King Smokey: What California Needs Is a Strong Dose of Old Fashioned Progressive Scientific Forestry

As famed author John McPhee explained long ago in “Los Angeles against the Mountains,” (republished in his 1989 collection The Control of Nature)? that teeming metropolis is fundamentally at war with its setting, because that setting is at war with itself.? The main natural foliage of the Los Angeles hills is chaparral, a scrubland of vigorous shrubs whose reproductive strategy hinges on piling up lots of inflammable biomass while having seeds better equipped than their rivals to survive what the hot winds and mixture of dry and wet spells ensure will be the inevitable conflagration.

More than a century ago Progressive activists and politicians brought a lot of change to America, much of it imported directly from Germany. Among these German imports was the notion of scientific forestry, the idea that by careful mapping and quantification a forest could be optimally managed for human needs.

As science, scientific forestry has long suffered from two maladies, which in the context of the horrific Los Angeles basin wildfires turn out to be blessings in disguise. Because scientific forestry came to America as a tool of Federal forest management, university schools of forestry have never had full academic freedom. Their funding has always depended on following the political line set by officials in the Federal Department of Agriculture and its daughter agency, the United States Forest Service, that maintains national forests.

Second, as James Scott demonstrated in his 1999 political science classic, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, scientific forestry has suffered from what prior to 2025 could be seen as a myopic focus on human needs. Foresters and forestry professors took decades to grasp that the forest is a living web of organisms: vegetable, microbial and animal, make up an ecological community in which the flourishing of each form of life was necessary for the continued health of the forest. Like other kinds of managerialism, scientific forestry (at least in its original form) assumed that forest could be optimally managed by a limited number of quantitative indicators -- over-attention to those indicators invariably produces, in the short run or the long run, what subsequent generations of foresters came to call “forest death,” and thus failure even according to those preferred indicators.

To 2025 Angelenos, “forest death”? would be preferable to city death, and land management focused on human needs rather than ecological preservation might look ideal. One should not oversimplify the problem of managing the natural environment of Los Angeles for the safety and prosperity of the city of Los Angeles: as McPhee explained to a wiser generation of readers, the same chaparral that threatens to burn the city after the rain dries is also what holds down the hills to keep them from undermining and flooding the city when the rain doesn’t stop.

Still, at least from the Federal level the policy tools seem clear, even if the forestry details require a lot of elaboration, experiment, and rethinking. Use the USDA’s leverage over forestry to put old fashioned human-needs-centered-forestry at the center of forest management and academic forestry science. Replace the biologists who have been calling the shots on behalf of the welfare of supposedly endangered species of animals and plants with foresters taught to put human needs first. For us humans, the primary endangered species in the Los Angeles basin is homo sapiens, and while it is helpful for the biologists to tell us what we are doing to our environment in the effort to survive it, our first priority is to survive it. Sorry fish, sorry, toads, sorry scrubland flora and fungi, we can’t always afford to look out better for you than you are capable of looking out for us.?

Smokey the Bear is still king: only you, not the bears and not the tortoises, solo ustedes, damas y caballeros, can prevent forest fires.

reprinted from American Greatness