Trapped in flames
“We really need to shift the paradigm toward proactive ecological fire management that is a high-wage, high-skill, high-status career available to all people,” Ingalsbee said. “That’s the better future.”
The Bootleg Fire grew fast. Did forest management play a role?
Past commercial logging and livestock grazing has encouraged wildfires, according to Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. Ingalsbee, who is an advocate of prescribed burning, notes that when the fire entered the Gearhart Mountain Wilderness, an area with more potential fuel but fewer small trees and flammable grasses, it appears to have burned more slowly.
The rapid spread of the Bootleg Fire also poses a risk to firefighters. “These fires are just hop-scotching across the landscape, leap-frogging across fire lines and all other traditional places you might try to contain a fire,” Ingalsbee says.
Technology has growing role in corralling US West wildfires
Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who now heads Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, also said firefighters need to adopt a new approach when confronting the most dangerous wind-driven wildfires that leapfrog containment lines by showering flaming embers a mile or more ahead of the main inferno.
It's better to build more fire-resistant homes and devote scarce resources to protecting threatened communities while letting the fires burn around them, he said.
"We have these amazing tools that allow us to map fire spread in real time and model it better than weather predictions," Ingalsbee said. "Using that technology, we can start being more strategic and working with fire to keep people safe, keep homes safe, but let fire do the work it needs to do — which is recycle all the dead stuff into soil."
We must burn the West to save it
To live in the American West today is to live with wildfires. And to suppress those fires is only to delay, and worsen, the inevitable.
A number of unique factors in recent seasons combined with long-term trends and created the devastating blazes. But a major reason for the massive scale of the destruction is that natural fires and burning practices first developed by Indigenous people have been suppressed for generations.
‘The people’s land.’ Will the feds close California forests to hunters, campers again?
Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter who now heads the environmental advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said he understands why forest managers don’t want the public to interfere with active firefighting efforts and to tamp down the risk of starting fires. But when the public is allowed in the woods, it serves as an important check to make sure the forests are being managed appropriately, Ingalsbee said.
As wildfires get worse, so are firefighter shortages. Climate change and low pay aren’t helping
Stephen Pyne, a former wildland firefighter who teaches courses on fire and fire history at Arizona State University, said the Forest Service has long struggled with staffing for what used to be a seasonal-only occupation. “They didn’t want to hire people full-time and they only wanted them when they needed them,” he said. These days, the U.S. wildfire season is nearly year-long. Pyne said it’s like the federal government is fighting 2021 fires with a 1951 staffing mindset. “It’s the gig economy,’ he said. “You’ve got people who are working for relatively low wages, seasonal, very little career advancement for many of them. That sounds like a lot of unhappy workers in today’s economy.”
Bay Area nonprofit touts greenbelts as proven protection from wildfire
Greenbelts are “an interesting idea” -- provided they’re properly stewarded, he added -- “another tool in the toolbox.” They are a very old tool. Panelist Tim Ingalsbee called in from Oregon’s Willamette Valley -- the traditional lands, he pointed out, of the Kalapuya tribe, which lived in that fire prone area “for 10,000 years” without a single fire engine or air tanker. “How did they do it?” asked Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “They didn’t attempt to fight fire. They worked with fire. They carefully and selectively and strategically burned around their village sites, creating greenbelts, if you will, with fire.”
Oregon’s comprehensive and contentious wildfire response bill left for the last week in session
Tim Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, says his organization isn’t opposed to thinning on a broader scale in areas with high fire risk. But he says the state needs to sequence its efforts and concentrate its investment around communities. His organization is supporting another provision in the bill, the creation and funding of the Oregon Conservation Corps, a workforce training program that would employ youth and young adults in fuel reduction projects directly around communities.
“If some back country patch of forest burns, OK, it’s going to recover,” he said. “If it’s a community, it’s a catastrophe. Where would a taxpayer prefer their money go to? This kind of work has got to become a way of life. If you’re living in a fire environment, you better have your home and yard prepared.”
KSWild podcast focused on living with wildfire
The podcast offers a hopeful glimpse into sustainable firefighting and management operations, shifting away from “a perpetual state of war against wildfire” by communities and emergency responders, according to Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters for United Safety, Ethics and Ecology.
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.