‘A deranged pyroscape’: how fires across the world have grown weirder
As the planet heats, combustible landscapes will dry and ignite. Less fire-prone lands, such as Greenland, will start catching fire, too. Environmentalists now urge us to imagine the whole world aflame. If our old picture of climate breakdown was a melting glacier, our new one is a wildfire. Its message is simple and urgent: the higher we crank up the heat, the more everything will burn – call this the “thermostat model”. With headlines reporting enormous fires from Sacramento to Siberia, it’s easy to feel that we’re already on the brink of a devastating global conflagration.
Prescribed Fire: Why We Burn
Fire has long been used in Oregon for a variety of purposes. Native Americans have used fire to influence landscapes across the state for millennia. Some goals of cultural burning include:
Increasing the vigor and abundance of important plant species.
Creating habitat for wildlife.
Easing travel along important trails.
Aiding in ceremonial purposes.
Early settlers learned about the use of fire from Native Americans and adopted the practice to manage rangelands and forests. Ranchers in some regions use fire to keep woody plants from invading pastures and to improve forage quality. Fire has also been used in timber harvesting and forest management. In the western part of the state, fire has been used to reduce fire hazards created by slash left after logging. Underburning was reintroduced in the eastern Cascades as a forest management tool in the 1960s and 1970s.
Out West climate change is real, right now – pyroeographer Crystal Kolden on possible solutions
Many of the solutions to our fire problem actually lie in looking at the natural world. As someone who has studied this for a long period of time, it does not exclude humans, it includes humans managing this landscape in a very specific way. So, when we talk about how we can learn from nature how to restore these landscapes to health, returning to natural solutions means including humans and very much following the lead of indigenous peoples who have been here for millennia.
Biden administration announces plan to spend billions to prevent wildfires
Drought and extreme heat, made worse by global warming, have played a role by making forests tinder-dry and easier to burn. But many researchers say that more than a century of management policies that called for every fire to be extinguished, no matter how small, also contributed to the problem by allowing dead vegetation to accumulate and add fuel to fires.
That is why the Biden administration has decided to use thinning and intentional burning to restore forests to conditions closer to those that existed in the past, when fire was a regular part of the forest life cycle and naturally removed some trees and dead underbrush.
Forest Service scraps post-fire logging plan in Willamette National Forest
The U.S. Forest Service has abandoned a plan to log along more than 400 miles of roads in burnt areas of the Willamette National Forest.
U.S. District Judge Michael McShane in November ordered an immediate stop to the roadside logging just days before cutting was set to begin, indicating the environmental groups were likely to win their case. McShane wrote in his order that the Forest Service could cut trees at imminent risk of falling onto roads, but noted that most of the trees slated for felling didn’t fit that description.
The deadly dynamics of Colorado’s Marshall Fire
When it comes to meeting the challenge of escalating fire catastrophes amid overstocked forests, an ever-expanding urban interface, and worsening climate change, there are no easy answers. Because the underlying causes are complex and multifactorial, so must be the solutions: there simply is no silver bullet. Many folks would rather there be a singular villain—but the reality is that all of these factors are critically important to varying degrees. Making real progress toward mitigating this crisis means addressing each component head on: using more prescribed, beneficial fire to reduce hazardous fuel buildup and improve ecosystem resilience; reimagining how we design neighborhoods and retrofitting homes to make them more fire resistant; and, of course, zeroing out global greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible to eventually halt climate change. None of this will be easy, but given that the alternative is an ever-increasing risk of catastrophic fires, we simply can’t afford not to act.
PG&E blamed for massive Northern California wildfire
PG&E equipment has been blamed for several of California’s largest and deadliest wildfires in recent years.
Last September, PG&E was charged with involuntary manslaughter and other crimes because its equipment sparked the Zogg Fire in September 2020 that killed four people and burned about 200 homes west of Redding. Investigators blamed a pine tree that fell onto a PG&E distribution line. The company could be heavily fined if convicted.
In California, Tribal members and more protected from liability for cultural, controlled burns
Hankins said that, while cultural burning achieves the same goal as controlled burning, it also goes way beyond risk mangement and back to a core Indigenous principle: connection to the land.
“What it really comes down to, in my mind, is this idea of cultural competency,” he said. “ If you're a practitioner, like a weaver or a hunter, and you're using fire to help you with those particular things, that's very unique.You're setting fire and you're coming back into that spot continually to collect plant materials, or to hunt or to provide that habitat so that you can hunt in a different area and the animals have that place that you burned for their wellbeing.”
With prescribed burns, he said, you walk away.
‘It felt like the apocalypse’: Colorado wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes.
Wildfires in the American West have been worsening — growing larger, spreading faster and reaching into mountainous elevations that were once too wet and cool to have supported fierce fires. What was once a seasonal phenomenon has become a year-round menace, with fires burning later into the fall and into the winter.
Recent research has suggested that heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires, as rainfall patterns have been disrupted, snow melts earlier and meadows and forests are scorched into kindling.
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.