‘‘Of the hundreds of persons who visit the Pacific slope in California every summer to see the mountains, few see more than the immediate foreground and a haze of smoke which even the strongest glass is unable to penetrate.’’
-- CH Merriam, 1898, cited in Stephens, "Prehistoric fire area and emissions from California’s forests, woodlands, shrublands, and grasslands" (Forest Ecology Management, 2007).
Unpleasant though it may be, Californians are going to have to get used to lots more smoke. Most Californian's are used to the unnaturally low mount of fire and smoke that characterized the 20th century. That low amount of fire, however, was historically off the charts and entirely the product of human tinkering in the ecosystem.
If you look at acres burned, we find...
2018: 1.7 million so far
2017: 1.2 million
Average since 2000: 705,174
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_California_wildfiresBut what was the average acreage burned before 1800, according to the best estimates of forest ecologists?
4,5 million acres per year on average (Stephens).
So our "bad" fire years in the 21st century are burning roughly 1/3 of what an
average year burned pre-1800. Our
average year is one sixth of what the California ecosystem expects and needs to stay healthy.
In addition to all that, throughout most of the 20th century, those numbers were much, much lower. For example, in Yosemite the pre-1800 average is estimated at 15,000 acres per year. From 1931 to 1971, a total of 4,700 acres burned. That means that for 40 years, we were letting burn roughly 1% of the historically normal burn acreage. I don't know how that corresponds to the state as a whole, but I bet it's similar.
We've now reached a point where we've pushed suppression-based management way past the breaking point. What we've been doing is equivalent to solving floods by never letting any water flow out of the dam. When it springs a leak, we patch it. Every year, we add another couple meters to the dam to hold in this year's flow. After 100 years, you end up with a lot of very tall, very dangerous dams.
And then of course, this is all compounded by people (like me) moving into the Wildland Urban Interface, warmer climate causing longer fire seasons, and so forth.
What we're seeing this year is what we should expect for the foreseeable future. We completely borked the ecosystem and now we're finding the old adage is true: Nature bats last.