This piece originally appeared at Green Tape.
By now, everyone has heard about the wildfires sweeping through the Los Angeles area. The sheer scale of destruction is hard to make sense of. My cousin, aunt, and uncle in Pasadena spent days anxiously packed, ready to evacuate at any moment. Their friends lost their homes; the local elementary school is rubble.
It’s tough to pinpoint a single cause for any given wildfire—and wildfires sometimes happen regardless of human activity or government policy. But there’s no doubt that forest management and wildfire-prevention policies can reduce both the probability and severity of wildfires. In California and at the federal level, those policies have often fallen disastrously short.
With that, here’s a wildfire-focused edition of NEPAstats. I’ve compiled data (all cited at the bottom) on how NEPA and similar review processes intersect with wildfire prevention, and I’ve pulled together a number of specific case studies.
