Can we replace fire with mechanical thinning in Southwest Colorado?
The spate of burn-induced wildfires led Forest Service Chief Randy Moore to suspend the agency’s prescribed fire operations to conduct a 90-day review of its protocols and practices.
Yet, amid renewed awareness of the risks of prescribed fire, forest ecologists and biologists say fire serves an irreplaceable role in Southwest Colorado’s mixed conifer and ponderosa pine forests, and that limiting the use of fire would do more harm than good.
Fires spread as firefighters plead for pay raise promised last year
Federal firefighters still haven’t received a pay boost approved last year. It’s not known which employees will get the money once it is implemented. In some high-risk areas, the U.S. Forest Service has only half the staff it needs.
Meanwhile, the number of acres burned as of Wednesday was 112 percent higher than the 10-year average, according to the government’s wild land fire outlook. Drought, heat and wind are creating additional fire hazards.
Forest Service finds its planned burns sparked N.M.’s largest wildfire
After decades of embracing a policy of putting out fires as quickly as possible, federal and some state officials have come around to the idea of prescribed burns in recent years. The basic concept, backed by science and Indigenous groups’ long history of using intentional fire, is that modest controlled burns can clear flammable vegetation and preempt the kind of destructive megafires that have devastated the West. Experts have called for more fire on the land, and the Biden administration has announced plans to use intentional burns and brush thinning to reduce fire risk on 50 million acres that border vulnerable communities.
But extreme drought and record heat, worsened by climate change, have made it more difficult to use intentional fire as a preventive measure. Longer wildfire seasons have narrowed the window of time when firefighters can set controlled burns safely. Bureaucratic obstacles, combined with public fear that an intentionally set fire could escape, have also prevented some forest managers from using prescribed fires.
COIC, Heart of Oregon Corps receive nearly $1 million to launch C. Oregon Wildfire Workforce Partnership
(The) Central Oregon Wildfire Workforce Partnership…will train and employ over 140 local youth and young adults in wildfire reduction and related skills. In addition to gaining on-the-job training, certifications, and knowledge in fire fuel reduction practices, youth in the program will receive wages, scholarships, additional workforce training in both soft and hard skills to prepare them to enter the professional workforce.
Why climate change makes it harder to fight fire with fire
Last summer, the Forest Service’s chief, Randy Moore, restricted the use of prescribed fire on agency lands to make sure resources were available to fight wildfires. He also ordered a pause on allowing backcountry fires to burn if they provided ecological benefits and didn’t threaten homes or infrastructure.
The halt was temporary, but it was enough to make some ecologists fear that officials’ recent championing of fire could still go into reverse. If the goal is to return the land to an older ecological state, one in which frequent natural fires kept forests vibrant and resilient, then the scale of the task is staggering.
Many factors influenced the severity of burns from Oregon's devastating 2020 megafires
"90% of the burning occurred during high winds," said Dr. Cody Every, a Research Associate in the Department of Environmental Science and Management at Portland State and the study's lead author. "But we also found that vegetation structure and canopy height were significant in determining where the fire burned more severely."
The research team found that areas with younger trees and low canopy height and cover were particularly susceptible to high mortality rates. As Holz pointed out, this finding is of particular consequence to lumber production in the state, where trees grown on plantations are typically younger, uniformly spaced and located near communities and critical infrastructure.
How the Indigenous practice of ‘good fire’ can help our forests survive
“There is so much to learn from cultural practitioners — not just about traditions and techniques, but also about stewardship and connectedness,” she says. “Fire is a reflection of culture, and the kinds of fires we’ve been experiencing in California are a projection of our own disconnection and imbalance. It’s time to reclaim the balance, rebuild the relationship. Cultural practitioners can help show us how.”
Women firefighters from around train in Virginia’s forest
Women make up only about 10% of the national wildland firefighting force. Many are the only woman or transgender person in their division and often feel they have to represent their gender, Quinn-Davidson said. She said she wasn't sure what to expect during the first training exchange.
“We were really surprised by how powerful it was,” Quinn-Davidson said. “It could’ve just been another training event that just had more women. But instead there was this level of camaraderie that we just didn’t anticipate. And it was a pretty emotional event.”
