Is a Perfect (Fire) Storm Brewing for 2026?
“There is a lack of will at the very top, especially in this administration,” says Ingalsbee. “It’s part of an ideology to make prescribed burning impossible so it makes commercial logging inevitable.”
Viewpoint: What actually works — and what doesn’t — when managing wildfires
The good news is that we know what to do. Thin the understory. Conduct prescribed burns. Update building codes and zoning. Create real defensible space around homes. These are not partisan positions — they are the accumulated findings of decades of peer-reviewed research and on-the-ground experience.
The bad news is that more and more intense wildfires are coming regardless of what we do about carbon emissions in the next decade. We cannot apply 20th-century solutions to 21st-century fire. The forests around us are changing, the climate is changing, and our policies need to change with them — guided by evidence rather than ideology.
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.
Announcing a new Program in Wildland Fire at Lane Community College!
A new Wildland Fire Management Certificate program at Lane Community College is for wildland fire practitioners and those who seek to understand the ecological role of wildland fire, indigenous use of fire, and the issues facing fire managers today.
Land Managers Can’t Burn the West Fast Enough
The West will have many more summers like this past one. Extreme heat waves, wind events, and droughts will make severe, destructive fires an inevitability. The air will be choked with smoke from July to October, and tens of thousands of people will likely be displaced by wildfires in the next decade. For all of humanity’s attempts at setting boundaries between our spaces and wild ones, every summer proves that the two are irreversibly interwoven.
Experts To Western States: Time To Finally Fight Wildfires With More Fire
If historically flawed forest management is half the problem here – battling most every fire - the other half is the world's warming climate with hotter, drier conditions igniting a Century of built-up fuel.
Rethinking Our Relationship With Fire
During this fire season, millions of acres of land have burned throughout the western U.S., with over 4 million acres burned in California alone, and the fire season is not over. Fires have destroyed thousands of homes, dozens of lives have been lost, and persistent smoke from these fires has created hazardous air quality across the West. The long-term impacts of smoke inhalation are yet to be realized. Near Bozeman, we recently experienced the fast-moving Bridger Foothills Fire, which consumed 30 homes in a matter of hours.
Prescribed Burn Associations Are One Answer to California’s Megafires
For years, Wolfy Rougle was known as “the kale lady” at her local farmers' market. She grew the leafy green, along with other cool-season vegetables, on her farm in the blue oak woodland foothills of Tehama County, California. The garden and greenhouse took up a small fraction of her property—she left the rest undisturbed, save for cutting firewood and harvesting wild foods.
Thoughtful Forest Management and Better Building Practices Can Help Mitigate the Impact of Wildfires
More than five million acres have burned across the West Coast in this year’s unusually severe wildfire season. Billowing smoke has traveled across the country, degrading air quality as far east as Washington, DC, and amplifying health risks for a nation still grappling with COVID-19.
The West’s Infernos Are Melting Our Sense of How Fire Works
On the windy, hot day of July 26, 2018, as record 113-degree temperatures baked Redding, California, in the northern Sacramento Valley, Eric Knapp toiled in an air-conditioned government office. After work, he planned to meet his wife and 3-year-old daughter, and some family friends, for dinner. Slender and fair-skinned with a gentle smile, Knapp is a research ecologist for the US Forest Service. He was well aware that, three days earlier, in coastal mountains west of town, a wildfire had started when a trailer got a flat tire and the metal wheel rim scraped the asphalt, sending sparks into dry brush.
Global warming driving California wildfire trends - study
Climate change is driving the scale and impact of recent wildfires that have raged in California, say scientists.
Their analysis finds an "unequivocal and pervasive" role for global heating in boosting the conditions for fire.
California now has greater exposure to fire risks than before humans started altering the climate, the authors say.
Senators Wyden, Manchin, Cantwell introduce legislation to help prevent catastrophic wildfires
U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., today introduced legislation to help prevent the blistering and destructive infernos destroying homes, businesses and livelihoods and becoming all too common as the climate crisis grows.
Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead.
Five of California's 10 largest fires in modern history are all burning at once. Together, this year's wildfires have already destroyed 4,200 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, and scorched more than 3.2 million acres across the state.
Our land was taken. But we still hold the knowledge of how to stop mega-fires
As wildfires rage across California, it saddens me that Indigenous peoples’ millennia-long practice of cultural burning has been ignored in favor of fire suppression.
California residents didn't want controlled burns near their homes. Some of those homes then burned in a wildfire.
SALINAS, Calif. – The Carmel Fire rolled up to the vineyards Jack Galante owned up until a month ago.
It burned the edges, sent enough smoke in the air to potentially taint the grapes, then backed off and kept moving, eventually destroying 73 structures and damaging seven, many were million-dollar Sky Ranch homes.
They Know How to Prevent Megafires. Why Won’t Anybody Listen?
“The fire community, the progressives, are almost in a state of panic,” Ingalsbee said. There’s only one solution, the one we know yet still avoid. “We need to get good fire on the ground and whittle down some of that fuel load. You won’t find any climate deniers on the fire line.”
Is it the Apocalypse? No, but it feels like it.
It’s been challenging for me to think about how to start this newsletter, because things are changing every day, and this is a humble newsletter and not a news organization, and I have a whole job and also am painting my room and things have been so busy. But whenever I glance at the news, my heart breaks for California.
The fire we need. Can managed fire heal more than just the forests?
Elizabeth Azzuz had already worked with fire three times during the week I spoke with her from her home at the confluence of the Klamath and Trinity Rivers in Northern California. Azzuz is a member of the Yurok Tribe, which has used fire for cultural and ecological reasons for hundreds of generations. She burns dense understory to cleanse conifer forests and promote the growth of hazel for basket weaving. At night, she ignites leaf litter and grasses; the resulting smoke discourages weevils and moths, which can infest the acorns used in traditional foods.