‘The fire moved around it’: success story in Oregon fuels calls for prescribed burns
The weeks-long battle against the Bootleg fire, one of the largest burning in the US, has offered new evidence that Indigenous land management techniques and prescribed burns can change how megafires behave. Tribal experts and ecologists told the Guardian that, with enough investment, the application of “good fire” throughout the US west could make a big difference in defending ourselves against increasingly fierce and destructive fire seasons.
United States of wildfire
There’s a forgotten history that should serve as a warning — wildfire isn’t unique to the West.
Now the warming climate is increasing the risk of major wildfires across America. And more people are moving to fire-prone areas without realizing the danger.
'Good' fires can help slow wildfires, but the Forest Service is too busy to use them
Federal agencies are doubling down on stopping extreme wildfires. They're also limiting the use of fire to help with fire prevention, which is concerning some fire scientists.
Let it burn? Forest Service's new all-out fire suppression policy a dangerous move, critics say
Last week, the head of the U.S. Forest Service ordered federal firefighters to put out every wildfire across the nation as quickly as possible.
Some fire experts, however, aren’t so sure about the new mandate. They say the order appears to be more about crowd-pleasing politics than fire protection. Under the directive, the Forest Service is no longer allowing small fires to burn, nor lighting prescribed fires of its own, which both clear out thick, overgrown forests and reduce the intensity of future fires. They say this is the real danger.
Restoring Indigenous wildfire management could be a huge boost to biodiversity
Hoffman and her team reviewed nearly 1,000 papers published over a century, between 1900 and present day, looking at how the “frequency, seasonality, and severity of human-ignited fires” improved or reduced biodiversity metrics. “We found overwhelmingly that where there is frequent fire use by Indigenous peoples and cultural burning, there are increases in biodiversity associated with those places,” she says
3 wildfire lessons for forest towns as Dixie Fire destroys historic Greenville, California
Our worst-case scenario – high climate impacts, large numbers of new rural homes and no fuels management – led to an order of magnitude greater risk to homes in our study area over the next 50 years. But by consolidating new development in cities and clustered rural housing, the risk dropped by half. And combining compact development with management of burnable vegetation reduced it by nearly 75%.
Renewing—and radicalizing—our relationship with fire
We need to let go of the blame, too. Can retired fire managers who put out fires and deferred risk for the last 30 years point fingers at today’s fire folks, who have been left to pick up the pieces? Can the cities and developers point fingers while they sprawl aimlessly into the wilds? Can the environmental organizations call out inaction at the same time they’re filing lawsuits? Can we citizens blame the fire managers, when we and the agencies consistently fail to give them the pay, job security and votes of confidence they need to do the jobs we hired them to do?
It’s time for radical action—and radical responsibility.
Forest Service to be more aggressive in dousing wildfires that threaten communities, after small blaze south of Lake Tahoe exploded in size and destroyed at least 14 homes
The head of the Forest Service, Randy Moore, in a letter to staff on Monday, said extreme drought and the Covid-19 pandemic are limiting the agency’s resources and it would as a result focus primarily on fires that threaten communities and infrastructure. Until the current wave of Western fire activity abates, he said, the agency wouldn’t use prescribed burns in high risk areas or manage natural fires to help thin overgrown forests.
Bootleg, Biscuit, Rosland and Milli: lessons from past and current fires
“Because Central Oregon is a fire-adapted forest, we have kind of been one of the forests at the forefront of reintroducing fire into the system,” said Jean Nelson-Dean, the public affairs officer for Deschutes National Forest. Each prescribed burn takes years of planning. Other forest officials send crews from around the country to train with crews from Deschutes.
How years of fighting every wildfire helped fuel the Western megafires of today
Unintentionally, by focusing on short-term risks of wildfires, the U.S. is predisposing forests to burn under the very worst conditions. Active fire suppression contributes to what is often referred to as the wildland fire paradox – the more we prevent fires in the short term, the worse wildfires become when they return.
It looked like an atomic bomb’: Surveying the Bootleg Fire’s devastation
Earlier this summer, punishing heat waves gripped the Pacific Northwest. In Portland, temperatures reached as high as 116 degrees, and a majority of the state has been primed to burn while undergoing severe drought. The past few weeks have felt especially chaotic, as climate change has helped make extreme weather and extreme disaster commonplace in the region.
White House forms working groups to target heat, wildfires
The White House has also established the Wildfire Resilience Interagency Working Group, which will coordinate strategies for battling wildfires, including investments in forest thinning and prescribed fire. It will be co-chaired by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland.
Fighting fire with fire
An ancient art perfected by Indigenous people and verified by scientific data, the practice could be used more in the struggle against ever-intensifying wildfires amid climate change. So what is standing in the way?
Meet the people burning California to save it
California is reckoning with a terrifying new normal, and it’s fueling a movement to radically rethink how we deal with fire.
The climate change link to more and bigger wildfires
Something else to keep in mind is that fire is normal. Lots of forests need fire - before Europeans got here there was lots of natural fire in North America, and Native people also set fires to manage the landscapes they lived on. It helps open up the land, it can rejuvenate growth, some species of animals thrive after burns.
Amid summer of fire and floods, a moment of truth for climate action
“What more can numbers show us that we cannot already see? What more can statistics say about the flooding, the wildfires, the droughts and hurricanes and other deadly events?” United Nations Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa told a gathering of energy and environment ministers from G-20 nations. “Numbers and statistics are invaluable, but what the world requires now, more than anything else, is climate action.”
Underpaid firefighters, overstretched budgets: The U.S. isn’t prepared for fires fueled by climate change
Yet fire experts say the escalation of wildfires, fueled by climate change, demands an equally dramatic transformation in the nation’s response — from revamping the federal firefighting workforce to the management of public lands to the siting and construction of homes.
“As our seasons are getting worse and worse … it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Kelly Martin, a wildfire veteran and president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “We need a new approach.”
‘Fire is medicine’: How Indigenous practices could help curb wildfires
Lake and the Cultural Fire Management Council are trying to revive the intrinsic knowledge that long guided Indigenous life in a natural fire zone.
“It’s important to recognize there was a fire system in place that was culturally influenced,” Lake said, referring to the Indigenous fire management he has researched and participated in for the last several decades. “We have to question the narrative of history that has demonized fire, coming from a colonial perspective,” he added.
Climate change or forest management? ‘Everyone is right’ Wildfires. OSU prof: 'The bill for those decisions has come due'
“As a society we’ve made every wrong choice. When it comes to dry forests in the American West, we made a choice to log most of the old fire resistant trees. We made a choice to exclude fire from forests that need fire to thrive,” he told KOIN 6 News. “We made a choice to warm the atmosphere by several degrees, and we made a choice not to thin stands and re-introduced fire under the right conditions. The bill for those decisions has come due.”
‘A recipe for catastrophic fire’: how an Oregon blaze became the nation’s largest
Beyond the heat and dryness, experts say decades of forest-management policies are partly to blame for the Bootleg Fire and many other large blazes. Under aggressive fire-suppression policies, every fire, no matter how small, is extinguished. But fire ecologists say it is better to allow some smaller fires to simply burn, or to conduct controlled burns, to consume the underbrush that ends up feeding much larger blazes.