This year’s US wildfires have already set records that could foreshadow a smoky, fiery summer
Recently released data show how drought, paltry Western snows and unseasonable heat, all exacerbated by climate change, could be priming the nation for a long wildfire season.
More fires in what has historically been a wetter part of the year “is becoming less a trend, more a pattern and normality,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, co-founder and executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. “It is a clear signal of ongoing climate change.”
USDA is asking contractors and others to weigh in before it launches a study on moving wildfire management to the Interior Department.
The Trump administration is inching forward on its proposal to take the Forest Service out of the fire suppression business.
Questions mount as Interior’s wildfire agency takes shape
Over time, many land managers have come to embrace wildfire as an inevitable — and often beneficial — force that shapes forests, grasslands and wildlife. In some cases, fires should be allowed to burn, said Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, an advocacy group of current and former wildland firefighters.
“All suppression, all the time, is basically a failed — failing and failed — strategy,” he said. “We are losing the war on wildfire, and the whole paradigm needs to shift to working with fire instead of fighting against fire.”
Fire season started early. Is the federal government ready?
With Trump’s proposal, Congress has chosen to slow things down in two ways. First, the appropriations bill package passed by the Senate in January didn’t allocate funding for the USWFS, instead allocating funding for wildland firefighting separately to the Forest Service and Interior. The administration had asked for $6.5 billion for the new agency.
Congress has also said the idea has to be studied further, which could end up derailing it. In a letter sent to Burgum on February 5 by nearly a dozen senators and representatives, the administration is criticized for a lack of detail. “We are concerned that the DOI is advancing a rapid and consequential restructuring of wildfire management,” the letter says, “without adequate analysis, transparency, or planning to prevent disruption during what is expected to be a significant fire season or to safeguard long-term wildfire preparedness.”
The fight over logging on U.S. public lands isn’t done yet
Despite an Oregon court ruling in January invalidating a rule that enabled clear cutting, it’s far from the last salvo in the battle for how to fight fires or manage forests—and who can profit from it.
Fires and logging justice
A decades-old US Forest Service rule that’s been used to supposedly reduce wildfire risk through large-scale logging while bypassing environmental review has been deemed unlawful by a federal court in Oregon. Timothy Ingalsbee, co-founder and Executive Director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, talks with Host Steve Curwood about why clearcutting can instead increase wildfire risk, and shares his view that USFS needs to rethink its entire approach to managing forests and wildfire risk.
Rescinding ‘Roadless Rule’ threatens Oregon’s public lands
Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology in Eugene, said changing the rule has nothing to do with fire prevention.
“Rescinding protection of the roadless area is about extracting commodity resources and exerting power over the landscape, not fire prevention,” Ingalsbee said. “It’s a losing proposition. It’s not about firefighting, it’s staking out landscapes for logging, grazing, mining or drilling. That’s what this administration is all about. These places are so remote and rugged that building a road is destructive. It won’t last. It’s a huge expense for taxpayers.”
Wildfire seasons are starting to overlap. That spells trouble for firefighting.
“If a fire season is increasing and eventually overlapping, it will shrink the window of opportunity to help each other in terms of firefighting,” said Cong Yin, a climate scientist at the University of California, Merced, who led the new study. “These changes are attributable to climate change, so we need to mitigate climate change if we want to avoid this future.”
How protecting wilderness could mean purposefully tending it, not just leaving it alone
Scholars recognize prescribed burning as an effective strategy to protect forests from catastrophic fires, though it remains controversial in wilderness as human intervention. Government policy allows lightning-ignited wildfires to burn in federal wilderness areas in certain circumstances, but most of these fires are still suppressed – a human intervention that is widely accepted.
Scientists have found another alarming pattern in wildfires. Around the world, the conditions that brew massive blazes are...syncing up?
The extreme heat, high winds, and severe dry conditions that produce towering, fast-moving flames that advance by the acre are not just becoming more common; new research shows that these factors are increasingly arising in multiple regions at the same time, creating the conditions for simultaneous wildfires around the world.
The increasing threat from wildfires is also taxing for firefighters, who are not just facing more dangers to their lives and limbs, but also to their mental health. Field said the study shows that everyone should start preparing for the threat of simultaneous severe fire.
It’s clear then that we can’t simply rely on firefighting to cope with this problem.
