Oregon senators call for federal firefighters to be exempt from hiring freeze
Oregon U.S. Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley have joined over a dozen other lawmakers, all Democrats, in calling on the administration to issue an exemption for thousands of seasonal firefighters so federal agencies can prepare for “what’s expected to be another devastating wildfire year.”
“The Administration must not sacrifice the safety of the American people for the benefit of implementing a political agenda,” their letter reads.
Loper Bright opens scrutiny of Forest Service's war on wildfires
Environmentalists say USFS abuses discretion to favor logging. Loper Bright offers new avenues to challenge project studies
The US Forest Service is fighting to keep in place a plan to raze the equivalent of 500 Central Parks in California’s forests as wildfires ravaging the southern part of the state put a spotlight on the agency’s management of these natural disasters.
Simple ways to protect OR homes from wildfires
Once a fire starts moving house to house, Ingalsbee acknowledged it is almost impossible to control. He added people living rurally as well as in urban areas need to think about safety because embers from wildfires can travel for miles and ignite homes easily.
"If anything is teaching us a lesson now, in this era of climate change, we're all living in the fire zone," Ingalsbee pointed out.
Federal firefighters fought L.A.’s blazes. Then came resignation offers.
Federal firefighting teams are already underpaid and suffering from attrition, firefighters and union leaders said. Shrinking those forces, they said, would hamper the country’s ability to respond to another life-threatening blaze as climate change causes fire seasons to lengthen.
Trump orders USDA to take down websites referencing climate crisis
On Thursday, the Trump administration ordered the US agriculture department to to take down its websites documenting or referencing the climate crisis.
By Friday, the landing pages on the United States Forest Service website for key resources, research and adaptation tools – including those that provide vital context and vulnerability assessments for wildfires – had gone dark, leaving behind an error message or just a single line: “You are not authorized to access this page.”
USDA ordered to scrub climate change from websites
The directive from USDA’s office of communications, whose authenticity was validated by three people, could affect information across dozens of programs including climate-smart agriculture initiatives, USDA climate hubs and Forest Service information regarding wildfires, the frequency and severity of which scientists have linked to hotter, drier conditions fueled by climate change.
They helped save L.A. Will California ever pay them fairly?
Thanks to a state constitution that allows forced labor as a form of criminal punishment, California’s incarcerated workers are regularly deployed to complete dangerous, necessary work, from manufacturing key medical supplies during the Covid-19 pandemic to ensuring that sanitation systems continue to function. But the state’s century-old incarcerated firefighters program, the largest in the country, stands out in its scope. According to some estimates, it accounts for nearly a third of California’s total firefighting force. In a state where destructive wildfires are common and growing more frequent, they are vital workers. They typically make less than a dollar an hour.
New evidence links heavy metal pollution with wildfire retardants
The research, conducted by a team from the University of Southern California and published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, found that between 2009 and 2021, wildfire retardant application in the U.S. released at least 380,000 kg (more than 400 tons) of at least four toxic metals into the environment. Toxic metals — like cadmium, chromium and vanadium — accumulate in ecosystems and organisms and are linked to organ damage, cancer and neurological disorders.
How wildlife survives after wildfires
Fire is a serious problem for humans, particularly when they build in fire-prone areas, and the losses of life, property and economies can be immense. The Los Angeles wildfires that occurred in January 2025 are predicted to have cost in excess of $135bn (£109.7bn).
However, it is not intrinsically a problem for wildlife. One study, which looked at the results of 31 research papers from 1984 to 2020, found that 65% of studies did not report any animal fatalities as a direct result of fires. Many species have a strategy for evading the fire itself, ranging from simply running away to hiding in burrows underground or sheltering in the treetops.
Global warming set the stage for Los Angeles fires
A new attribution analysis found that climate heating caused by burning fossil fuels significantly increased the likelihood of extreme fire conditions.
Rain aids L.A. firefighters, prompts fears of toxic runoff, while Trump plays politics
“Our current dominant model is to invest in reactive wildfire suppression, and the costs are just soaring,” Timothy Ingalsbee, co-founder and executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, told the Guardian.
Climate change is stoking monster blazes that no amount of dollars or human effort can put out, the former wildland firefighter warned.
