On a steep mountainside where walls of flames torched the forest on their way toward Lake Tahoe in 2021, blackened trees stand in silhouette against a gray sky. "If you can find a live tree, point to it," Hugh Safford, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of California, Davis, tells the AP while touring damage from the Caldor Fire, one of the past decade's many massive blazes. Dead pines, firs, and cedars stretch as far as the eye can see. Damage in this area of Eldorado National Forest could be permanent — part of a troubling pattern that threatens a defining characteristic of the Sierra Nevada range John Muir once called a "waving sea of evergreens."
Forest like this is disappearing as increasingly intense fires alter landscapes around the planet, threatening wildlife, jeopardizing efforts to capture climate-warming carbon and harming water supplies, according to scientific studies. A combination of factors is to blame in the US West: A century of firefighting, elimination of Indigenous burning, logging of large fire-resistant trees, and other management practices that allowed small trees, undergrowth, and deadwood to choke forests. And a changing climate has brought more intense, larger, and less predictable fires.
Despite relatively mild wildfire seasons the past two years, California has seen 12 of its largest 20 wildfires—including the top eight—and 13 of the most destructive in the last five years. Record rain and snowfall this year mostly ended a three-year drought but explosive vegetation growth could feed future fires. California has lost more than 1,760 square miles—nearly 7%—of its tree cover since 1985, a recent study found. While forest increased in the 1990s, it declined rapidly after 2000 because of larger and more frequent fires. A study of the southern Sierra Nevada—home to Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon national parks—found nearly a third of conifer forest had transitioned to other vegetation as a result of fire, drought, or bark beetles in the past decade.
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"John Muir would not recognize any of this," says Safford, gesturing at a stand of tightly packed dead trees. "He wouldn't even know where he was." After wildfires in 2020 and 2021 wiped out up to about a fifth of all giant sequoias—once considered almost fireproof—the National Park Service last week embarked on a controversial project to help the mighty trees recover with its largest planting of seedlings a single grove. Read the full story for more about the long-range plans, including prescribed burns, to try to save the state's forests. (Or read more about wildfires.)
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