Firefighters wore gear containing “forever chemicals.” The Forest Service knew and stayed silent for years.
According to multiple wildland firefighters and government officials familiar with contracting and purchasing, the Forest Service never told rank-and-file wildland firefighters that their pants might contain PFAS.
Interior department moves to consolidate its firefighters into one agency. With no dedicated funding for the new U.S. Wildland Fire Service, how are those in land management reacting?
“It’s all been kind of a black box operation,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a nonprofit based in Eugene, Oregon. “There’s almost no information coming out.”
Trump’s new Wildland Fire Service is failing to ignite. Wildfires are a growing threat. Do we need a new federal agency to help?
There are also concerns about how the Wildland Fire Service will set its priorities. “There are valid reasons to support creating a fire management agency, but this is a firefighting force, and that is part of the problem,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology and a former firefighter. “Waiting around for a wildfire during these hot, dry, windy conditions that are becoming more frequent due to climate change, we’ll never get ahead of the problem.”
Wildfire urgency unites Congress. The ‘Fix Our Forests’ Act does not.
“There are some good things in FOFA,” said Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), noting provisions that would deploy new wildfire monitoring tools. But he warned the legislation reflects misplaced priorities and lacks “real funding solutions” to back up lawmakers’ stated commitments to fire resilience.
Democrats also voiced frustration with Republicans for holding repeated hearings on FOFA while declining to examine how the Trump administration is reshaping, and in some cases hollowing out, federal agencies tasked with managing public lands and fighting fires.
Letting Drago Bravo Fire burn made future Grand Canyon wildfires less likely, writer says
President Donald Trump’s appointee to lead the Forest Service has argued that wildfires should instead be suppressed as quickly as possible.
But controlled burns have wide-ranging environmental benefits, and science journalist M.R. O’Connor says the potential positive impacts of Dragon Bravo shouldn’t be ignored.
O’Connor is the author of the book “Ignition: Lighting Fires in a Burning World.” She says periodic wildfires are necessary for the rejuvenation of the forest ecosystem. Among other things, it returns nutrients to the soil and opens up the tree canopy to encourage biodiversity.
Lawmakers fight back against major decision that will impact 45 million acres of land: '[They] will literally pave the way'
The U.S. Forest Service is attempting to repeal a 2001 Virginia law that protects 45 million acres of forest from logging and development. The federal government has framed its argument around bolstering wildfire management, though a seasoned wildfire ecologist who started his career as a wildland firefighter said more roads are likely to cause more fires.
"The historical evidence is clear: roads did not and do not prevent wildfires, they actually facilitate them," Timothy Ingalsbee, PhD, wrote for Columbia Insight in December.
Fix Our Forests Act makes big wildfire response changes. Expert says it also has harmful provisions
Before we can fix our forests, we really need to fix our fires.
Federal judge nixes rule that enabled clearcutting in the name of taming wildfires
“Calling out fire is not enough to get you a get-out-of-jail-free card, you have to back it up with some actual truth.”
Decades-old rule that allowed logging on vast swaths of US land ruled unlawful by Oregon court
“Most of these categorical exclusions used for logging have been framed as wildfire emergency prevention schemes,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, who was not involved in the lawsuit. “The agency screams ‘Fire!’ and thinks they can induce panic in the public and in the courts, and especially in the politicians who are naturally inclined to favor industry, and they can get away with it.”
Forest thinning is most effective when combined with prescribed burning and targeting excessively dense shrubs, saplings and younger trees—the fuel closer to the forest floor, Ingalsbee said. “They burn fast, they burn hot,” he said. But large logging projects target the big crown trees, which are often more resilient to wildfires, and can remove too many trees, leaving sparse forests that can take decades to recover.
Congress has doubts about the Trump administration’s new wildfire management plans
The appropriations bill package approved by the Senate on Thursday doesn’t allocate any funding for the U.S. Wildland Fire Service, denying the administration’s request for $6.5 billion for a new agency. The snub is more targeted at the Trump administration’s broader vision to also fold into the agency fire operations from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service—a merger that has not yet happened and is unlikely without congressional approval, sources say.
“This consolidation plan has occurred in a black box,” Tim Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter, told me last week. He is the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “Everything they’ve done on this has been basically an unfunded mandate [by] Trump.”