42 MOTHER JONES |^ SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
BURN. BUILD. REPEAT.standing on Shingletown Ridge and
gazing west toward the setting sun, Bruce
Miller eyes a rainbow of colors. He sees
pink: the dusky sky blanketing a postcard-
perfect valley 3,000 feet below. He sees
gray: distant snow-capped mountains.
He sees brown: century-old pine and oak
trunks towering more than 100 feet above
him. And he sees green: the profit he hopes
to make by turning this 274-acre patch of
forest into a subdivision for buyers looking
for jaw-dropping views.
“This would be your high-dollar lot
here,” the hearty 68-year-old tells me, halt-
ing our hike through a tangle of manzanita
and poison oak to unfurl a map and point
out the boundaries of a future home site.
A sheer drop at the property’s rear reveals
a stunning panorama. It also invites flames.
“Fire,” Miller says, “burns uphill.”
Wildfire’s lethal tendency to surge up
slopes was driven home last summer,
when an inferno called the Carr Fire ripped
through Shasta County, a chunk of North-
ern California pocked by crests and can-
yons as gorgeous as they are combustible.
Lit by a spark from the wheel rim of a flat
tire scraping the ground, the fire raged
for 39 days, destroying more than 1,000
homes, killing eight people, and requiring
some 3,500 firefighters from around the
world and more than a dozen planes drop-
ping chemicals to finally quell it. In No-
vember came the Camp Fire, which incin-
erated the nearby town of Paradise, killing
85 people. Together, the fires caused at least
$18 billion in damage, bankrupted Califor-
nia’s largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric,
and forced the liquidation of at least one
insurer. For weeks, Northern Californians
breathed smoky air.
The destruction ended any delusion
that humans could keep Mother Nature
in check. They were harbingers of a new
kind of megafire being unleashed on a
warming world.
In February, at California Gov. Gavin
Newsom’s direction, state fire officials
listed 35 spots at particularly severe risk—
spots where crews would race to cut down
trees, in part to create wider evacuation
paths. “Climate change is acting as a
force-multiplier that will increasingly exac-
erbate wildland fire issues over the coming
decades,” the report concluded. It named as
the state’s top priority for tree-thinning the
stretch of highway that runs along Miller’sproperty, an area so overgrown that local
fire officials call it “the brush belt.”
Just three weeks later, Shasta County’s
planning commission unanimously en-
dorsed Miller’s plan to build houses on
that land. The commission had let him
subdivide the property several years ear-
lier, but he hadn’t found a developer who
wanted to buy the property, and his de-
velopment window was set to close this
year. So last December, about four months
after the Carr Fire, he applied for an ex-
tension. This March, the commission gave
him another three years. Since 2016, when
the commission had blessed Miller’s ini-
tial development proposal, there had been
“no new information of substantial impor-tance” about the advisability of develop-
ing the property, according to a document
accompanying the commission’s decision.
The document didn’t mention the Carr
Fire. Nor did it cite the recent state report
identifying the stretch of road along Mill-
er’s acreage as the most urgent spot for fire-
risk mitigation in all of California.today’s monster fires result largely from
three human forces: taxpayer-funded fire
suppression that has made the forest a
tinderbox; policies that encourage con-
struction in places that are clearly prone
to burning; and climate change, which
has worsened everything. Behind them
all is a massive economic perversity: So-
ciety masks the costs of building on the
edges of the forest, a zone that planners
call the “wildland-urban interface,” or the
wui. With its vast forests and penchant for
sprawl, California is the epicenter of wui
wildfire damage. Between 2000 and 2013,
fire destroyed more buildings in Califor-nia’s wui than in all similar areas in the
United States combined, and more than
75 percent of all buildings destroyed by fire
in California were in the wui, according to
a University of Wisconsin–Madison study.
The costs of those fires are soaring. The
federal government spent more than $3 bil-
lion suppressing wildfires in 2018—nearly
five times what it spent 20 years ago, in
inflation-adjusted terms. The US Forest
Service accounts for the bulk of the spend-
ing; the portion of its total budget spent on
firefighting ballooned from 16 percent in
1995 to 52 percent in 2015 and is expected
to hit 67 percent in 2025. The California
Department of Forestry and Fire Protec-
tion, or Cal Fire, estimates it spent $677
million on emergency fire suppression in
2018—ten times what it spent fighting fires
20 years ago. Beyond fire suppression, tax-
payers are forking over large sums to help
bail out people who lose homes, and com-
munities that lose infrastructure. The Fed-
eral Emergency Management Agency puts
the tab at $94.3 million for aid it provided
in the wake of the Carr Fire. “In some in-
stances, would it just be cheaper to buy the
land and keep it from being developed? The
answer’s clearly yes,” says Ray Rasker, ex-
ecutive director of Headwaters Econom-
ics, a Montana-based research group that
focuses on disasters.it seems harsh to blame the bear. But
the fire-suppression campaign that helped
create the conditions for today’s huge
blazes got a crucial boost in 1944 with the
creation of Smokey, whose motto, “Only
you can prevent forest fires,” would be du-
tifully memorized by generations of Amer-
ican schoolchildren. Despite mounting
science pointing to the contrary, the con-
viction that all wildfire is bad wildfire has
guided decades of federal and state policy,
perhaps nowhere more than in California.
After a century of fire suppression, the ac-
cumulated vegetation in the forest is “like
an explosion ready to happen,” says Eric
Knapp, a research ecologist at the Forest
Service’s office in Redding, Shasta’s county
seat. “What climate change has done is
make those fuels more volatile.”
The tragic irony is that, although fire
suppression was designed to tamp down
flames, it has ended up fanning larger ones.
Between 1911 and 1924, California’s aver-
age fire season lasted from May to Octo-REDDING STILL ISN’T
MAKING IT HARDER
TO REBUILD WHERE
HOUSES BURNED
DOWN, SAYS THE CITY
MANAGER. “THAT’S
THE LAST THING WE’D
WANT TO DO.”PHOTOGRAPHS^ BY^ JUSTIN^MAXON