Fighting fire with fire: Native American burning practices spark interest in a year of historic wildfires
“The fires are much more dangerous than ever before, because we have interrupted that long-standing practice of cultural burning by Native peoples, which kept things in check,” said Kari Norgaard, a sociologist at the University of Oregon who has been working with the Karuk Tribe for the last 15 years. “I think there’s no question that what we’re seeing now has to do with the changing climate, as well as a combination of [the] failed management of fire suppression.”
How Napa's Cakebread winery absolved itself of starting one of California's most destructive fires
If Cakebread’s vineyard fence were found to have sparked the Glass Fire, and if the winery were found guilty of negligence or another statutory violation, it would have been vulnerable to lawsuits from Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, as well as the owners of 650 destroyed homes.
‘Tired, exhausted’ California firefighters stretched thin as they battle unprecedented wildfires
The incredible speed and ferocity of wildfires in recent years has also changed the methods that crews use to fight the blazes, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who is now executive director of the wildfire prevention organization Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
“Unlike years past, where with a large fire, the crews can settle in for a long siege, this is kind of run-and-gun,” he said. “But at a cost to other incidents — other wildfires — because the crews are just beat up, and burned out, with battle fatigue, if you will.”
An obsession with suppression
And yet, 20 years later, the Forest Service keeps going back to treating fire as the enemy. Timothy Ingalsbee, head of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, told me he’s seen it over and again: “It’s almost a chronic knee-jerk reaction to fall back on this retrograde policy,” he said.
Welcome to the Pyrocene
The planet’s current unhinged pyrogeography has also been shaped by fires that should have been present and weren’t. These are the fires historically set by nature or people to which landscapes had adapted. Now those fires are mostly gone, and the land has responded by degrading ecologically while building up combustibles to stoke more savage wildfires. The Earth’s fire crisis, that is, is not just about the bad burns that trash countrysides and crash into towns. It is equally about the good fires that have vanished because they were extinguished or no longer lit. The Earth’s biota is disintegrating as much by tame fire’s absence as by feral fire’s outbreaks.
Forest management not so clear cut
An analysis by Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology of last year’s Labor Day fires found that plantation forests in Holiday Farm Fire along the McKenzie River burned more intensely than nearby federally managed lands.
“Climate change is causing fires to grow so big and so fast that what they are burning through is the legacy of industrial forestry,” said Ingalsbee.
The U.S. Forest Service’s Terrible, Shortsighted New Wildfire Policy
The struggle to effectively communicate scientific processes is not limited to forest fires, of course. But when it comes to how important controlled burns are for protecting the environment and habitats for life, figuring it out is especially imperative. “As a strategy and gesture, the controlled burns ban is misguided,” Pyne also said. “It’s as if, with COVID, we were putting all our resources to distributing ventilators but stopping mask mandates and vaccinations.”
Could the infrastructure bill make wildfires worse?
California has cut thousands of miles of fuel breaks, many in remote areas. But companies have had little incentive to return to them, Ingalsbee said, because they’ve already logged the most valuable trees from those fire breaks. “It’s the lack of maintenance that has doomed every one of these schemes,” he said.
“The real crisis is not burning trees on top of a mountaintop in a wilderness area. It’s incinerated homes in communities,” Ingalsbee said.
Exploding California wildfires rekindle debate over whether to snuff out blazes in wilderness areas or let them burn
A U.S. Forest Service directive to put out fires in remote, roadless California forests has angered foresters and firefighters, who say doing so will put lives at risk and fuel worse fires in the future.
With extreme fires burning, Forest Service stops ‘good fires’ too
“Every time I’ve been out on a large wildfire, the only thing that has moderated fire spread has been past fire footprints on the landscape,” says Mike Beasley, a retired fire manager who worked for the National Park Service and Forest Service for decades.
Forest Service promises swifter action on new wildfires, after plea from California
Ironically, the Forest Service for years was so aggressive about extinguishing new wildfires that it was criticized for not letting some fires burn naturally as a means of removing flammable vegetation from the forests. In recent years, the agency has taken a more measured approach, saying it would let some fires burn if they didn’t threaten people, buildings or important infrastructure.
Timothy Ingalsbee, a retired firefighter, said the Forest Service is making a mistake by going back to its old policy. “We’re stuck on this treadmill of mismanagement,” said Ingalsbee, a former Forest Service employee who runs an Oregon group called Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
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.
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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.