The uncertain fate of America’s iconic Christmas tree
Rich Fairbanks is among the rare-but-vocal landowners who support fire management, even as he questions some of the federal government’s efforts. He collaborated with a regional Prescribed Burn Association — the first of its kind in the state — to burn an acre of land right by his home.
He wishes more landowners would realize that to protect the forest, it needs to burn occasionally.
It’s time to redefine what a megafire is in the climate change era
“The modern era of megafires is often defined based on wildfire size,” wrote Jennifer Balch, associate professor of geography at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and her colleagues in the new study, “but it should be defined based on how fast fires grow and their consequent societal impacts.” While large fires have a major effect on air quality, ecosystems, and the release of planet-warming carbon, it is fast fires that have the greatest impact on infrastructure damage, evacuation efforts and, ultimately, death tolls.
Wildfires in the West Aren’t Just Getting Bigger. They’re Faster, Too.
When it comes to wildfire threats, “we’ve been so focused on size,” said Jennifer Balch, the study’s lead author and an associate professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. “But what we really need to focus on is speed.”
Many of today’s deadliest fires burn so ferociously that firefighters cannot do much in the moment but get out of the way, Dr. Coop said. “If we’re not prepared for them, they hit us and they hit us hard.”
Forest Service halts prescribed burns in California. Is it worth the risk?
“They’re backed into a corner, but they’ve backed themselves into a corner,” Quinn-Davidson said. “They’re not leading, and it seems like they’re not capable of leading on prescribed fire, given the nature of politics and how they do business — always choosing short-term risk over long-term vision and strategy.”
She calls for a rethinking of how prescribed burns can be applied on federal lands.
“If the Forest Service is consistently not able to do the work, how can we lean on local resources — tribes and prescribed burn associations, for example — to get that work done?”
This data shows just how much faster California wildfires are getting — and why that's so dangerous
Fires are moving quicker in California versus other regions in the West, the scientists found. Between 2001 and 2020, wildfire growth rates increased by 249% across the Western U.S. — defined as a group of 11 Western states — but 398% in California alone. Mountainous regions of Southern California were found to have the largest increase in daily wildfire growth rates in the two decade span.
“This is the California foothills,” Kolden said. “The Coast Range, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, all through the Central Valley. This is the region where you really have fires being carried by that grass understory.”
Working with fire: Eugene-based organization FUSEE celebrates 20 years of rethinking what we think we know about wildfires
Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology is celebrating 20 years of advocating for change in wildfire media coverage and management. For FUSEE members, proactive fire lighting can solve the wildfire crisis. This stance has been historically underrepresented in media and policy because of the conventional narrative that fire suppression and logging will prevent wildfire damage.
“We’re torch bearers for a new paradigm of fire management” says founder and executive director Timothy Ingalsbee, echoing FUSEE’s slogan. Over its 20 years FUSEE has been featured in over 400 news stories and has had a national impact on wildfire policy.
Sharp divide in Oregon over bill to step up logging to prevent wildfires
Republicans are backing a proposal to scale back environmental regulations to “thin” forests while Democrats and environmentalists want to fund community preparedness
Ten days of action: The Eugene Environmental Film Festival starts Oct. 11 at Art House
“Environmental justice is at the heart of this year’s festival,” says EEFF Director Ana McAbee in a press release. “We believe that films have the power to educate, inspire and mobilize communities.” Each day of the festival is hosted by either filmmakers or by local nonprofits working in collaboration with the festival. Those nonprofits include Mount Pisgah Arboretum, Beyond Toxics, Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, the Edelic Center for Ethnobotanical Services, Friends of Family Farmers, BRING Recycling and the Willamette Resources and Educational Network.
How the Northwest Forest Plan may reshape management of our woods
“One of the biggest barriers is just risk-averse managers. There’s this double standard,” continued Ingalsbee. “They can light up an entire mountainside in a huge backfire, fighting the fire and celebrated as heroes. But if they try to light a prescribed fire and things go wrong, it could cost their career.”
Wildfire Data Is Flawed — Here’s How to Fix It.
The U.S. Forest Service includes fire it intentionally sets as part of its acreage count of the nation’s “wildfires.” That presents an inaccurate picture.
