Rekindling with fire
Wearing deerskin leather gloves dampened with drops of diesel and gasoline, I tilted my drip-torch down toward the earth and ignited the dry blackberry bush below. With a flick of my wrist, I made a C-shaped movement and the fuel followed my gesture, lighting the vines and leaves quickly. Aside from the faint crackle of the fire, it was silent where I stood on a hilltop at Andrew Reasoner Wildlife Preserve near Eugene, Oregon. I paused to look at my surroundings. Hundred-year-old Oregon white oaks, draped in old man’s beard — a lichen called Usnea — reached toward the crisp blue sky. Yarrow leaves poked through the bunches of invasive crabgrass, and sword and bracken ferns dotted the landscape. The hairy yellow leaves of a hazel plant next to me indicated the changing seasons.
Wildfires are erasing Western forests. Climate change is making it permanent.
Now that the winter has cooled the 2021 fire season, scientists are looking at the big burn scars across the West with the grim understanding that, in some places, the pine and Douglas fir forests will not return.
The devastation of the Gatlinburg wildfires offered hope, in a way, for scientists
National park personnel have been intentionally burning sections of the park since the 1990s, for conservation purposes and to thin out debris. But for a prescribed fire to work as intended it needs to mimic the effects of a natural fire.
"I thought it was interesting that the prescribed fires done in earlier years by the park staff had similar effects to wildfire," Franklin wrote in an email to Knox News. She explained that it was difficult to mimic the effects of more intense wildfire with safe, controlled fires set during the wet season. The 2016 fire revealed that it is possible to get some of the effects of a wildfire without a fire going wild.
Hotter Summer Days Mean More Sierra Nevada Wildfires, Study Finds
Wildfires are increasing in size and intensity in the Western United States, and wildfire seasons are growing longer. California in particular has suffered in recent years, including last summer, when the Sierra Nevada experienced several large fires. One, the Dixie Fire, burned nearly a million acres and was the largest single fire in the state’s history.
Recent research has suggested that heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires.
Climate change is now the main driver of increasing wildfire weather, study finds
In a finding that scientists believed was still decades away from becoming reality, California researchers say that climate change is now the overwhelming cause of conditions driving extreme wildfire behavior in the western United States.
The Native American way of fighting wildfires
Curiously, as partisan and ideological divisions deepen in America, something that looks an awful lot like consensus has been forming around wildfire policy in the West. Government agencies, academic researchers, Native American tribes, rural dwellers and environmentalists have all been reaching a similar conclusion: The 20th century approach to forest management was a long, tangled, disastrous mistake.
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“This idea of indigenous knowledge as a true source of knowledge and time-tested learning is just flooding into the scientific space right now,” said Paul Hessburg, a scientist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest research station. “Increasingly, as I’m getting into the last season of my career, I’m working with tribes and indigenous burning methods, and sometimes the knowledge that I’m learning blows my mind.”
For tribes, ‘good fire’ a key to restoring nature and people
Scientific research increasingly confirms what tribes argued all along: Low-intensity burns on designated parcels, under the right conditions, reduce the risk by consuming dead wood and other fire fuels on forest floors.
To the Yurok, Karuk and Hupa in the mid-Klamath region, the resurgence of cultural burning is about reclaiming a way of life violently suppressed with the arrival of white settlers in the 1800s.
Current approach to wildfires risks lives and wastes money, say experts
Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire adviser at the University of California, said: “We’re seeing our historical approach to fighting fires is no longer working. We saw this summer in California that going out, attacking fires and putting them out was totally ineffective.”
See how the Dixie Fire created its own weather
From California to Canada, the landscape was primed to burn: A severe drought and high summer temperatures magnified by climate change left vegetation tinder-dry, with low humidity and strong winds further amplifying the risk. Given a spark, new fires grew explosively. Several became so large and intense that they powered their own weather systems, spawning towering storm clouds, lightning and even some “fire whirls,” spinning vortices of flames.
Ancient Native American forest practices demonstrated in burn near Eugene
Kimbol’s with a nonprofit group called Maqlaqs Gee’tkni, meaning “Place of the People.” He brought several youth along to share Indigenous fire practices, which were suppressed for generations after colonization.
“The idea is to change the mindset that most people have about fire, which is one of fear. And change that to an empowered mindset around how to use fire, how to employ it, and how to relate to land and culture through it.”
To that end, the tribal trainees’ families — including children — were invited to watch the burn, to view fire more as a tool, versus something to be feared.
