An obsession with suppression
And yet, 20 years later, the Forest Service keeps going back to treating fire as the enemy. Timothy Ingalsbee, head of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, told me he’s seen it over and again: “It’s almost a chronic knee-jerk reaction to fall back on this retrograde policy,” he said.
Welcome to the Pyrocene
The planet’s current unhinged pyrogeography has also been shaped by fires that should have been present and weren’t. These are the fires historically set by nature or people to which landscapes had adapted. Now those fires are mostly gone, and the land has responded by degrading ecologically while building up combustibles to stoke more savage wildfires. The Earth’s fire crisis, that is, is not just about the bad burns that trash countrysides and crash into towns. It is equally about the good fires that have vanished because they were extinguished or no longer lit. The Earth’s biota is disintegrating as much by tame fire’s absence as by feral fire’s outbreaks.
Forest management not so clear cut
An analysis by Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology of last year’s Labor Day fires found that plantation forests in Holiday Farm Fire along the McKenzie River burned more intensely than nearby federally managed lands.
“Climate change is causing fires to grow so big and so fast that what they are burning through is the legacy of industrial forestry,” said Ingalsbee.
California can either make fire part of its cultural identity, or it can watch its heritage go up in smoke
In the early 1900s, this practice of cultural burning was criminalized when federal and state officials initiated an era of fire suppression. The stated goal was to save trees — to protect forests from the very process that had shaped and maintained them through time. Yet we know now those losses weren’t avoided; rather, by removing fire, the losses were stalled, accentuated. It’s clear that the fires that burn now are making up for generations of missed fire. The more we’ve rejected fire as the natural — and human — process that it is, the more volatile it has become.
Welcome to ‘Trump world,’ the climate future scientists fear
“These politicians don’t dispute that the climate is changing, but they are absolutely in denial about what curbing it would entail,” wrote Kate Aronoff of the New Republic. “The report has made clear that the climate in which this country became a superpower no longer exists. So why are politicians stuck on twentieth-century answers to the twenty-first century’s problems?”
Climate change is only one driver of explosive wildfire seasons — don't forget land management
Welcome to a new era of wildfire in the American West — and increasingly, in other parts of the world. The fire seasons that have been scorching huge areas and wiping entire towns from the map are not anomalies — they appear to be the future. To meet that future, a response could be based on an understanding that wildfire is not going away, wildfire will be a part of the ecosystem moving forward and fire management systems should be modernized to meet the moment.
California's forests are at a turning point. Why aren't we committing to 'good fire'?
“The Karuk people have always lived on the Klamath River, and they used fire to manage resources," Kathy McCovey, a Karuk tribal member and former longtime Forest Service employee, told me.
"If you can’t learn to live with fire and learn how to work with what it is and what it does to help maintain all the things needed for survival in a place like this, then basically you’re working against it, and if enough time goes by, it will work against you," Bill Tripp, director of the Department of Natural Resources for the Karuk, said in a recent interview. "Things in nature have a tendency to win."
Forest Service maxed out as wildfires blaze across US west
The U.S. Forest Service said Friday that it was operating in crisis mode, fully deploying firefighters and maxing out its support system as wildfires continued to break out across the U.S. West, threatening thousands of homes and entire towns.
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.