Opinion: Don’t clearcut in fire-adapted, mature forests

Additionally, according to Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) and senior wildland fire ecologist certified by the Association for Fire Ecology, “Studies show that forests that have been degraded by past commercial logging, livestock grazing, or fire suppression typically burn more severely than native forests that have not been subjected to these past land abuses and are more resilient to fire.”

Inside the massive and costly fight to contain the Dixie Fire

Timothy Ingalsbee, who co-founded Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a group that pushes for stronger land management practices, has argued that over the long term many of the tactics employed by emergency crews hurt forest land, which benefits from periodic controlled fires.

“We’re fighting fires under the worst conditions rather than lighting fires under the best conditions,” Mr. Ingalsbee added. “There are 10,000 firefighters on the line in California, trying to keep people safe. What would those 10,000 be able to do to apply fire in the winter or spring to yield the best ecological effects — and a very different set of costs?”

Impact of forest thinning on wildfires creates divisions

Firefighters and numerous studies credit intensive forest thinning projects with helping save communities like those recently threatened near Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, but dissent from some environmental advocacy groups is roiling the scientific community.

While most scientific studies find such forest management is a valuable tool, environmental advocates say data from recent gigantic wildfires support their long-running assertion that efforts to slow wildfires have instead accelerated their spread.
The argument is fueling an already passionate debate.
It has led to a flurry of citations of dueling scientific studies and has fed competing claims that the science may be skewed by ideology.

‘A fire age is upon us’

Over the past decade, the U.S. fire community has developed a national cohesive strategy for wildland fire. It has three components: create fire-adapted communities, create fire-resilient landscapes, and develop a workforce capable of implementing these goals. To that triad, I would add: begin work to contain climate change. The national strategy is pretty much a master plan for living with fire. If we wait until we tackle climate change before we mitigate the risk of fire in towns and countrysides, we will suffer lots of losses, some irreversible. If we only focus on mitigation, climate change will eventually overwhelm our efforts. We need all of it all at once.

The Pyrocene is not just a metaphor: Whatever we decide to call it, a fire age is upon us. Our fire behavior made the problem and will have to unmake it.

As wildfires become more intense, we’re dumping more retardants. What’s the impact on wildlife?

As bigger, more intense fires push into the wildland-urban interface and fire crews battle to protect towns and agricultural areas, new questions are emerging about what happens when aerial wildfire retardants become a larger part of the chemical cocktail in wildfire smoke.

We’re dumping loads of retardant chemicals to fight wildfires. What does it mean for wildlife?

Tim Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter, directs the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, & Ecology and believes, like Stahl, that state and federal fire agencies should be more restrained and targeted in their use of retardant.

"The price of just one air tanker load of retardant can fund so many more workers [on the ground]," he told EHN. "They're much more flexible and nimble and versatile than that air tanker, which has one single function."

Why Everything We Know About Wildfires May Be Wrong

Ponder the title “fire rangers.” That’s what Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, wants to substitute, universally, for the word that happens to be the first one in his organization’s name—a title he now considers overly militaristic. “It’s a very different mission, different identity now,” he says.

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

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.

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.