Forester Greg Giusti doesn’t fight fires with water, hoses and aerial assaults. He didn’t fight the Valley Fire or any of the other conflagrations — at Elk and Jerusalem — that swept across Lake County this past summer and caused immense damage to nature and human beings. “I just stayed out of way,” Giusti says from his office in Lakeport where he serves as the forest adviser for Lake and Mendocino at the University of California Cooperative Extension. “I stood back and let the professionals do their work.”
As soon as it was safe and as barriers came down, Giusti toured the torched landscapes and listened to men and women tell tales of great balls of fire that sped across the sky. Now, when he talks about the fires his voice fills with emotion, though his language also seems to reflect a certain detachment that might be necessary if he’s to do his job, which is protect forests, wild life, wetland and watersheds. So, for example, he speaks about the “mosaic of fire” and the “matrix of charred timberlands.” His fiery language is memorable.
Others who have lived in Lake for years have said that there’s a kind of stark beauty in the fire-ravaged valleys and hillsides. Still others, have said that the fire taught them lessons about themselves they would not otherwise have learned.
“The Valley Fire was a catastrophic event for all of Lake County, but I experienced it as something very private and very personal,” a woman who lived in hard-hit Anderson Springs explained. “Strangely though I was burned out I feel more at home there than ever before.”
For Giusti, fire is both an old foe and longstanding friend. He sees the terrible destruction caused by fire and he also sees the necessity and the inevitability of fire. “California will always have fires,” he says. “There will never be a day without fires in the state. What we have to do is spend as much if not more money, time and energy on the prevention of fire as we do on the suppression of fire.”
There isn’t enough money in the state’s coffers, he argues, to continue to emphasize the suppression of fires. What needs to be done, he believes, is to take a holistic approach to fires, including fighting fire with fire.
“Activities for the suppression of fire may include controlled burns, mechanized removal of brush, creation of defensible space, and selected timber harvest to thin canopies,” he said.
Giusti doesn’t identify one magic-bullet solution to fire prevention, but rather a whole array of options that will require imagination, funding and determination. So, too, he doesn’t locate one single cause of the Valley Fire.
“In many ways, it was a perfect storm,” he says. “The temperature of the air was right, fuels, including leaves on the trees, were very dry, the winds were unusual and of course the drought loomed behind everything else.” He adds, “How the fire traveled, how fast or how slow, depended on the slope of the hillside, the wind, and the dryness of the fuels.”
On his tour, Giusti saw houses in tact. In other places, all he saw were piles of ashes. Here and there, pine trees were reduced to blackened stumps, while elsewhere canopies were in tact. The fire, it seems, adhered to a kind of crazy logic.
“Vineyards were burned, and or covered in soot and grapes were smoked,” Giusti says. “Crops were lost. I was told that in the Rocky Fire, marijuana gardens and greenhouses burned up. Fire fighters did not try to save them, though they tried to save houses.” He paused a moment and added, “Some of the people doing clean up told me that by the end of the day they felt they’d smoked a pack of cigarettes. The air is that bad.”
Not a man to wait for others to strike up the band and call the tune, Giusti has met with private citizens and with forest professionals. He aims to disseminate information as widely as possible and to hold workshops open to all. “We have to see what resources are available, who can pay, and how we can assist property owners who want to reforest and protect against erosion,” he says. “We might be able to figure out tax breaks.”
There’s already grumbling by citizens about the ways that Davy Tree and PG & E are operating: with little consideration for either ecology or aesthetics.
“Some properties are entirely clear-cut with the logs just scattered,” one Lake County resident says. “There needs to be a better plan.”
Still, restoring the landscape might be easier than healing the deepest wound to the community. “I expect to see Manzanita and Toyon to sprout by spring,” Giusti says. Indeed, residents in scorched areas have already noticed the emergence of plants.
“For the botanical world fire is a necessary component,” he says. “Not for the human world. There’s the sociological as well as the ecological aspect of the fire. Lake County is faced with rebuilding the community. People are understandably frightened. They chose to live in a forest environment. Now much of the forest is gone. The question is ‘Will families rebuild?’”
Indeed, forests will take care of themselves. After all forests have learned to live with fire and to depend on fire. “Forest ecology is all about time,” Giusti says. “For the human environment to heal, we need much more public dialogue. And we need to be proactive.”
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