44 MOTHER JONES |SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2019
BURN. BUILD. REPEAT.ber, and only two fi res burned more than
47 square miles each, according to a study
that Knapp and his colleagues published
this year. But between 2002 and 2015, the
fi re season lasted two months longer, with
notably more fi res as early as April and as
late as November, and 25 fi res burned more
than 47 square miles each. The Carr Fire
last year scorched 359 square miles.
Wildfi res don’t merely refl ect climate
change. They also intensify it. When
trees burn, they release carbon. Califor-
nia’s wildfi res emitted 45.5 million metric
tons of carbon dioxide in 2018, roughly
equivalent to putting 9.1 million cars on
the road. That was more than twice the
amount by which California’s annual
emissions fell between 2013—when the
state implemented its carbon cap-and-
trade program—and 2016, the most
recent year for which the state has num-
bers. California has provided $12 million
in cap-and-trade proceeds to thin forests
and mitigate the wildfi re threat in Shasta
County. Meanwhile, the county is seek-
ing another $28 million in forest-thinning
funds from fema. Despite these attempts
at mitigation, much of the local popula-
tion and the power structure is intent on
maintaining the old paradigm even as the
new reality closes in.
Bret Gouvea, the 48-year-old chief of Cal
Fire’s Shasta County unit, started fi ghting
fi res before he could legally drink. A gas sta-
tion owner’s son, he rose through Cal Fire’s
ranks to direct the massive fi ght against the
Carr Fire, which roared into a 17,000-foot-
tall column of hot air and fl ames. Wind and
low atmospheric pressure whipped the
Carr fl ames into a blazing tornado that
tossed a 40-foot-long shipping container
into the sky, spinning it like a toy ball. “The
kind of fi re behavior we’re seeing now is
historic,” Gouvea says. “It’s extreme.”
Gouvea threw everything he had at the
Carr Fire. He directed airplanes, helicop-
ters, bulldozers, and more than 60 teams of
emergency responders, an eff ort that cost
the state $149 million. (It would spend an
additional $94 million battling the Camp
Fire.) One morning in late May, Gouvea
and I drive in his white Cal Fire–issued
Chevy Tahoe through the burn zone, still
barren and charred. When I ask about
criticism of wildfi re suppression, he says
the dense forest vegetation fueling today’s
megafi res is a result not just of fi ghting es-sentially all fi res but also of environmental
rules against felling trees. “The environ-
mental purists would tell you it should be
left to do what nature would let it do,” but
“when you don’t allow a large landowner to
harvest timber and reduce fuel because it’s
habitat for a frog or a spotted owl,” brush
grows and fuels blazes. Gouvea looks me in
the eye. “You just drove through it,” he says.
“It’s a moonscape. It kills off a hundredfold
of what you’re trying to protect.”Around the time marketers created
Smokey Bear, another force began to
remake California’s forests: real estate de-
velopment. Shasta County’s population
grew by an average of 32 percent every
decade between 1950 and 2010. Recently it’s
fl attened at about 180,000, but houses are
being built ever closer to the forest’s edge.
Jeb Allen, who has been building houses
in Redding for three decades, has facili-
tated that development and profi ted hand-Developer Jeb Allen’s Salt Creek
Heights neighborhood lost several
houses to the Carr Fire. He’s since
built new homes there—this spring,
nine sold in just one week.