Good fire: Indigenous fire management
After the heat of the day has passed and the cool evening arrives, Colby Drake, burn boss for the Grand Ronde tribe, gathers with tribal members as they tame and manage the burn unfolding before them. Wearing full protective gear, Drake helps manage the burn for the acorn and hazel, carefully watching to ensure the flames don’t scorch the crops.
Drake conducts prescribed burns to protect Oregon’s vibrant forests containing lush natural beauty since the uptick in wildfires across the state have put it at risk. After decades of ineffective fire suppression, Oregon forests are fighting back. Suppressing wildfires by prematurely putting them out causes a dangerous buildup of flammable debris on the forest floor. This, combined with rising temperatures and decreased precipitation, creates the perfect conditions for large-scale fires to break out.
Scientists: Science-based management, fire-resistant homes can offset wildfires
“The wildland-urban fire problem is not a problem of wildfire control,” Cohen said. “The most effective treatment, whether it’s in the wildland or the community, is the fuels treatment. And when it comes to communities, the community is where we need to change the results of the fire. So, having ignition-resistant homes means preventing wildland-urban fire disasters.”
Moving beyond America’s war on wildfire: 4 ways to avoid future megafires
Fire is an essential ecological process, and many of the ecosystems in the West are adapted to frequent fire, meaning plant and wildlife species have evolved to survive or even thrive after wildfires. But most people arriving in California during colonization, both before and after the Gold Rush of 1849, fundamentally misunderstood the nature of frequent fire forests.
Native people who practiced prescribed fire to manage forests were removed from their homelands, and burning was criminalized. California made prescribed fire illegal in 1924, and it remained illegal for decades until a better appreciation of its importance emerged in the 1970s.
Fires will help the health of Southwestern forests
We have chosen to live in a fire-prone landscape. Unfortunately, we humans have been poor stewards of the forest for the past couple hundred years because we excluded fire. Ensuring that our forests continue to persist and are not killed by high-severity wildfires means we need to support forest managers restoring regular burning to the forest. That means that periodically, we will have to deal with some smoke. However, a smokey morning because smoke settles over Santa Fe when the temperature drops at night is far better than being stuck in your house for several months because the acrid air from out-of-control wildfires could kill you.
‘Self-serving garbage.’ Wildfire experts escalate fight over saving California forests
For decades, environmentalists fought the agency for allowing timber companies to pillage huge stretches of the national forests for profit. Hanson says thinning projects, performed in the name of fire safety, are simply an excuse for more of the same commercial logging.
But climate change is making the forests hotter and drier — at the same time they’re getting increasingly populated with humans. That has sharpened the debate over how best to manage California’s woods. And with another 2.4 million acres burning in California this year, on top of 4 million in 2020, many other environmental organizations have embraced thinning as a means of saving America’s forests.
Inside the massive and costly fight to contain the Dixie Fire
Timothy Ingalsbee, who co-founded Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a group that pushes for stronger land management practices, has argued that over the long term many of the tactics employed by emergency crews hurt forest land, which benefits from periodic controlled fires.
“We’re fighting fires under the worst conditions rather than lighting fires under the best conditions,” Mr. Ingalsbee added. “There are 10,000 firefighters on the line in California, trying to keep people safe. What would those 10,000 be able to do to apply fire in the winter or spring to yield the best ecological effects — and a very different set of costs?”
Impact of forest thinning on wildfires creates divisions
Firefighters and numerous studies credit intensive forest thinning projects with helping save communities like those recently threatened near Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, but dissent from some environmental advocacy groups is roiling the scientific community.
While most scientific studies find such forest management is a valuable tool, environmental advocates say data from recent gigantic wildfires support their long-running assertion that efforts to slow wildfires have instead accelerated their spread.
The argument is fueling an already passionate debate.
It has led to a flurry of citations of dueling scientific studies and has fed competing claims that the science may be skewed by ideology.
Are California’s wildfires really “disasters”—or just something natural?
“California forests are fire-adapted, which means they need fire to thrive,” says Crystal Kolden, an assistant professor of fire science at the University of California, Merced. “Precolonization, much of California’s forest would burn every five to 20 years.”
