Worsening California blazes prompt new calls for innovations to fight fires smarter
“The technology for monitoring, mapping, and modeling wildfires is like a technological renaissance,” he added. “What we have as a problem is under-utilization of all this investment in technology for fire management.”
“We still are in this kind of war-on-wildfires paradigm, still seeing fire as an enemy to attack, extinguish or eliminate,” he said. “And this technology really has the ability to shift our paradigm, so we see fire more as I dare say ally, or at least a tool, for managing ecosystems in ways that really better protect communities and also sustain the ecosystem services that we all rely on.”
Fighting fire with fire. As climate change continues making wildfires worse, how do we learn to live with fire?
The Forest Service also has been slow to embrace another kind of good fire that experts say the West desperately needs: managed wildfires, in which fires are allowed to burn in a controlled manner to reduce overgrowth. To protect the future of the land and people – especially with climate change making forests drier and hotter – the Forest Service needs to embrace the idea of good fire.
The racist removal of Native Americans in California is often missing from wildfire discussions, experts say
Climate change is a driving factor of California wildfires, but so is a build-up of excess fuels. That’s often attributed to a century of fire suppression dating back to the era of the Great Fire of 1910.
But what experts say is often missing from this conversation is the racist removal of Native American people from California. Along with their physical beings, the knowledge of taking care of the land was also removed resulting in overgrown forests, experts say.
As California burns, anger and pointed questions for caretaker of its vast forests
Oftentimes, keeping fire crews away from a new fire is “the right call from the standpoint of firefighter safety,” said Ingalsbee, head of an Oregon-based group called Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics & Ecology. What’s more, trying to put out every fire at once can be unrealistic, he said. “Sending crews to attack all fires in all places ... spreads the resources thin,” Ingalsbee said.
Our wildfire breaking point. We’ve lost the war and must rethink how to protect our communities
A hundred years waging war on fire and criminalizing its use gave us broken ecosystems and communities on the brink. We won many battles, but with climate change as an ally, fire won the war. It’s over, and as long as we refuse to surrender, fire will keep up its siege until every last mountain town and green tree burn to ash
Lake Tahoe wildfire seemed controllable, then it wasn't
“Mother Nature is calling the cards on our hubris that we can conquer and control wildfires during these extreme conditions," said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who now heads Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, which advocates for working with wildfires instead of reflexively putting them out.
How one town put politics aside to save itself from fire. Timber Wars tore this town apart. Wildfire prevention brought it back together.
The Forest Service — no longer able to conduct the business of managing timber sales as usual — focused instead on building access roads for firefighters and thinning trees deemed a wildfire threat. “It was almost presto-chango,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. “All of a sudden the Forest Service, instead of doing timber extraction, was all about tinder reduction.”
Can ‘active forest management’ really reduce wildfire risk?
Mitigating wildfire impacts by reducing home losses is one area where scientists and politicians find common ground. Programs like FireWise USA, which helps individuals and communities protect against structure loss by assessing ignition potential and working with property owners to decrease it, enjoy widespread support in both policy and research circles. But when it comes to active forest management, the farther from a community a proposed logging, thinning or burning project is, the more controversial it becomes.
Lightning, wildfire, and bureaucracy: The Woods Creek story
Mike Beasley, a retired National Forest chief from California who co-founded an organization called Foresters (sic) United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, began posting on Aug. 8 on the Helena Lewis and Clark National Forest web page, calling the Needle Fire “an arson fire,” asking, “Why was it so important to eliminate records of this fire?” and saying, “A lot of folks would like to know what happened on the Galt Ranch.”
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.