The Bighorn Fire is being called a fire management success due to minimal community impact
Timothy Ingalsbee is the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) who put together the report said, “Despite its great size, not a single home or business burned and that was a stark contrast to the 2003 Aspen Fire. The change in tactics is about size not severity. It’s going to grow large, (but) it’s not the size that matters, but more the severity. Is it unnaturally severe?”
50+ Groups across US northwest unveil Green New Deal vision for region's vital forests
Michael Beasley, a fire behavior analyst and retired fire chief in California's Inyo National Forest, said the plan would allow "disadvantaged workers to be true heroes in the eyes of rural communities as they conduct fuel reduction close to homes and infrastructure where it matters most, in the home ignition zone.
In turn forests can be allowed to fulfill the full range of ecosystem services, sequestration of carbon and clean water most importantly, all the while allowing for rewilding of the most remote areas, complete with intact ecosystem processes like naturally-occurring fires."
Regular people learn to do prescribed burns
“Most private land needs to be underburned, but you usually can’t do it unless you can apply a lot of manpower,” he said. “My great hope is that there could be a labor exchange. With the prescribed burn association, we can do that. I could give time to my neighbor, and he could help me.” The dozens of people who visited Fairbanks’ land this spring got plenty of before-and-after views of prescribed burns. They could see the forest floor sporting a new carpet of greenery and wildflowers that sprouted after small burns he carried out in February and March. The prescribed burn they helped tend left behind a blackened surface, but not for long.
Oregon Department of Transportation is a hazard to Oregon’s wildfire recovery
The forests of our region have co-evolved with fire for millennia, and as the climate crisis progresses, we will see longer fire seasons and more extreme weather events. Even now, we are facing what is shaping up to be another historic wildfire season with Oregon already experiencing the second driest spring since 1895. If we continue to respond to these wildfires by bowing to the demands of disaster capitalists and allowing for the indiscriminate removal of large trees, alive and dead, we are creating a precedent for unending ecological destruction and setting ourselves up for worse disasters in the future.
Burning Idaho to save it: Why one solution to our raging wildfires can’t gain traction
When fire scientists talk about prescribed burns, the discussion often turns to the Forest Service. Critics say the agency clings to a century-old “suppression culture” that resists deliberately starting fires. “For the Forest Service, the only good fire is a dead-out fire,” said Ingalsbee, a former firefighter with the agency in Oregon.