Smoke Signals
The Need for Public Tolerance and Regulatory Relief for Wildland Smoke Emissions
Land managers and residents of the western United States face a dilemma. Large areas of public wildlands, with their scenic landscapes and outdoor recreation opportunities attract millions of people to the West. But these federally-managed wildlands are prone to burn. When they do, air quality standards may be exceeded and, even if not, persons who find the smoke a nuisance may put pressure on air quality regulators to eliminate it. Yet these lands require occasional fire for their ecosystems’ health. Indeed, fire has played a vital role in maintaining many of the scenic and recreational resources that Americans enjoy.
Without human interference, most wildland areas would experience much higher levels of fire than they do today. The levels of smoke emitted by today’s fires, though high during brief isolated events, are overall unnaturally low compared with pre-1900 levels. This has resulted from well-intentioned but misguided fire suppression policies that have degraded public lands. Recent decades’ expensive and increasingly counterproductive fire suppression efforts have only delayed the occurrence of wildfires, not eliminated them.
Today’s federal land managers understand the need to allow or facilitate burning on millions of acres of wildlands, both to restore their ecological health and to help protect nearby human communities from future high-intensity wildfires. Further, many climate change models indicate that most of the West will face larger and more frequent fires over the next few decades, making controlled burning today all the more necessary. But land managers face significant obstacles, chief among which are current air quality regulations stemming from the federal Clean Air Act.
Federal and state air quality regulators routinely seek to reduce smoke from wildland fires. This occurs primarily because the air is already polluted by human-caused urban, industrial, and agricultural sources. Applying strict air quality regulations to smoke from wildland fires, however, poses a direct impediment to the good management of public lands. In addition, the more fires are suppressed now, the more unruly future fires will be, potentially producing far more smoke if they burn during extreme conditions.
Fire managers can and will continue to manage wildland fires to reduce smoke emissions. But wildland fires are natural events, beneficial to the environment, and as such must be exempted from Clean Air Act regulation.
This whitepaper discusses:
Why forest and rangeland fires and the smoke they emit are inevitable, and how the historic deficit of fire on public land, in addition to climate change, will lead to more fire in the coming decades;
How fire management has changed as scientists have come to understand the vital, essential role of fire in restoring and maintaining the ecological health of wildlands;
How Clean Air Act regulation of wildland fire smoke is forcing land managers to institute regressive, expensive, and counterproductive fire suppression policies that go against the best science and merely defer smoke emissions into the future; and
How land managers can apply fire management strategies and techniques to lessen smoke emissions while allowing more fires to burn.