Rather than reactively laying siege to fire whenever it appears on the land, Angelenos need to “re-engage” with an element that has always been a part of the ecosystem in which they live, Ingalsbee said.
This bill to reduce wildfires might actually make them worse
Some experts told me that the basic logic behind the bill could actually lead to more severe burns. Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, or FUSEE, told me that scaling up logging in the wilderness, where uncontrolled blazes can stomp through small towns on their way to the exurbs, would leave behind the most flammable materials. “Grasses, shrubs, leaves, small trees, old logging slash: These are the things that the timber industry will never ever remove,” he says. “They have no commodity value. When they wanna do logging, they remove the least flammable portion of a tree and dump all the needles and limbs on the ground where it’s basically tinder.” In fact, the best wildfire mitigators are often the trees themselves. Old-growth forests are able to survive and slow the spread of flames—and their numbers are dwindling due to logging.
We Australians have learned from our bushfires. Can Californians?
As Angelenos stand in the ashes of their own fires, the fear, rage and finger-pointing has kicked in. Australians have been there, too. Fire transforms what it touches, not just the air that it poisons and the land it blackens, but also people and institutions. Over time, we’ve learned that comanaging nature and urban sprawl involves trade-offs that are difficult but worth making.
Inclusion of Indigenous voices in revised Northwest Forest Plan focus of symposium
“One of the ways we are going to get through both the climate and the wildfire crisis is by bringing in the values and perspectives of indigenous people,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety Ethics and Ecology. “They survived here, thrived here for millenia.”
Symposium stresses need for Indigenous perspectives in Northwest Forest Plan amendment
One point of emphasis for one of the speakers was how going forward fire management needs to change its year-round approach, especially outside of wildfire season.
"As wildfires come through, then we pick up the broken pieces,” says Ryan Reed, an Indigenous fire practitioner and wildland firefighter. “There is a lot of power that needs to be distributed into the proactive aspect. It's wintertime now, where work and strategy-making has to be done now."
‘We surpassed human limits to stop this’: LA megafires show our approach to fire needs to change.
“Our current dominant model is to invest in reactive wildfire suppression, and the costs are just soaring,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, co-founder and executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (Fusee) and a former wildland firefighter.
“The problem is we surpassed our human limits to prevent or put out all wildfires, particularly during these extreme wind-driven weather events that have a link to climate change.
“We surpassed our human limits to stop this,” he said.
The Tongva’s land burned in Eaton fire. But leaders say traditional practices mitigated damage
“It’s important to listen to Indigenous voices and to understand that the knowledge that communities hold is thousands and thousands and thousands of years of knowledge,” she said. “I think that listening and allowing that knowledge to be practiced is really the key to the future of wildfire.”
Here’s what we know about L.A. fire department’s DEI efforts, which Republicans have attacked
Timothy Ingalsbee, a former wildland firefighter and executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a public education and advocacy group, said the wildfires are "a clear sign that we have surpassed the human capacity to stop these extreme, urban conflagrations during these extreme conditions."
It’s a "grand delusion" to suggest that "more white, male firefighters, bigger fire engines or bigger air tankers" would have stopped this disaster from unfolding, he said.
A new kind of urban firestorm
Rising temperatures and shifting seasons have increased the risk of wildfires that burn faster and are harder to contain. When those blazes jump into nearby communities, they are fueled not by forests but by buildings — moving from home to home, from garage to business to school, until they consume even areas far away from the wilderness.
“It’s a new beast,” said John Abatzoglou, a climatologist at the University of California at Merced. “Or rather, it’s a beast that existed and we thought we had controlled.”
Experts say one practice could have slowed down devastating LA fires
But one thing that could have limited the mind-boggling devastation, many experts say, is better preparation by communities, specifically the widely promoted, yet sometimes overlooked, practice of creating “defensible space” around buildings and “hardening” homes to fire.
In Los Angeles County, like in so many parts of California, entire neighborhoods exist in or next to fire-prone wildlands. With flames bound to reach these areas and no assurances they can be stopped, especially in an age of climate-charged mega-fires, many say focusing on community-level safety should be top priority.