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.
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.
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.
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.
A megafire overwhelmed even some of the best preparations. What’s next?
But there are already questions about whether it was enough. Zeke Lunder, a Chico resident and wildfire and fuels management expert, quickly pointed to an overgrowth of invasive thistle near the Park Fire ignition site that Chico could have reduced with a prescribed burn, as it recently had in other parts of Upper Bidwell Park.
The enormous flaw in wildfire data
The first publicized example of such wildfire expansion was the 2002 Biscuit Fire. Timothy Ingalsbee, PhD of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology estimated that a large proportion of the Biscuit Fire was ignited by Forest Service firing operations. Inglasbee stated in a 2006 report largely focused on the Biscuit Fire: “…burnout operations can sometimes take place several miles away from the edge of a wildfire, or alternately, miles away from the fire containment line.” Wildfire expansions have increased since 2002, and wildfire starts, such as lightning strike ignitions, are often simply the “match that lit the fire” leading to numerous firing operation ignitions to implement intentional burns that they call wildfires.
Why the Park Fire exploded so quickly
“What climate change is doing is just adding more energy into the system and amping up what’s there,” said Stephen Pyne, an emeritus professor and fire historian at Arizona State University.
Will the Northwest Forest Plan finally respect tribal rights?
Ryan Reed (Karuk, Hupa, Yurok), an Indigenous fire practitioner and wildland firefighter and the youngest advisory committee member, said he pushed the committee to start to address the impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous communities, citing the impacts of the agency’s long suppression of cultural fire:
“If we’re able to empower Indigenous people, we’re also going to empower the various communities that are directly impacted by fire and have limited access to traditional foods or cultural practices.”
“We’re all feeling the negative impacts of fire suppression,” said committee member Ryan Reed.
Heavy gear, unforgiving terrain, backbreaking work. Now firefighters contend with extreme heat too
The conditions also illustrate the increasing prudence of managing some backcountry fires for ecological benefit, treating them more like controlled burns rather than trying to immediately suppress them, Duncan said. That benefits the environment, and it protects the physical health of firefighters by permitting them to focus on fires threatening people or structures, she said. The idea remains politically unpopular, she noted.
It will also be increasingly key to set more controlled fires in the spring and fall to reduce the amount of fuel on the ground come summer, Ingalsbee said. “Big picture, we’re going to have to be proactively managing fire during the cooler period of the year, rather than attacking all fires at the hottest period of the year, when we fail, and we surpass human physical ability for working in these kinds of conditions,” he said.
Forest Service, Native American Tribes partner to promote forest resilience
Ryan Reed, a member of the Hoopa Tribe in Northern California, is also member of a 21-person federal advisory committee for the Northwest Forest Plan. (And at 23, he’s the youngest.) He said true co-stewardship with tribes starts with early engagement in the planning process. Too often, he said, tribes are notified toward the end and then under pressure to find the people and resources to respond.
…
Reed added that not everyone embraces tribes sharing in policy decisions. But he’s seen Forest Service leaders working “to make some serious change” in tribal consultation practices. “Climate change has been an unfortunate vehicle for tribal leadership and knowledge to be reintroduced,” he said. “The colonial mismanagement ... in our forests since contact has really caught up with the rest of society. We have large catastrophic wildfires and fuel loading in our forests. And so now the agencies are in a pinch.”
We are living in the Pyrocene—At our peril
Ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed by fire are becoming realities. How will we respond?
Forest agencies seek tribal inclusion in policymaking. Indigenous leaders are holding them accountable
Indigenous leaders working on the Northwest Forest Plan amendment are trying to hold the U.S. Forest Service to account — and Reed is part of the latest generation engaged in that effort.
Now is no time to reduce support for wildland firefighters
Now is not the time to shrink our firefighting workforce. Not only does the profession offer professional jobs in rural areas, but it is also essential for protecting communities and wildlife habitats. The public needs to know we cannot take firefighters for granted, especially when fires are increasingly big and challenging and threaten millions of homes throughout the West.
This is a big year for forests in Oregon. After 30 years, the Northwest Forest Plan is getting amended
The Forest Service will have the final say in what’s ultimately included in the amendment, and there’s no requirement that it include any of the committee’s recommendations. At a late January meeting in Eugene, Forest Service staff slashed entire sections of the draft the advisory committee had spent months to develop, saying they weren’t relevant to an amendment.
Several committee members say the agency should have provided more guidance on what it was expecting earlier on.
“It’s difficult for us to be banging our head against the wall when there hasn’t been a lot of transparency from higher U.S. Forest Service leadership,” said committee member Ryan Reed during its January meeting in Eugene.
Indictment of US Forest Service ‘burn boss’ in Oregon could chill ‘good fires’ across the country
A “burn boss” with the U.S. Forest Service is facing unprecedented criminal charges for an escaped prescribed burn in rural Oregon, which may complicate nationwide goals to set low-intensity fires that can thin out excess vegetation and dead wood in overgrown forests to improve forest health and lower the risk of uncontrollable wildfires igniting.
In Oregon, a youth program prepares vulnerable landowners for wildfires
This is the Community Wildfire Protection Corps, a three-month paid program for young adults ages 19 to 26. It’s backed by state wildfire funding, and run by the Northwest Youth Corps.
The goal is to build fire-safe buffers around homes and infrastructure, with a focus on landowners who are older, disabled or without financial means. In the process, organizers also hope to train some of the next generation of wildland firefighters.
In Oregon, a New Program Is Training Burn Bosses to Help Put More “Good Fire” on the Ground
More states and private landowners recognize the importance of prescribed burns to improve forest health and reduce the severity of wildfires, but the lack of firefighters trained to ignite and manage the blazes has slowed progress.