Prescribed Fire: Why We Burn
Fire has long been used in Oregon for a variety of purposes. Native Americans have used fire to influence landscapes across the state for millennia. Some goals of cultural burning include:
Increasing the vigor and abundance of important plant species.
Creating habitat for wildlife.
Easing travel along important trails.
Aiding in ceremonial purposes.
Early settlers learned about the use of fire from Native Americans and adopted the practice to manage rangelands and forests. Ranchers in some regions use fire to keep woody plants from invading pastures and to improve forage quality. Fire has also been used in timber harvesting and forest management. In the western part of the state, fire has been used to reduce fire hazards created by slash left after logging. Underburning was reintroduced in the eastern Cascades as a forest management tool in the 1960s and 1970s.
Out West climate change is real, right now – pyroeographer Crystal Kolden on possible solutions
Many of the solutions to our fire problem actually lie in looking at the natural world. As someone who has studied this for a long period of time, it does not exclude humans, it includes humans managing this landscape in a very specific way. So, when we talk about how we can learn from nature how to restore these landscapes to health, returning to natural solutions means including humans and very much following the lead of indigenous peoples who have been here for millennia.
How one Oregon town put politics aside to save itself from fire
Things had started to change in Ashland in the ’60s and ’70s: A new generation of residents saw the forests of the Pacific Northwest not as an industrial resource for exploitation, but a place for recreation and serenity. Throughout the 1980s, activists set up camps to block logging roads, gave speeches outside ranger stations, filed lawsuits, and lobbied politicians — a period known as the Timber Wars. Then, in 1990, environmentalists got the spotted owl on the endangered species list, and shortly thereafter a judge stopped all logging on state and federal land in southeastern Oregon.
The Forest Service — no longer able to conduct the business of managing timber sales as usual — focused instead on building access roads for firefighters and thinning trees deemed a wildfire threat. “It was almost presto-chango,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of the nonprofit Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. “All of a sudden the Forest Service, instead of doing timber extraction, was all about tinder reduction.”
New federal plan aims to prevent wildfire in high-risk areas of Oregon. Supporters say wildfire prevention spending could create forest industry jobs; critics say it’s too heavy on logging
Tim Ingalsbee, executive director for the Firefighters United For Safety, Ethics and Ecology, said the plan brings nothing new other than funding. He said he’s disappointed it focuses on fighting fire instead of working with fires when they naturally occur.
“To me a wildfire strategy would be centered on that,” he said. “How are we going to live and work with wildfire instead of the same old obsolete paradigm of how can we prevent wildfire or if it happens, how can we fight wildfire.”
Fire strategy stuck with old tactics, experts warn
Although it uses the words “paradigm shift” 13 times, the U.S. Forest Service’s new wildfire crisis strategy appears stuck on old tactics, according to area fire experts.
“I saw no new strategy but rather a potential increase in the same fire control strategy of ‘fuel treatment’ to enhance fire control,” retired Forest Service fire scientist Jack Cohen said after reviewing the documents released on Tuesday.
Biden administration announces plan to spend billions to prevent wildfires
Drought and extreme heat, made worse by global warming, have played a role by making forests tinder-dry and easier to burn. But many researchers say that more than a century of management policies that called for every fire to be extinguished, no matter how small, also contributed to the problem by allowing dead vegetation to accumulate and add fuel to fires.
That is why the Biden administration has decided to use thinning and intentional burning to restore forests to conditions closer to those that existed in the past, when fire was a regular part of the forest life cycle and naturally removed some trees and dead underbrush.
Forest Service scraps post-fire logging plan in Willamette National Forest
The U.S. Forest Service has abandoned a plan to log along more than 400 miles of roads in burnt areas of the Willamette National Forest.
U.S. District Judge Michael McShane in November ordered an immediate stop to the roadside logging just days before cutting was set to begin, indicating the environmental groups were likely to win their case. McShane wrote in his order that the Forest Service could cut trees at imminent risk of falling onto roads, but noted that most of the trees slated for felling didn’t fit that description.
Intentional blazes spark new complaints in fight against wildfire
People and groups critical of backfires said they're not looking to end their use. "By using wildfire, you can steer wildfire," said Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology and author of the report on Oregon's Biscuit Fire.
But the environment in forests has changed, thanks to drought brought on in part by climate change, and the Forest Service is being reactive rather than proactive, critics said. Even where backfire is effective, Ingalsbee said, forest managers need to ask what the cost is in landscapes burned at high intensity and wildlife habitat damaged.
"Lack of planning leads to crisis," Ingalsbee said. "They're managing fire as if it's unforeseen. It's time we prepare for it. We can't prevent it."
The deadly dynamics of Colorado’s Marshall Fire
When it comes to meeting the challenge of escalating fire catastrophes amid overstocked forests, an ever-expanding urban interface, and worsening climate change, there are no easy answers. Because the underlying causes are complex and multifactorial, so must be the solutions: there simply is no silver bullet. Many folks would rather there be a singular villain—but the reality is that all of these factors are critically important to varying degrees. Making real progress toward mitigating this crisis means addressing each component head on: using more prescribed, beneficial fire to reduce hazardous fuel buildup and improve ecosystem resilience; reimagining how we design neighborhoods and retrofitting homes to make them more fire resistant; and, of course, zeroing out global greenhouse gas emissions as quickly as possible to eventually halt climate change. None of this will be easy, but given that the alternative is an ever-increasing risk of catastrophic fires, we simply can’t afford not to act.
