A Q&A with John Laird on how California has done on its wildfire response.

On Monday, Sept. 14, as President Donald Trump lectured Gov. Gavin Newsom, California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot, and the California public about the state’s poor forest management practices, the Sacramento Valley was filled with smoke. Much of that smoke originated on the Creek Fire, ripping through the Sierra National Forest, and the massive August Complex on the Mendocino National Forest—land owned and managed not by the state of California, but by the federal government.

From 2011 to 2019, John Laird, who is now running to represent the Central Coast in the State Senate, held the cabinet-level office Crowfoot now occupies. The Natural Resources Agency includes Cal Fire and the Board of Forestry—so ultimately the protection of the state’s forests fell under Laird’s purview. 

During Laird’s time in that post, California launched an effort to revolutionize forest management practices throughout the state by bringing science into the woods. It involves state, federal, and tribal governments as well as private landowners. It is likely the most comprehensive forest stewardship endeavor in American history. Laird helped lay the groundwork through his agency’s work on the California Forest Carbon Plan. And he negotiated the deal that made Cal Fire and Cal EPA co-chairs of the effort. Needless to say, he does not seem interested in being lectured on this topic by the Science-Denier-in-Chief.

The Weekly spoke with Laird on three occasions over the past two weeks. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Weekly: When President Trump was in California last week, he talked about forest management. Your thoughts?

Laird: Fifty-seven percent of California's forests are under federal management. And the forestlands across California, under whoever's care, have not received adequate management for the last century. So there's just an accumulated problem in California’s forests. 

There has been a historic effort to deal with that situation coming out of the state. It’s based on science and it has involved large amounts of money—and this is something that we can actually do. We can do prescribed fire, and we can do forest thinning in the wildland-urban interface. We can change how we think about fire. This year has just given an urgency to accelerating this process. And we desperately need the federal government as a partner.

With the small amount of cap-and-trade money we had for forest management in the last years of the Brown Administration, we ended up spending almost half on federal forests, even though it was state money and not within state authority. We did what are known as “good neighbor” agreements so we could cross into the federal land to do projects on the federal side. And that's been the difficult thing about the current discussion and the president's recent visit. There needs to be a commitment to take responsibility for the federal lands rather than look at everybody else.

The president was silent for weeks when almost every other national leader sent sympathies to California and the Western states. If he really wants to understand who has responsibilities here he needs to get a mirror, plant it firmly in front of his face and look directly into it.  

Looking back at the fires that have been tearing through parts of the Central Coast for weeks: What’s your takeaway?

I think the state really stepped up, but they stepped up days into it. It took days before there were enough firefighters to do fire suppression on the Santa Cruz [CZU Complex] Fire, and it was burning through residential areas in those first days. I was pounding every single person I know at the top in Sacramento about getting more resources here. It’s fair to say that they were all overwhelmed, at first. There just weren’t enough resources.

My successor [Crowfoot], any time a new area was evacuated, I sent him a text. I told him “We’re packed. I have six boxes just inside the front door. My spouse has stuff in his car. There’s no one fighting the fire that’s heading at us.”

If I land in Sacramento, this is one of the first questions I want to work with some of the agencies on. The question is how do we get to a point— or can we get to a point—where this doesn’t happen again across the state?

Speaking of resources: When the River Fire and the Carmel Fire were both spreading, people in Carmel Valley and Corral De Tierra were experiencing what you experienced in Santa Cruz, awaiting evacuation order updates. How did this happen?

Our whole system was overwhelmed at first. I cannot remember a time when we didn’t fight a fire after the first day or the second day. I remember the Rim Fire because there were people trapped inside when it broke out. So before they put down fire lines, they were taking fire trucks down burning roads and grabbing people and throwing them in the trucks. It was the only way to get them out. While that was going on, it was pretty hard to set down a fire line.

So we’ve had experiences where things just got away. But I don’t have any experience where they went as long as they did without doing fire suppression. And that’s what was terrifying to me—and I’m sure to the folks up in Carmel Valley.

I was in a chat with the Cal Fire chief [Thom Porter], who was deputy chief when I was [Natural Resources Secretary], and he basically said: “It’s been seven days and we’ve got a million acres burning in California.” 

It was a perfect storm. Covid had affected the prison population and all those firefighters were unavailable. The fires were everywhere in the state, and a lot of local departments didn’t want to release their firefighters for mutual aid because they were looking over their own shoulders at home. Perfect storm.

Looking ahead: I heard a New York Times "Daily" podcast episode about California’s wildfires, and about the cycle that takes place when communities are burned out and then rebuild the same types of homes in the same places. What are your thoughts about that? Will we keep rebuilding in fire-prone areas?

There was a substantial building code change in California after the Cedar Fire in San Diego in 2003. A few years later, there was a fire in Orange County that burned through a neighborhood that had been constructed under the new building codes. And the loss was much, much less than in the neighborhoods with homes that were built before the code change. If we are going to rebuild in these areas that are lost, we have to build homes or buildings that are hardened.

When the Cal Fire chief and I were driving through Paradise in the days after the Camp Fire, we passed a storage business that looked relatively untouched in the midst of buildings that had all been lost. The chief pointed out that the structure had stucco walls all around, a metal roof and protected vents. I think the question about rebuilding is simply how to rebuild with those kinds of hardened structures.