The U.S. Forest Service’s Terrible, Shortsighted New Wildfire Policy
The struggle to effectively communicate scientific processes is not limited to forest fires, of course. But when it comes to how important controlled burns are for protecting the environment and habitats for life, figuring it out is especially imperative. “As a strategy and gesture, the controlled burns ban is misguided,” Pyne also said. “It’s as if, with COVID, we were putting all our resources to distributing ventilators but stopping mask mandates and vaccinations.”
‘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.
Could the infrastructure bill make wildfires worse?
California has cut thousands of miles of fuel breaks, many in remote areas. But companies have had little incentive to return to them, Ingalsbee said, because they’ve already logged the most valuable trees from those fire breaks. “It’s the lack of maintenance that has doomed every one of these schemes,” he said.
“The real crisis is not burning trees on top of a mountaintop in a wilderness area. It’s incinerated homes in communities,” Ingalsbee said.
Exploding California wildfires rekindle debate over whether to snuff out blazes in wilderness areas or let them burn
A U.S. Forest Service directive to put out fires in remote, roadless California forests has angered foresters and firefighters, who say doing so will put lives at risk and fuel worse fires in the future.
'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.
With extreme fires burning, Forest Service stops ‘good fires’ too
“Every time I’ve been out on a large wildfire, the only thing that has moderated fire spread has been past fire footprints on the landscape,” says Mike Beasley, a retired fire manager who worked for the National Park Service and Forest Service for decades.
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.
Forest Service promises swifter action on new wildfires, after plea from California
Ironically, the Forest Service for years was so aggressive about extinguishing new wildfires that it was criticized for not letting some fires burn naturally as a means of removing flammable vegetation from the forests. In recent years, the agency has taken a more measured approach, saying it would let some fires burn if they didn’t threaten people, buildings or important infrastructure.
Timothy Ingalsbee, a retired firefighter, said the Forest Service is making a mistake by going back to its old policy. “We’re stuck on this treadmill of mismanagement,” said Ingalsbee, a former Forest Service employee who runs an Oregon group called Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
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.