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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Which city burns next?
Watching from afar, we still reflexively call these disasters “wildfires,” perhaps imagining that they ignite in some distant forest. But there may be little truly “wild” about such fires beyond the ferocity of the burn. Increasingly, disaster strikes almost entirely within an urban envelope, drawing on homes and landscaping for fuel rather than trees and wild brush. These are not forest fires encroaching on human settlement but rather human settlements burning like only forests used to. And stopping them will require something much harder, and more unpopular, than clearing out distant forests of dead wood.
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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!
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.
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.
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.