Why do we still have wildfires raging in Spain? With all the regulations, restrictions, and resources poured into fire prevention and fire fighting, surely wildfires would have disappeared or at least they would have been controlled to the point of not causing damage. Is the climate changing so rapidly that the government cannot keep up? Are the resources used by authorities insufficient, or the restrictions too lax?
To answer these questions we need to look at them calmly, which is difficult when you are talking about something that can take everything from you, something that causes such strong emotions in everyone. But it is an important analysis to make as wildfires, at least in Spain, are going down only in number. Those that do happen are increasing in severity.
Economic Calculation
In the old times, wildfires happened a lot more frequently than people assume. After all, there was no electricity. All heating and cooking was done using fires. And wildfires also happened due to natural phenomena such as lightning. So both completely untouched ecosystems and humans in the natural world had to learn to live with wildfires.
And they did. A testament to this is the amount of rural lands still with vegetation. Untouched ecosystems developed a balance in which herbivores avoided excessive vegetation accumulating. People dealt with wildfires by calculating how much to spend on risk and where, and how much on fire fighting. This meant knowing roughly how valuable a land was and the cost of a fire. This meant small, low-intensity fires would either be left to burn or even be started on purpose.
These fires would clear dry vegetation, avoid excessive amounts of it and introduce nutrients into the soil. Far from being destructive, they would add value to land. So it would cost far less to let these fires burn than to spend resources fighting them.
When fires got either too big, or had too much vegetation to burn or were close to valuable parts of land, they would be tackled. This meant people would again make a calculation and deem that the fire would cost more to leave than to extinguish.
These economic calculations would avoid high-intensity fires. These would not happen as not enough fuel would be allowed to accumulate, and valuable parts of land would be kept clean of dry vegetation. Authorities nowadays concentrate on spark avoidance, but it is the fuel that determines what fire you have. A spark can start a fire, but it only becomes a raging inferno if it has enough fuel to burn. Fire prevention does not mean putting up signs saying “barbecues forbidden,” it means clearing the land of excessive dry vegetation.
These ways of fighting wildfires were done in the old times, in which rural life was generally left alone by authorities. Nowadays it is the opposite. They try to micromanage everything. Find a dead tree in the woods? You need a permit to collect the wood that may even not be granted. Want to clear your land? You need not only the say so of authorities but even costly studies of environmental impact.
The same goes for working the land. The amount of regulations is simply staggering. It is commonly accepted that regulations are necessary to “protect” the environment. But in reality they are restrictions on human action. When my local council says that two trees in my property are “protected” they do not mean they care for those trees. It means that I am forbidden to take actions on those trees without their say so. If the trees withered and died, the council would not even notice or care.
So we need to see regulations for what they are. They are restrictions that reduce choice and make human action more costly and difficult. In a rural setting this means that working the land and maintaining it is every year more costly and difficult. This alters individual economic calculation. In many cases, rural life is no longer viable, forcing people to leave. This creates today’s Spain’s rural landscape, the “España vaciada.” It also means that a lot of land is not worked or maintained. Dry vegetation accumulates without check. And these are no longer natural ecosystems. Removing humans from them does not make them functional ecosystems, much less if natural fires are not allowed to burn.
On public lands economic calculation is not altered, it is simply impossible. How can you calculate how much to spend when, for you, everything is free or valueless? Authorities “manage” land they have not paid for with resources that someone else pays for. And they do it by decree. The benefits are zero, value is zero and costs are zero. Economic calculation makes no sense. And this inability for economic calculation determines current policies.
Knowledge
A popular online farmer commented, exasperated, that whenever wildfires raged, “experts” they had never seen before flooded rural areas. And this is the problem. Contrary to popular belief, the real experts are local residents. I know more about my trees (and yes I do have an open feud with my local council about these trees) than any bureaucrat could ever have. I live with them. I can tell you if they are dry or wet today. I can tell you how much they have grown, which one gets the sun first, which one sways more with the wind.
In a rural setting, the people who live there know how dry the land is, what part of the land is normally more humid, where the wind tends to come from, how to get into land A or B from the better access. They know what vegetation there is, how much is a fire risk, how clean the forest is. But, more importantly, they know what value the land has. We need to remember that value is subjective, so the landowner may value a cluster of ancient oaks where he used to play as a kid more than a productive orchard. He and only he can assign this value.
But, to bureaucrats, all land is the same. The way wildfires are reported is very telling. It is surface burned, no matter what has been burned. To them all land has the same value—zero.
Incentives
As politicians and bureaucrats cannot calculate what wildfires to tackle nor allocate resources rationally, their only incentive is to do whatever gains them more votes and power. As wildfires create a lot of panic, there is much to gain by trying to tackle any little fire. Small beneficial fires are extinguished, accumulating even more fuel for high-intensity fires. When these do happen, there is nothing they can do.
These fires are getting worse, but, instead of changing their way of working, authorities double down because they have the incentive to appear to “fight fires” as this wins them even more power.
Conclusion
Collectivism is the belief that the best way to do something is to take the decisions away from individuals and give that power to the collective or a centralized power, which, in practice, means a few “experts” tell everyone else what they can or cannot do. But when the individual is prevented from deciding, subjective valuation is impossible, economic calculation is impossible, all the local relevant knowledge individuals have is also lost, and incentives are completely altered.
The “public” management of rural land has all these problems, making land management—both private and public—costly and difficult. Lack of maintenance means excess vegetation not cleared, which in turn means fuel for fires. The more vegetation, the worse the fires. It should be no surprise that fires are getting more intense and more destructive, as this is the logical result of government intervention and “management.”
It is time we realize wildfires are not proof that we need more regulations, restrictions, and prohibitions and more resources taken from us to be mismanaged. They are a prime example of the failures of collectivist actions and government intervention.
What is the solution?
Wildfire prevention and firefighting are as human endeavors as any others. This means we do not know and cannot know today what the best course of action is, but the only way to tend towards a better solution is to let the experts work on the problem freely. I mean the real experts, the people that know the land and that live in it. They know how best to tend their land. They also need the room to try different ways of fire prevention and the best ways to collaborate. Only free individuals can constantly learn by trial and error, and gradually progress. This and only this will start reducing wildfires.
As a first step, start removing regulations—especially supposedly “environmental” ones—and start removing bureaucrats from “environmental” positions. That would be a nice start.
