Opinion: Don’t clearcut in fire-adapted, mature forests
Additionally, according to Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) and senior wildland fire ecologist certified by the Association for Fire Ecology, “Studies show that forests that have been degraded by past commercial logging, livestock grazing, or fire suppression typically burn more severely than native forests that have not been subjected to these past land abuses and are more resilient to fire.”
Climate change is now the main driver of increasing wildfire weather, study finds
In a finding that scientists believed was still decades away from becoming reality, California researchers say that climate change is now the overwhelming cause of conditions driving extreme wildfire behavior in the western United States.
The Native American way of fighting wildfires
Curiously, as partisan and ideological divisions deepen in America, something that looks an awful lot like consensus has been forming around wildfire policy in the West. Government agencies, academic researchers, Native American tribes, rural dwellers and environmentalists have all been reaching a similar conclusion: The 20th century approach to forest management was a long, tangled, disastrous mistake.
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“This idea of indigenous knowledge as a true source of knowledge and time-tested learning is just flooding into the scientific space right now,” said Paul Hessburg, a scientist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest research station. “Increasingly, as I’m getting into the last season of my career, I’m working with tribes and indigenous burning methods, and sometimes the knowledge that I’m learning blows my mind.”
For tribes, ‘good fire’ a key to restoring nature and people
Scientific research increasingly confirms what tribes argued all along: Low-intensity burns on designated parcels, under the right conditions, reduce the risk by consuming dead wood and other fire fuels on forest floors.
To the Yurok, Karuk and Hupa in the mid-Klamath region, the resurgence of cultural burning is about reclaiming a way of life violently suppressed with the arrival of white settlers in the 1800s.
Current approach to wildfires risks lives and wastes money, say experts
Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire adviser at the University of California, said: “We’re seeing our historical approach to fighting fires is no longer working. We saw this summer in California that going out, attacking fires and putting them out was totally ineffective.”
See how the Dixie Fire created its own weather
From California to Canada, the landscape was primed to burn: A severe drought and high summer temperatures magnified by climate change left vegetation tinder-dry, with low humidity and strong winds further amplifying the risk. Given a spark, new fires grew explosively. Several became so large and intense that they powered their own weather systems, spawning towering storm clouds, lightning and even some “fire whirls,” spinning vortices of flames.
Ancient Native American forest practices demonstrated in burn near Eugene
Kimbol’s with a nonprofit group called Maqlaqs Gee’tkni, meaning “Place of the People.” He brought several youth along to share Indigenous fire practices, which were suppressed for generations after colonization.
“The idea is to change the mindset that most people have about fire, which is one of fear. And change that to an empowered mindset around how to use fire, how to employ it, and how to relate to land and culture through it.”
To that end, the tribal trainees’ families — including children — were invited to watch the burn, to view fire more as a tool, versus something to be feared.
Researchers: Wildfire debate misses crucial science
“This may seem like a radical statement, but we don’t have to control extreme wildfire to keep neighborhoods from burning up,” fire physical scientist Jack Cohen said. “Science reveals how homes ignite in extreme conditions. These are preventable human disasters.”
While the number of homes destroyed nationwide during wildfires has skyrocketed in recent years, Cohen said study of how those houses burned shows they had little to do with the wall of flames rushing through the surrounding forest. Instead, the problem comes in what’s called the “home ignition zone” of vulnerabilities such as open windows or flammable materials piled against walls that destroy the buildings.
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.