Bay Area nonprofit touts greenbelts as proven protection from wildfire

With the planet warming and large swaths of California annually going up in flames, the Greenbelt Alliance believes these buffer zones are an idea whose time has come.|

It is once again a leafy refuge, a pocket wilderness for residents of nearby Windsor, and all of Sonoma County. But in late October 2019, Foothill Regional Park was the front line of a dramatic battle to save Windsor from the advancing Kincade fire.

That heroic, successful struggle quickly entered California firefighting lore. It also underscored the importance of parks, preserves and open spaces as buffers capable of protecting towns and cities from encroaching wildfires.

The key role played by such barriers, often known as greenbelts, was the subject of a virtual panel discussion hosted June 22 by Bay Area nonprofit the Greenbelt Alliance.

While it’s been around for over 60 years, the Greenbelt Alliance is feeling a particular urgency these days, with the planet warming and large swaths of the region annually going up in flames. Greenbelts, the alliance has concluded, are an idea whose time has come.

To raise the profile of this critical “yet overlooked” tool, the nonprofit commissioned a white paper based on original research and case studies, including several instances of greenbelts slowing or stopping wildfires in Sonoma County. One was that epic stand in Foothill park. Another featured firefighters’ strategic use, 11 months later, of the roads in Trione-Annadel State Park to start controlled burns, create fuel breaks and position equipment to keep the Glass fire out of Santa Rosa.

After detailing for her audience the different kinds of greenbelts -- parks like Foothill; vineyards and farmland; recreational greenways such as bike paths and golf courses -- Greenbelt Alliance Deputy Director Sara Cardona called on politicians and planners in wildfire-prone areas to “more intentionally” prioritize them -- and to create new ones.

She called on cities and counties to contain growth inside their “main areas,” where residents will be “most wildfire safe.”

Cardona also emphasized the need for stewardship of greenbelts, and for sustainable funding for the long term management of those lands. That message resonated with Sonoma County Regional Parks Deputy Director Melanie Parker, a member of Tuesday’s panel discussion. Parker noted that, without such management, an oak woodland will eventually convert to a forest of Douglas fir, far less biodiverse, and much more prone to conflagration.

All that sounds reasonable, as long as decisions on where greenbelts go are “ecologically grounded,” said Sasha Berleman, a seasonal U.S. Forest Service firefighter who has a doctorate in fire ecology from UC Berkeley.

A housing complex abutting a greenbelt consisting of chaparral would not be reducing fire risk, she said. A development next to an oak woodland, on the other hand, “is a great option.”

Berleman is director of the Fire Forward program for Audubon Canyon Ranch. Fire Forward helped found the Good Fire Alliance, a group of North Bay landowners and land managers seeking to expand the use of prescribed burning -- one of the stewardship elements the Greenbelt Alliance calls for in its new report.

Misti Arias, general manager of the Sonoma County Agricultural Preservation and Open Space District and a panelist at Tuesday’s event, effused about the “multilayered” benefits of greenbelts, from recreation to locally grown food, then cited a starker example. A building owned by her agency was spared from the Glass fire, thanks to an undeveloped tract just beyond the northeast boundary of Santa Rosa.

While the idea of creating “green spaces” has been around for a long time, said Michael Jones, a forestry adviser for Lake, Mendocino and Sonoma counties, the concept of using them for fire defense, or fire resilience, is a more recent “framing of the conversation.”

While only passingly familiar with the Greenbelt Alliance, Jones said he’s supportive of “any new ideas for how to develop and protect communities.”

Until recently, he said, residents of the American West built homes in vulnerable areas, under the assumption “that fire protection resources will be able to protect them.”

As the last few years have shown, that’s not a sustainable model. Greenbelts are “an interesting idea” -- provided they’re properly stewarded, he added -- “another tool in the toolbox.”

They are a very old tool. Panelist Tim Ingolsbee called in from Oregon’s Wilamette Valley -- the traditional lands, he pointed out, of the Kalapuya tribe, which lived in that fire prone area “for 10,000 years” without a single fire engine or air tanker.

“How did they do it?” asked Ingolsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “They didn’t attempt to fight fire. They worked with fire. They carefully and selectively and strategically burned around their village sites, creating greenbelts, if you will, with fire.”

The other out-of-state panelist, Dr. Michael Medler, who chairs the Environmental Studies program at Western Washington University, was invited to discuss his work on a different kind of greenbelt, dubbed the Community Wildlife Resilience Zone.

Rather than be overwhelmed by the number of acres of forestland in California that need to be treated to make them more fire safe -- around 20 million, said Medler -- he encourages people to think on a smaller scale. Much of what needs to be done to stop wildfires from coming into communities, he went on, citing research by Jack Cohen, a retired US Forest Service fire scientist, “can be done with about a quarter-acre buffer.

“That’s a quarter-mile, 400 meters,” he said, of his proposed resilience zones, more tailored and tight-fitting than other species of greenbelts. “And it isn’t an area you need clear cut, or scrape. It just has to have room for firetrucks to get through, and for people to work. It needs to have the canopy broken up. We’re still talking parkland, by and large.”

Every community in fire-prone areas would be a candidate for its own wraparound safety belt. There are, of course, “a million caveats,” said Medler, “involving wind-blown embers and all the other stuff you have to do to stop fires from leaping from place to place.” Those issues, he allowed, are not trivial.

But as far as “treating the ground,” these wildfire resilience zones would “allow us to focus our efforts. These areas are much smaller. If we target them first, and communities feel more resilient, then maybe we can start using wildland fire to the scale we’re going to need to on those millions of acres in the back country.”

Asked by the moderator how his resilience zones might work in the Bay Area, Medler judged that “more than a lot of places in the country, you’re ready to kick the tires” on them.

Other advantages: plentiful parkland, and many “folks in the field” interested in developing the concept.

Mostly, he concluded, “you’ve got a moment in history where fire demands we do something about it.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.

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