall Ponderosa pine of the 1.6 million-acre Deschutes National Forest, a veritable tinderbox on its very doorstep. Bend’s arid climate, hot, dry summers, abundant grasses and reputation as an outdoor destination for vacationers make it a prime candidate for the kind of wildfires that encroach on human habitations — just like what we’re witnessing in Los Angeles. The city has responded with the kind of preventative thinking we’re going to need moving into a climate-change-strained future.
This includes the “Own Your Zone” program, helping homeowners develop “defensible space,” essentially creating home firelines that remove combustible fuel. In a twist of intense irony, Oregon unveiled new codes mandating vegetation reduction in certain zones on new maps of wildfire-susceptible areas on Jan. 7, the very same day the conflagration kicked off in Los Angeles.
But the shining example is the Deschutes Collaborative Forest Project, a volunteer collaborative focused squarely on the problem of ensuring healthy forests are getting the helping hand they need. The collaborative helps to tackle climate change, and build the kind of resilient wildland that won’t cure wildfires but can help ensure those wildfires that do break out are easier to control. Indeed, wildfires shouldn’t be cured, as many ecosystems are dependent on “normal” natural burns that are nothing like what we saw in Jennings Creek or what we’re currently seeing in Los Angeles.
This involves a range of commonsense measures which, unlike the dramatic and immediate impact of assets like additional firefighters, the gear they need to do their jobs, and abundant water, have to be undertaken gradually, over many, many years, to help wildlands build the resilience they need to keep these kinds of blazes manageable.
“In some parts of the forest,” the Deschutes Collabortive notes, “we are past the point of allowing nature to take its course. These forest stands need our help to get back to health.” This includes a variety of forest management practices, including reducing invasive species that burn more readily than native plants, thinning to remove thick underbrush that adds to the fire fuel load and opens canopies that prevents “crown-to-crown” spread of fire through the treetops.
Fire suppression efforts in wildlands are necessary in many cases, but they also run counter to the natural ecosystem that depends on fire (there are species of pine and oak that require it) to maintain balance. Big meadows, cleared by fire, become overgrown, adding to fuel load and allowing for more rapid spread.
Prescribed or controlled burns, where humans deliberately simulate the natural spread of fire, can help mitigate this, but it requires funding, skill, and care. Even then, they’re still risky. In 2022, a controlled burn leapt its bounds to become the worst wildfire in New Mexico’s history. In fact, some are arguing that forest management is the real culprit behind the Los Angeles fires, but these are fringe voices sometimes tied to climate change denial, and drowned out by the focus on bodies, water and gear.
Back here in New York, there are multiple projects like the Deschutes Collaborative. There’s the Black Rock Forest Consortium, just down the road from me. There’s the Hudson Valley Alliance for Housing and Conservation, which strikes a rare balance between attempting conscious management of ecosystems alongside the need to provide affordable housing to the region’s growing population. The Audubon Society runs a healthy forests initiative in the state that helps create the kind of wildland resilience that might help prevent the next Jennings Creek disaster, or at least make it more manageable. All of these efforts, like Deschutes, are nonprofit, heavily dependent on community involvement, volunteer labor and public funding.
You can’t even call the Los Angeles fires a warning shot. Rather, they are merely the latest episode in a rapidly unfolding story. With climate change’s increasing impact, and the increasingly populated intersection between wildland and urban environments, we can expect more of the same unless we address it urgently.
Part of that move should absolutely be the tools firefighters need — more hands to do the hard work, more water to “put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” more and better gear. But the longer, slower and more patient work of managing the wildlands where these things start is going to be a critical part of that fight, demanding volunteers, dedicated activists and, of course, lots and lots of money.
What’s more, it demands political courage and deft communication to sell the slower and more complex solution to a public who, as the current news cycle and social media conversation shows, have short attention spans consumed by outrage.
As we reckon with what is still unfolding around Los Angeles, we need to be thinking about the full range of solutions to employ to move toward a time where this becomes a moment in history, and not the new normal.
Myke Cole is a historian, novelist and essayist. His career spans service in the military, intelligence, law enforcement and firefighting. His most recent book is “Steel Lobsters: Crown, Commonwealth, and the Last Knights in England.”