What we’re seeing now is the reintroduction of fire to forests that haven’t been allowed to burn for more than a century. These megablazes, Kolden says, are “doing the work that fire has done for millennia—taking out a lot of old dead material, thinning out the forest naturally and reinitiating that biogeochemical cycle that breaks down all the vegetation and returns those nutrients to the soil.”
‘A fire age is upon us’
Over the past decade, the U.S. fire community has developed a national cohesive strategy for wildland fire. It has three components: create fire-adapted communities, create fire-resilient landscapes, and develop a workforce capable of implementing these goals. To that triad, I would add: begin work to contain climate change. The national strategy is pretty much a master plan for living with fire. If we wait until we tackle climate change before we mitigate the risk of fire in towns and countrysides, we will suffer lots of losses, some irreversible. If we only focus on mitigation, climate change will eventually overwhelm our efforts. We need all of it all at once.
The Pyrocene is not just a metaphor: Whatever we decide to call it, a fire age is upon us. Our fire behavior made the problem and will have to unmake it.
Planning for uncertainty: U.S. Forest Service prepares for climate change impacts on public lands
Whitlock said changes are already underway, and they will likely continue through the middle of the century no matter what managers do. However, reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the best strategy for slowing the changes down.
“If we’re able to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we can start to flatten the warming curve,” she said. “We just need to be prepared to live in a place where there is more fire and more smoke, and accept that our forests are undergoing change.”
As wildfires become more intense, we’re dumping more retardants. What’s the impact on wildlife?
As bigger, more intense fires push into the wildland-urban interface and fire crews battle to protect towns and agricultural areas, new questions are emerging about what happens when aerial wildfire retardants become a larger part of the chemical cocktail in wildfire smoke.
The bill is climbing to fight California wildfires. How much are they costing taxpayers?
The Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, better known as Cal Fire, has projected an all-time high of $1.3 billion for the last fiscal year. California approved $373 million for its emergency fund, but the budget ended up being about $900 million short, according to a budget post from the State Legislative Analyst’s Office.
We’re dumping loads of retardant chemicals to fight wildfires. What does it mean for wildlife?
Tim Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter, directs the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, & Ecology and believes, like Stahl, that state and federal fire agencies should be more restrained and targeted in their use of retardant.
"The price of just one air tanker load of retardant can fund so many more workers [on the ground]," he told EHN. "They're much more flexible and nimble and versatile than that air tanker, which has one single function."
Why Everything We Know About Wildfires May Be Wrong
Ponder the title “fire rangers.” That’s what Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, wants to substitute, universally, for the word that happens to be the first one in his organization’s name—a title he now considers overly militaristic. “It’s a very different mission, different identity now,” he says.
Raging debate over burned trees could leave residents vulnerable to disastrous fires
Removing burned trees after a wildfire has been standard practice for the U.S. Forest Service for the past century, but an NBC Bay Area Investigation reveals an increasing number of scientists now blame post-fire logging for leaving communities even more vulnerable to hotter, faster fires
These maps show where prescribed burns helped curb the Caldor Fire’s rapid growth
The Caldor Fire defied expectations, climbing up mountains and crossing highways, destroying more than 1,000 structures in the process. South Lake Tahoe narrowly avoided the fire’s wrath, which fire experts say was largely thanks to fire prevention activities, including prescribed burns. The following maps show how prescribed burns and other methods of removing vegetation to reduce the risk of hotter, larger fires — known as “fuel treatments” — slowed or curbed Caldor’s growth.
What likely saved the General Sherman Tree from the KNP Complex Fire
It seemed like a miracle of sorts, but Mark Garrett, a fire information officer for the National Park Service, said there's an explanation for why these trees survived — and that's prescribed burns. More than 400 acres around the General Sherman Tree underwent a prescribed burn as recently as 2019, Garrett said. Prescribed burns, in which fires are set intentionally and monitored closely, can maintain the health of a forest and prevent overgrowth of vegetation that can intensify fires.
Anatomy of a wildfire: How the Dixie Fire becamethe largest blaze of a devastating summer
The fire’s tear through remote, rugged terrain, exceptional drought bringing moisture levels in California’s forests to historic lows, searing heat, as well as a series of unexpected obstacles, combined to fuel a monstrous blaze unlike any firefighters said they had seen before.