Yelling timber
FUSEE believes that doing better requires a complete reevaluation in how we view and treat wildfire in our society; the organization strives for a “paradigm shift” in society’s relationship with wildfires, manifesting in new firefighting strategies that focus on using controlled burns and working with wildfire as a natural occurrence.
“Nothing influences fire like fire,” Ingalsbee says. “We’re pitching that new kind of strategy for active ecological fire management — incorporating this concept of fire mosaics and prescribed fires.”
PG&E blamed for massive Northern California wildfire
PG&E equipment has been blamed for several of California’s largest and deadliest wildfires in recent years.
Last September, PG&E was charged with involuntary manslaughter and other crimes because its equipment sparked the Zogg Fire in September 2020 that killed four people and burned about 200 homes west of Redding. Investigators blamed a pine tree that fell onto a PG&E distribution line. The company could be heavily fined if convicted.
In California, Tribal members and more protected from liability for cultural, controlled burns
Hankins said that, while cultural burning achieves the same goal as controlled burning, it also goes way beyond risk mangement and back to a core Indigenous principle: connection to the land.
“What it really comes down to, in my mind, is this idea of cultural competency,” he said. “ If you're a practitioner, like a weaver or a hunter, and you're using fire to help you with those particular things, that's very unique.You're setting fire and you're coming back into that spot continually to collect plant materials, or to hunt or to provide that habitat so that you can hunt in a different area and the animals have that place that you burned for their wellbeing.”
With prescribed burns, he said, you walk away.
This isn’t the California I married. The honeymoon’s over for its residents now that wildfires are almost constant. Has living in this natural wonderland lost its magic?
I asked Zeke Lunder, the best wildfire analyst that I knew, who should be worried. He rejected the whole premise of the question. Worried? Ha. We’ve passed that stage. We exist in a world of knowing that not everywhere nor everyone will be spared. “We need to accept that there’s going to be a fire,” he said. “It’s going to burn the whole town down. When that happens, let’s have identified a pot of money to buy these 5,000 lots that are in the worst places and we know are never going to be safe. So, let’s buy them and rebuild in a footprint that’s defensible.”
I asked if he knew of any towns doing that. He said no.
‘It felt like the apocalypse’: Colorado wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes.
Wildfires in the American West have been worsening — growing larger, spreading faster and reaching into mountainous elevations that were once too wet and cool to have supported fierce fires. What was once a seasonal phenomenon has become a year-round menace, with fires burning later into the fall and into the winter.
Recent research has suggested that heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires, as rainfall patterns have been disrupted, snow melts earlier and meadows and forests are scorched into kindling.
Rekindling with fire
Wearing deerskin leather gloves dampened with drops of diesel and gasoline, I tilted my drip-torch down toward the earth and ignited the dry blackberry bush below. With a flick of my wrist, I made a C-shaped movement and the fuel followed my gesture, lighting the vines and leaves quickly. Aside from the faint crackle of the fire, it was silent where I stood on a hilltop at Andrew Reasoner Wildlife Preserve near Eugene, Oregon. I paused to look at my surroundings. Hundred-year-old Oregon white oaks, draped in old man’s beard — a lichen called Usnea — reached toward the crisp blue sky. Yarrow leaves poked through the bunches of invasive crabgrass, and sword and bracken ferns dotted the landscape. The hairy yellow leaves of a hazel plant next to me indicated the changing seasons.
The U.S. government is wasting billions on wildfire policy that doesn’t work
More than 6.5 million acres in the U.S. have been affected by fire so far this year. The Dixie Fire, at nearly 1 million acres burned, was the second-largest fire in California’s history. Faced with such catastrophic wildfires, it seems only natural for fire services to respond with every resource available. But according to many of the country’s most respected fire experts, there is little evidence that most of these fire suppression campaigns are effective. These critics say that the current practice of trying to suppress every big wildfire is foolhardy, especially given the huge, climate-driven fires more and more common in the West. Some blame this policy on what they call the fire-industrial complex: a collection of the major governmental fire agencies and hundreds of private contractors, who are motivated by a mixture of institutional inertia, profiteering, and desperation.
Wildfires are erasing Western forests. Climate change is making it permanent.
Now that the winter has cooled the 2021 fire season, scientists are looking at the big burn scars across the West with the grim understanding that, in some places, the pine and Douglas fir forests will not return.
The devastation of the Gatlinburg wildfires offered hope, in a way, for scientists
National park personnel have been intentionally burning sections of the park since the 1990s, for conservation purposes and to thin out debris. But for a prescribed fire to work as intended it needs to mimic the effects of a natural fire.
"I thought it was interesting that the prescribed fires done in earlier years by the park staff had similar effects to wildfire," Franklin wrote in an email to Knox News. She explained that it was difficult to mimic the effects of more intense wildfire with safe, controlled fires set during the wet season. The 2016 fire revealed that it is possible to get some of the effects of a wildfire without a fire going wild.
Using the old burns to help lessen the new burns
When you hear that a fire burned 100,000 acres, the degree of burning can vary wildly inside that perimeter. In fact, some patches may not have burned at all.
This is the "mosaic" of fire, where burned land is not burned evenly. The firefighter group FUSEE--Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology--advocates making use of the fire mosaic to lessen the intensity of future fires in the same area.
We explore the concepts with FUSEE Executive Director Timothy Ingalsbee and Mike Beasley, retired Fire Management Officer for the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service.