Prepare your yard for wildfire season by creating a low-flammable landscaping plan, finding fire-resistant plants with new database
Oregon’s $200 million wildfire bill includes stricter building codes to make new or remodeled structures more fire hardened, but all owners need to maintain their property to prevent and slow a fire.
Research has found that fire suppression work reduces the vulnerability of a home and the entire community.
Indigenous fire practices can help Oregon wildfires, land management
As fires appear to haunt Oregon’s imagination of summertime, we sit to reflect on the need to define our collective relationship with fire through an engagement with Indigenous science or ways of knowing and understanding the world.
Native American communities in western Oregon have been tending the land with fire since time immemorial. This practice, known today as cultural burning, offers many lessons on the value of fire to care for land and water. Cultural burnings are an ecological practice grounded in Indigenous science that prevents disastrous fire seasons, nourishes watersheds, sustains traditional food sources and maintains cultural practices and keeps memories alive across generations.
In western Oregon, Native communities have carefully burned to maintain oak groves for acorns, used mindful fire in meadows for camas and other foods and pruned and burned hazel patches for basketry materials. These practices, among many others, require the use of fire as a transformational element — fire to clear grassland, maintain forest health and encourage new growth, while rejuvenating springs and water tables.
Indigenous firefighter training teaches traditional Native practices in woodlands management
Thousands of years before colonization, Indigenous people did controlled burns to rejuvenate habitat and reduce fuel buildup.
Kimbol said he’s heartened that after a century of fire suppression, non-tribal governments are becoming more open to what many Native people call “cultural burns”, patterned after the practices of their ancestors.
Don’t blame national forests for America’s massive wildfires
National forests often get the blame for wildfire conditions in the West, says Christopher Dunn, a fire ecologist at Oregon State University. But more importantly, the Tamarack Fire isn’t representative of the fires that threaten most Westerners. According to recent research co-authored by Dunn, and published in the journal Scientific Reports, fires beginning in national forests are “a rare occasion.” Instead, “those ignitions are more likely to come off private land and move into national forest or into communities,” Dunn explains.
Climate scientists warn of a ‘global wildfire crisis’
“There isn’t the right attention to fire from governments,” said Glynis Humphrey, a fire expert at the University of Cape Town and an author of the new report. More societies worldwide are learning the value of prescribed burns and other methods of preventing wildfires from raging out of control, she said. Yet public spending in developed nations is still heavily skewed toward firefighting instead of forest management.
Wildfires are getting more extreme and burning more land. The UN says it's time to 'learn to live with fire'
Researchers say governments aren't learning from the past, and they are perpetuating conditions that are not environmentally and economically beneficial for the future.
"The world needs to change its stance towards wildfires -- from reactive to proactive -- because wildfires are going to increase in frequency and intensity due to climate change," Christophersen said. "That means we all have to be better prepared."
Top environmental groups call on Biden to protect mature trees and forests on federal lands from logging
While many policymakers look to shiny new technologies to solve the climate crisis, advocates say that safeguarding trees has long been a simple way to store carbon dioxide, preventing the potent greenhouse gas from entering the atmosphere and warming the planet.
OSU research suggests Forest Service lands not the main source of wildfires affecting communities
The findings, published today in Nature Scientific Reports, follow by a few weeks the Forest Service’s release of a new 10-year fire strategy, Confronting the Wildfire Crisis. The strategy aims for a change in paradigm within the agency, Dunn said.
“We are long overdue for policies and actions that support a paradigm shift,” he said.
A paradigm shift that could mitigate wildfire risk would begin with the recognition that the significant wildfires occurring in western states is a fire management challenge with a fire management solution, not a forest management problem with a forest management solution, Dunn said.
Bill would grant reporters more access to wildfire zones in Oregon
Oregon journalists would have more freedom to enter active wildfire zones under a bill discussed Thursday in the House Rules Committee.
As wildfires spread, news outlets in Oregon usually have to rely on photos and descriptions from government agencies. Media advocacy groups have lobbied for greater access to natural disasters so journalists can more accurately and efficiently document a breaking news story.
‘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.