Wildfires are ravaging forests set aside to soak up greenhouse gases
“The worst fire season in Western U.S. history is going on,” said Danny Cullenward, the policy director of CarbonPlan. “That story is just crashing headfirst into some of the big bets that policymakers and private companies have made about the role of forest carbon as a climate solution. What we are seeing is, a bunch of projects are on fire.”
The burning debate: manage forest fires suppress them?
Fire suppression will not alter this unsettling dynamic. We paradoxically need more fire, not less — targeted, site-specific reintroductions designed to restore ecosystem health. This may seem counterintuitive, but as forest ranger and firefighter Allen Calbrick advised Pinchot in 1940, fire is “nature’s way of cleaning up her backyard” and providing “good clean ground on which to grow.”
How Napa's Cakebread winery absolved itself of starting one of California's most destructive fires
If Cakebread’s vineyard fence were found to have sparked the Glass Fire, and if the winery were found guilty of negligence or another statutory violation, it would have been vulnerable to lawsuits from Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, as well as the owners of 650 destroyed homes.
As California burns, some ecologists say it’s time to rethink forest management
“There’s no way to keep fire out of forests,” Bauer said. “If you do it then the fuels conditions just become worse and worse until you get a really bad fire on a really bad weather day and it burns then. All putting fire out does really is defer the risk to a future fire.”
Documenting a wildfire when it’s in your backyard
I’ve photographed wildfires for The New York Times and other news outlets for 20 years. I covered the Tubbs fire in Santa Rosa in 2017 and the Camp fire in Paradise in 2018. Seeing the aftermath of the Tubbs fire was the real eye-opener. It jumped six lanes of Highway 101, burning through strip malls and destroying the Coffey Park neighborhood. To me, it showed that nowhere in the West is truly safe from wildfire.
‘Tired, exhausted’ California firefighters stretched thin as they battle unprecedented wildfires
The incredible speed and ferocity of wildfires in recent years has also changed the methods that crews use to fight the blazes, said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former federal firefighter who is now executive director of the wildfire prevention organization Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology.
“Unlike years past, where with a large fire, the crews can settle in for a long siege, this is kind of run-and-gun,” he said. “But at a cost to other incidents — other wildfires — because the crews are just beat up, and burned out, with battle fatigue, if you will.”
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.