Can Washington hack and burn its way out of a future of megafires?
By the 1950s, wildfires that used to burn around 30 million acres each year now burned close to 3 million a year, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildfire ecologist and the executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. During these decades, forests across the American West were accumulating a fire deficit. Grasses, shrubs and trees that historically burned away collected and piled up.
We are running out of firefighters at a perilous time
In the era of climate change and forest mismanagement, it’s tempting to shrug one’s shoulders and presume that firefighter shortages are inevitable. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Unlike urban firefighters, wildland firefighters are specially trained to take on the wildfires that plague the West. For years, those employed by the federal government have complained about profound levels of attrition driven by poor pay, increasingly exhausting working conditions and a lack of mental-health support. And unless Congress gets it together, a government shutdown on Oct. 1 will cut their wages across the board.
Extreme heat means more wildfires. It’s taking a toll on firefighters.
Extreme heat increases the chances that firefighters can suffer heat exhaustion or heat stroke — which can be deadly.
And as wildland firefighters face longer seasons, they may also face additional health risks down the line.
‘Weather whiplash’ helped drive this year’s California wildfires
“Fire just is. Fire is inevitable,” said Bloemers. “The problem is the vulnerability of the communities that we’ve built in the fire plain, not the fire, because we aren’t going to eliminate the fire from a Western fire-prone, fire-adapted landscape. It is a natural reality.”
A study Bloemers co-authored emphasizes improving resilience in at-risk communities. Modifying structures and landscaping around communities can make them less likely to burn in a wildfire, and can reduce the potential for ignitions in conditions in which a fire could be difficult to control.
Oregon House Republicans target forests for wildfire reform as grass and shrubland burns
About 1,650 wildfires this season have burned a record of more than 1.5 million acres in Oregon. But about 75% were not in forests but across grass and shrubland in eastern Oregon, according to the Wildland Mapping Institute.
“It’s true that better forest management is one piece of the puzzle. At the same time, it’s vital to base wildfire strategies on careful thinking and good science. Broad-brushed claims that more commercial logging will reduce our risk don’t clear that bar,” Sen. Jeff Golden, D-Ashland, and chair of the Senate Committee on Natural Resources and Wildfire, said.
In the Park Fire, an Indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction
Where others might see only catastrophe, Don Hankins scans fire-singed landscapes for signs of renewal.
He identifies prohibitions on Indigenous cultural fires as some of the most destructive ecological policies in history for both Native cultures and the lands they traditionally stewarded. “Indigenous communities often recognize colonization as the beginning of the climate crisis,” Hankins wrote. “Spanish, Mexican, and American governments enacted policies enabling private ownership of land and forbidding Indigenous peoples from setting fires—often with extreme penalties (i.e., death).” A complex web of state and federal laws continues to severely limit cultural burning.
The wildfire risk in America’s front yards
A 10-year
from the Forest Service calls for removing much more of this combustible kindling, reducing flammable fuels on up to 50 million acres of land. But communities will continue burning if leaders don’t also find the money and political will to retrofit older homes, and rethink where and with what new homes are built. “We assume that we can place our house in an area of high risk, and that firefighters will come in and risk their own life to protect our home,” Barrett said. “You would never assume that level of home protection from any other hazard, particularly from earthquakes or floods or hurricanes.”
The electric grid is a wildfire hazard. It doesn’t have to be.
Shareholder pressure on electric utilities has prioritized profits over maintenance that can help reduce wildfire risk. This deferred maintenance over the decades means old frail utility poles are more likely to fall and outdated, weakened wires are more apt to snap during storms.
As millions of acres burn, firefighters say the U.S. Forest Service has left them with critical shortages
The agency recently said that it had reached 101% of its firefighter hiring goal for 2024, but those on the front lines say the agency is understating how badly depleted their ranks are, especially for experienced firefighters.
Watch how a father’s risky plan to save his house from the Park Fire paid off
As Amy and their 19- and 22 year-old sons wrangled the family pets and packed two cars with go-bags and supplies, Mike put into action a plan he had developed for just this situation: an extensive fire defense system he created to protect his home from a wildfire’s destructive blaze.