The Forest Service's ban on controlled burns has come to a close
Rich Fairbanks spent most of his career fighting fires for the Forest Service. He says the whole issue of controlled burns gets political real quick.
RICH FAIRBANKS: You got to admit, it's a very risky thing to ask some senior land manager to light a fire in the winter when, if it gets away, it's on him, than to fight a wildfire where you're a hero no matter what happens.
SIEGLER: Still, foresters like Fairbanks are seeing a slow evolution within the Forest Service and the public - an acceptance that fire is a critical part of the ecosystem and it needs to be brought back if we're ever going to make some of these modern, extreme wildfires even just manageable again. In the Democrats' new infrastructure and inflation laws, tens of millions of dollars are going to preventative projects like tree thinning and controlled burning.
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We now know absolutely that we cannot prevent wildfires, and firefighters cannot stop and put out all wildfires. Decades of Smokey Bear propaganda that conditioned people to wrongly fear all forest fires is now being amplified by the valid fear of climate change, and the specter that people are powerless in the face of climate-driven megafires. The despair and disempowerment known as “climate doomism” is expressing itself in a kind of wildfire doomism that wrongly believes there is nothing we can do to avoid catastrophe.
But we are not powerless.
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Everyone along this road signed up for the free treatments. Fairbanks also is encouraged by what he sees as a paradigm shift in state and federal agencies toward prioritizing work like this, and among Westerners who are starting to understand they have to learn to live with wildfires.
But some people still don't get it.
"Unfortunately, there are politicians who make hay out of saying, 'They should put out every single fire all the time forever,' which is just really dumb," Fairbanks says.
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Firefighters, already in short supply due to labor shortages, are exhausted. And with these erratic fires burning so hot they create their own weather, the conditions often just aren't safe for crews to even try to slow down the flames. Retired firefighter Timothy Ingalsbee runs the Oregon-based Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. It's a group pushing for an overhaul in U.S. fire suppression and prevention policies.
Ingalsbee says mostly crews can just try to protect homes and lives in the fire's path - you're not going to stop these blazes. That's, again, the plan today on the McKinney Fire in Northern California, where firefighters are working to slow its eastward spread toward the town of Yreka.
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While much of the national debate about wildfire focuses on forest management and environmental protection, critics of the federal government's past approach say the conversation overlooks the greater impact of measures that protect homes in case of fire. Those measures include clearing combustibles from near homes and reducing vegetation up to 100 feet from homes — the idea that wildfire protection begins at the home and goes outward, rather than from wilderness areas toward communities (Greenwire, Jan. 8, 2019).
"This is exactly what needs to happen," said Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology in Eugene, Ore.
While forest management shouldn't be overlooked, Ingalsbee said, preventing ignition of homes through defensible space should be a high priority for public policy. "We need to do both."
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The outlawing of cultural fire and landscape burning in the United States emerged through industrial forestry practices that originated in seventeenth-century Western Europe—particularly in France—where foresters viewed fire as having no ecological role and considered it a wild, unnatural threat to future timber yields. In the late nineteenth century, settler-colonizers brought this approach to the western United States where, unlike Western Europe, forests had evolved to burn. Through violent means, the U.S. Forest Service imposed the idea that forest fires are the unnatural result of moral and ecological degradation.
Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE), told me that we need to end the “war on fire [and] focus on helping communities coexist with fire.”
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What if we learned to co-exist with wildfires rather than constantly fighting them? Portland filmmaker Trip Jennings’s new documentary “Elemental” includes the voices of climate experts, Indigenous people and fire survivors, and asks us to reimagine our relationship with wildfire. We hear from Jennings about what he hopes audiences will take away from his film.
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Many of the sequoias that have died were outside the most protected parts in Sequoia and Yosemite national parks, where officials have used prescribed fire to thin out the surrounding forest , said Zeke Lunder, a wildfire consultant in Chico, California. “The sequoias that burned were in the national forest surrounded by thickets of cedar and other trees,” Mr. Lunder said.
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U.S. officials are testing a new chemical mixture that is able to slow down the progress of wildfires. But critics say the Forest Service should be spending less on these mixtures known as fire retardants and more on firefighters.
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"Seems astounding," fire ecologist Timothy Ingalsbee tells NPR's Here and Now. "Never again should we have the excuse that we failed to include climate conditions and climate data in our fire management actions. That's just the era we live in," says the former Forest Service wildland firefighter who now directs the group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. "I can understand why people are upset. It sounds like the 'dog ate my homework' kind of excuse,' he says.
