As evidence of Idaho homeowners insurance crisis mounts, so does bipartisan concern
In a 2024 paper, she and her coauthors argued that it is rapid fire growth that matters most when it comes to risks to homes and neighborhoods.
“The modern era of megafires is often defined based on wildfire size, but it should be defined based on how fast fires grow and their consequent societal impacts,” the October 2024 Science publication opens. “Speed fundamentally dictates the deadly and destructive impact of megafires, rendering the prevailing paradigm that defines them by size inadequate.”
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“The community building I’ve seen and experienced because of FUSEE will send waves of positive change that will affect generations of public land managers. In attending these mindfulness retreats I’ve seen how profoundly it can touch someone, and give them tools to heal invisible scars many wildland firefighters carry.”
Hope—and Many Fears—Follow in the Wake of Trump’s Plan to Transform Wildland Firefighting
“The wildland fire community is freaked out beyond alarm … by all the defunding and downsizing and disruption caused by the DOGE dudes,” said Tim Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who is now executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE). Over his career, he has worked in fire operations under both the USDA and the Interior Department.
One of FUSEE’s primary concerns about consolidation is the mission impact. Each agency under the Interior Department brings different approaches to wildfire—for good reasons. The National Park Service, for example, seeks to protect communities by maintaining ecological health, while the BLM’s top priority is securing public safety; its website lists fire suppression first among the ways it does so.
“If you’re going to consolidate all these different programs with their different missions … whose fire philosophy is going to prevail?” Ingalsbee asked. His worry is that suppression will win out.
Fix Our Forests in name only. A new piece of bipartisan legislation would erode safeguards meant to protect trees
Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and now wildland fire ecologist, is executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. He also emphasizes the harms of road building—often falsely characterized as necessary for effective wildland firefighting—agreeing that FOFA on the whole is a dangerous bill.
He does think that, in isolation, some of FOFA’s provisions around wildland firefighting are important, but he worries about the impacts of the law’s overall approach on firefighter morale. “There is a legitimate need for proactive fire fuels management,” Ingalsbee said, pointing to prescribed burning, Indigenous cultural burning, and community fire preparation. Fire is inevitable and necessary in fire-prone landscapes, he said, and the century-plus-long practice of total fire suppression needs to change. “The exclusion of fire is now coming back to haunt us.”
Building more roads in national forests won’t prevent wildfires
Revoking the Roadless Rule will do no favors for wildland firefighters, only increase their risks and burdens to keep bolstering the failing and ultimately futile fire exclusion policies of the past century.
Firefighters motivated by conservation values and dedicated to protecting America’s wildlands are not willing to trade away ecological integrity for dubious claims of improved firefighter efficiency—not in our name, you don’t!
OPINION: Building more roads in national forests won’t prevent wildfires
Building roads is one of the most devastating things you can do to backcountry native forests. Carved into steep mountain slopes, gravel roads are perpetual sources of sediment that pollute waterways, foul fish habitat, spread invasive weeds and invite unnatural wildfires.
Despite these risks, the Trump administration wants to revoke the Roadless Area Conservation Rule and bulldoze new roads into national forests, claiming that they are necessary for “wildfire prevention” and “fuels reduction” to improve firefighter efficiency.
This is a pants-on-fire false alarm that ignores scientific evidence and denies the last quarter-century of lived experience.
Building roads leads to the destruction of native forests. Roads are lifeless, linear clear-cuts that open doors for commercial logging that converts tree groves into slash-covered stump fields and tree farms, while logging roads become lined with thickets of shrubs and invasive weeds.
This kind of phony “fuels reduction” makes roads and logging sites much more flammable than the original native forest cover. Indeed, tree farms are like firebombs, and logging roads are their fuses. But the Trump administration wants the public to believe that road building and logging will help prevent wildfires because they seemingly aid firefighting.
Sabotage of public lands continues
By now it’s clear the Trump administration is far outside public opinion in its views of Western public lands.
Yet Trump’s staff continue to dismantle our system of federal lands in direct conflict with the wishes of most Americas according to numerous polls.
US firefighter detained on the job speaks out after deportation: ‘I feel betrayed’
Border patrol arrested José Bertin Cruz-Estrada while he was battling a wildfire in Washington. He is now in Mexico, separated from his family in Oregon
Forest Service restarts effort to change decades-old Pacific Northwest forest policy
Initial efforts to amend the Northwest Forest Plan focused on getting input from tribes on how the federal government should manage their ancestral lands. Forest Service officials created an advisory committee made up of multiple tribal representatives, as well as people representing environmental and timber interests, to guide its policies. They also held forums with tribes to gather input ahead of drafting proposed changes.
