Forest fires

My friend Rachel studies San Francisco Bay area biodiversity among other things. She and her students have studied an area that wildfires recently engulfed. Because of California’s unusual range of climates, Rachel said, there are more different species in California than there are in all other U.S. states combined. The existence of a rare butterfly in the area that burned recently kept developers from gobbling it all up. But they did build houses nearby. The presence of the houses nearby still made it hard for the butterfly to thrive, partly because grasses – chapparal – built up, which it wasn’t easy to burn off, because controlled burns are difficult to pull off with houses so near by. What the forest fires did – in an uncontrolled way – was to burn off this undergrowth. Fortunately, the fires blew up north and – although they caused enough smoke to close the San Francisco airport for a while – they didn’t burn down any houses. It remains to be seen if political pressure will now build to develop the butterfly habitat in order to prevent any more fires.