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In the 1970s and ’80s, forest officials resisted conducting prescribed burns and letting natural fires run their course but began embracing this type of fire management in the 1990s, said Tom Ribe, public lands advocate and author of a book that takes a critical look at the 2000 Cerro Grande Fire.
Some similar missteps were made with both the Cerro Grande and Hermits Peak fires, Ribe said. Crews felt pressed to complete the burns despite dry conditions and the risk of erratic spring winds, especially on sloping terrain, he said.
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Andy Stahl, executive director of the Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, and Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, both said that the ammonium-phosphates-based retardant is essentially a fertilizer that can boost invasive plants and is potentially responsible for some algae blooms in lakes or reservoirs when it washes downstream. They said the magnesium-chloride-based retardant is essentially a salt that will inhibit plant growth where it falls, possibly harming threatened species.
Check out the wildfire risk at your Oregon property. Building codes and other requirements may depend on it.
That broader approach is exactly what Tim Ingalsbee would like to see happen. The executive director of the Eugene-based advocacy group Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, he says the definition of fire risks within the interface will give property owners with a low-risk classification a false sense of security.
“They’re talking about zones and not the actual conditions of individual properties,” he said. “It’s not a bad thing as a sensitizing exercise, but all of us have to get prepared regardless of what color the map is where our properties reside. It’s about the home ignition zone.”
Ralph Bloemers, an environmental lawyer who is the director of fire safe communities for Green Oregon, agrees that “regardless of where you are on the map, hardening homes and business is the most durable, cost-effective and fire-safe step you can take.”
Forest Service failed to account for climate change in setting New Mexico's largest wildfire
A new report by the U.S. Forest Service finds that the agency didn't account for the ways climate change has altered the conditions and the landscape when it set a prescribed burn in the national forest in April. That blaze quickly grew out of control and became the Hermit's Creek fire that then merged with the nearby Calf Canyon fire, which has torched more than 341,000 acres. That's an area larger than the city of Los Angeles.
Host Peter O'Dowd talks with Timothy Inglasbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
Forest Service says it failed to account for climate change in New Mexico blaze
Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director with Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, said authorities “can no longer manage fire according to the calendar date” and should incorporate climate data more thoroughly into their models. He also said firefighters need to intensify prescribed burns when weather conditions are favorable. He warned that halting prescribed burns for three months could have consequences later this summer. “Areas that should have burned under controlled conditions will burn under extreme conditions,” he said.
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Tom Ribe is the Co-founder of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) and a retired wildland firefighter. He said firefighter pay and working conditions are so bad now, this rise may not change much. “I don’t think it’s enough,” Ribe said. “They need to be able to survive. They need to not be living in their cars when they are off the fires.”
Forest Service barely, sorta met burn requirements before Hermits Peak fire, plan shows.
Author Tom Ribe, a longtime wildland firefighter, has said it was “extremely risky” to light a fire on a windy April day and that the forecasted winds and humidity should have given a burn boss pause. He and other experts, however, said wind and relative humidity are just two of many factors a burn boss considers when they approve a burn.
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“They are professionals, and I respect that very much, but obviously it was a risky thing to do given the dryness of this year,” said Tom Ribe, a fire scholar.
Ribe worked for the National Park Service for years doing prescribed burns in California and in New Mexico. He lived in New Mexico for most of his life and even wrote a book on the 2000 prescribed burn that turned into the Cerro Grande wildfire near Los Alamos. “I can’t imagine that the place was, as we call, ‘in prescription,’ which means that the conditions were right to do this,” Ribe said.
Massive fires should be a wake-up call
More research and experience show that prescribed burning is an excellent remedy for our fire-starved forests. Though the prescribed burn that was partly responsible for the fire’s ignition was very badly timed, in principle, carefully executed prescribed fire is a key answer to our unhealthy forests. Another approach lets large areas burn when lightning starts fires in moderately wet conditions. We need to get our forests back in balance with fire.
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"There's a lot of politics in play," said Matthew Hurteau, a professor at the University of New Mexico, who studies the effects of wildfires and climate change on Southwestern forests.
"After a plane crashes, we don't shut down all air travel for three months," he said. "The worst thing that can happen to our wildfire situation is that it get politicized."
The decision will affect the 193 million acres of land managed by the agency. Forest Service Chief Randy Moore called it a pause, "because of the current extreme wildfire risk conditions in the field."
He acknowledged 99.48% of prescribed burns go as planned and said the forest service will conduct a national review and evaluation of its program during the three-month hiatus.
It's the wrong message at the wrong time, said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, director of the Northern California Prescribed Fire Council.