“It was a tribal-centric effort,” said Ryan Reed, a former advisory committee representative and a member of the Hoopa Valley Tribe in Northern California. “That was the headliner of our work. It’s disheartening that they felt that wasn’t enough.”
Bipartisan Fix Our Forests Act would bring big changes to national wildfire policy
Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE) said that part of the bill “expands categorical exclusions and emergency authorities that weaken analysis, public engagement, and environmental safeguards” and “encourages logging-centric approaches that are not ecologically sound or fire-resilient.”
FUSEE supports other parts of FOFA, like those aiming to facilitate prescribed fire and make communities more resilient to blazes. The group encourages Congress to improve the bill through amendments, but does not endorse it in “its current form.”
“The Act, as drafted, prioritizes expedited logging over ecological fire management and lacks funding for the reforms wildland firefighters need,” the group wrote in a recent message to legislators.
12 hours in the smoke
Wildfire fighters nationwide are getting sick and dying at young ages, The New York Times has reported. The federal government acknowledges that the job is linked to lung disease, heart damage and more than a dozen kinds of cancer.
But the U.S. Forest Service, which employs thousands of firefighters, has for decades ignored recommendations from its own scientists to monitor the conditions at the fire line and limit shifts when the air becomes unsafe.
Some Oregon wildfire mitigation projects stalled by government shutdown
Terry Fairbanks, executive director of Southern Oregon Forest Restoration Collaborative, said Forest Service payments have been held up but are eventually being processed. "Delays, definitely. But a total stone wall — no," she said.
Dustin Rymph, coordinator with the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative, said contractors are currently doing fuels reduction work in the area. Pile burning, although briefly delayed, is also moving forward.
"There definitely was some lost momentum during a really important burn window," Rymph.
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Documentary film exposes the role of colonisers and agribusiness in causing massive forest fires
Painting with fire: How indigenous practices can help protect forests
As wildfires intensify and pose a growing risk in the American West, tribal leaders and community members are bringing fire back to their forests to save them.
Washington state’s wildfire future: More volatile forests amid slashed budgets
As the number of fire ignitions continues to rise, each new fire represents a roll of the dice, said Michael Medler, a former wildland firefighter and pyrogeography researcher at Western Washington University. Chances of a major fire in Western Washington might be low in a given year but they’re growing.
The paradigm brings to mind Hurricane Katrina, Medler said. In the aftermath, then-President George W. Bush claimed that nobody anticipated New Orleans’ levees breaching in the storm surge.
Sure they did, Medler said. Anybody who thought about it for an hour anticipated the breach.
“That’s where we’re at. Who could anticipate a $5 billion west-side Cascades fire? Everyone who’s thought about it,” said Medler, referencing the potential cost of damages from such a blaze.
WA’s wildfire future: More volatile forests amid slashed budgets
Put together, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a wildland fire ecologist based in Eugene, Ore., the Trump administration is dismantling the country’s resources to guard against, fight and recover from wildfires at a time when the risk is increasing. And it’s putting much more pressure on states that aren’t financially capable of making up the difference.
“We are running fast in the wrong direction,” Ingalsbee said.
The gap between science and contemporary fire management is huge and growing, said Ingalsbee, who also heads the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
Fighting fire with fire. FUSEE hosts its second Fall Fire Festival
“We need more than just a new policy, we need a new culture that welcomes all the gifts that fire brings,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a local wildland firefighting nonprofit. Ingalsbee says that FUSEE’s mission is to promote ecological fire management by working with fire instead of fighting against it.
Costly and deadly wildfires really are on the rise, new research finds
Fire is a natural and beneficial part of many ecosystems. But climate change can make fire seasons longer, hotter and drier. On top of that, humans have been artificially suppressing wildfire for decades, which creates more fuel for fires, and moving deeper into fire-prone areas.
Federal fire agencies take first steps toward consolidation, other reforms
“It seemed from the outset that consolidation was just a means of further downsizing the wildland fire workforce and shrinking the budget for federal fire management,” said Tim Ingalsbee, head of the advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
But beyond any specific policy, Ingalsbee wants to see a more fundamental change.
“We need to shift from this reactive mode of emergency wildfire suppression to a proactive mode of intentional ecological fire management,” he argued. “We have to increase and facilitate the use of beneficial fire.”
New wildfire agency launched to streamline federal response
Despite the administration’s optimistic outlook, critics have raised concerns that the new agency may overlook the ecological role of fire in land management. Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, cautioned that the discourse surrounding fire management appears to focus solely on its threats, rather than recognizing its role within ecosystems.
Ingalsbee, however, remains skeptical about whether this unification will enhance interagency coordination. He highlighted the distinct differences in fire management strategies between agencies such as the Forest Service and the National Park Service, raising concerns that the initiative could either push the Forest Service towards a more ecological management approach or vice versa.