Researchers: Wildfire debate misses crucial science
“This may seem like a radical statement, but we don’t have to control extreme wildfire to keep neighborhoods from burning up,” fire physical scientist Jack Cohen said. “Science reveals how homes ignite in extreme conditions. These are preventable human disasters.”
While the number of homes destroyed nationwide during wildfires has skyrocketed in recent years, Cohen said study of how those houses burned shows they had little to do with the wall of flames rushing through the surrounding forest. Instead, the problem comes in what’s called the “home ignition zone” of vulnerabilities such as open windows or flammable materials piled against walls that destroy the buildings.
Good fire: Indigenous fire management
After the heat of the day has passed and the cool evening arrives, Colby Drake, burn boss for the Grand Ronde tribe, gathers with tribal members as they tame and manage the burn unfolding before them. Wearing full protective gear, Drake helps manage the burn for the acorn and hazel, carefully watching to ensure the flames don’t scorch the crops.
Drake conducts prescribed burns to protect Oregon’s vibrant forests containing lush natural beauty since the uptick in wildfires across the state have put it at risk. After decades of ineffective fire suppression, Oregon forests are fighting back. Suppressing wildfires by prematurely putting them out causes a dangerous buildup of flammable debris on the forest floor. This, combined with rising temperatures and decreased precipitation, creates the perfect conditions for large-scale fires to break out.
Scientists: Science-based management, fire-resistant homes can offset wildfires
“The wildland-urban fire problem is not a problem of wildfire control,” Cohen said. “The most effective treatment, whether it’s in the wildland or the community, is the fuels treatment. And when it comes to communities, the community is where we need to change the results of the fire. So, having ignition-resistant homes means preventing wildland-urban fire disasters.”
Moving beyond America’s war on wildfire: 4 ways to avoid future megafires
Fire is an essential ecological process, and many of the ecosystems in the West are adapted to frequent fire, meaning plant and wildlife species have evolved to survive or even thrive after wildfires. But most people arriving in California during colonization, both before and after the Gold Rush of 1849, fundamentally misunderstood the nature of frequent fire forests.
Native people who practiced prescribed fire to manage forests were removed from their homelands, and burning was criminalized. California made prescribed fire illegal in 1924, and it remained illegal for decades until a better appreciation of its importance emerged in the 1970s.
Fires will help the health of Southwestern forests
We have chosen to live in a fire-prone landscape. Unfortunately, we humans have been poor stewards of the forest for the past couple hundred years because we excluded fire. Ensuring that our forests continue to persist and are not killed by high-severity wildfires means we need to support forest managers restoring regular burning to the forest. That means that periodically, we will have to deal with some smoke. However, a smokey morning because smoke settles over Santa Fe when the temperature drops at night is far better than being stuck in your house for several months because the acrid air from out-of-control wildfires could kill you.
‘Self-serving garbage.’ Wildfire experts escalate fight over saving California forests
For decades, environmentalists fought the agency for allowing timber companies to pillage huge stretches of the national forests for profit. Hanson says thinning projects, performed in the name of fire safety, are simply an excuse for more of the same commercial logging.
But climate change is making the forests hotter and drier — at the same time they’re getting increasingly populated with humans. That has sharpened the debate over how best to manage California’s woods. And with another 2.4 million acres burning in California this year, on top of 4 million in 2020, many other environmental organizations have embraced thinning as a means of saving America’s forests.
Are California’s wildfires really “disasters”—or just something natural?
“California forests are fire-adapted, which means they need fire to thrive,” says Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor of fire science at the University of California, Merced. “Precolonization, much of California’s forest would burn every five to 20 years.”
What we’re seeing now is the reintroduction of fire to forests that haven’t been allowed to burn for more than a century. These megablazes, Kolden says, are “doing the work that fire has done for millennia—taking out a lot of old dead material, thinning out the forest naturally and reinitiating that biogeochemical cycle that breaks down all the vegetation and returns those nutrients to the soil.”
Planning for uncertainty: U.S. Forest Service prepares for climate change impacts on public lands
Whitlock said changes are already underway, and they will likely continue through the middle of the century no matter what managers do. However, reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the best strategy for slowing the changes down.
“If we’re able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we can start to flatten the warming curve,” she said. “We just need to be prepared to live in a place where there is more fire and more smoke, and accept that our forests are undergoing change.”
The bill is climbing to fight California wildfires. How much are they costing taxpayers?
The Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire, has projected an all-time high of $1.3 billion for the last fiscal year. California approved $373 million for its emergency fund, but the budget ended up being about $900 million short, according to a budget post from the State Legislative Analyst’s Office.