The Bear Fire ‘smoldered for weeks,’ then destroyed a town. Was Forest Service slow to fight it?
But earlier this year federal officials announced that because of the risk of COVID-19 to firefighting crews, the Forest Service would revert back to fighting every fire that ignited to try to keep them small, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter who’s the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology. He said it didn’t matter. This year’s wildfire season left the Forest Service’s firefighting resources stretched so thin that they are having to “triage fires.” “There’s so much wildfire activity across the whole West Coast,” he said
Wildfire suppression efforts have gotten more aggressive, but is there an ecological cost?
But some conservationists believe that the current focus on fire suppression may be doing more harm than good. Tim Ingalsbee is with Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology. Ingalsbee, a former firefighter himself, says that aggressive wildfire suppression is a losing battle and it may be depriving forests and wildlife of the fires they need to thrive. “Making war on nature, we are damned if we lose for sure,” says Ingalsbee. “And we’re quite damned if we win because it will be a very different planet if we try to rob ecosystems of the fire they need to maintain their ecological integrity.”