Fire and the Emergent Worship of Artificial Intelligence.
Resisting the Erasure of Natural Fire: A Call for Ecological Fire Leadership in the Age of AI
As someone who has spent a career working with fire — and not just fighting it, but understanding and applying it — I see the current trajectory of fire management in the United States with deep concern. We are entering an era where AI-optimized strategies are being presented as panaceas. Technologies and the reorganization of Federal wildland fire agencies proposed by the Trump Administration promise faster detection, surgical exclusion, and a future free from “uncontrolled” fire. But in doing so, they are erasing something far older, wiser, and more vital than any algorithm: fire as a natural process.
For decades, those of us working in “fire use” — a term once officially recognized, now quietly buried — have been restoring relationships between people, landscapes, and seasonal cycles. Fire is not just a threat. It is a tool, a teacher, and in many ecosystems, a necessary breath of renewal. To manage fire ecologically is to respect its role in biodiversity, soil health, and climate adaptation. It is to work with fire, not simply against it.
The AI-optimized paradigm being championed today reduces fire to a problem to be solved. It prizes speed, suppression, and the illusion of total control. What gets lost in this model is the nuance — the deep knowledge of weather, fuels, topography, and tradition — and the long-standing wisdom of Indigenous and local fire practitioners. These systems promise efficiency but risk severing our last tenuous ties to land-based knowledge.
I believe this is more than a policy debate. It is a spiritual conflict about the role of humanity in nature. One side envisions a world sanitized of risk and irregularity — a world governed by remote sensing, machine learning, and automated suppression. The other side honors fire as a regenerative life force. As an ecological fire practitioner and educator, I know which side I stand on.
This isn’t a call to abandon technology, but to subordinate it to values rooted in place, reciprocity, and ecological understanding. The danger isn’t AI itself — it’s using AI to reinforce outdated suppression mindsets under the guise of progress. Real resilience will not come from AI alone, but from relationships: between people and ecosystems, between past practices and future innovations. Fire ties people across generations to the land, either through cultural burning on the same site or even the way stories of fire in the same watershed, often in the same footprint, tie firefighters of different generations together. Firefighting and cultural burning are both often communicated across generations through oral history and storytelling. Like any good fishing yarn, fire folks love to tell stories about the one that got away.
As we move into a hotter, more fire-prone world, the stakes are rising. If we let algorithms replace land stewards, we will lose more than just forests — we will lose our role in a living Earth.
FUSEE stands ready to lead a movement grounded in ecological fire — fire with purpose, fire with place, fire with people. This is our chance not to dominate nature with machines, but to remember who we are in the fire’s light.
Mike Beasley
June 28, 2025
6/29: Update on the New Executive Order Directing Wildland Fire Agency Consolidation
In the past few days President Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Empowering Commonsense Wildfire Prevention and Response.” On its surface, the Order calls for increased coordination, technology adoption, and regulatory streamlining in wildfire response. But beneath the bureaucratic language lies a stark shift: a national reversion to fire exclusion—only this time, optimized by artificial intelligence.
The Order demands the consolidation of all federal wildland fire programs within 90 days, a timeline that overlaps with the peak of the 2025 fire season and risks massive disruption. More significantly, it directs agencies to develop a wildfire technology roadmap focused on AI modeling, automated detection, weather forecasting, and performance metrics aimed at faster, more surgical suppression.
Nowhere in the EO is there mention of ecological fire management or cultural fire. Instead, “performance” is defined by speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness—metrics that align squarely with a suppression-first approach. The document’s references to "risk-informed wildfire policies" and "year-round response readiness" may sound prudent, but they echo the old paradigm of total suppression dressed in the robes of 21st-century tech. The roadmap is to be developed by federal agencies in consultation with the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), yet most community, Tribal, and ecological fire leaders are excluded from meaningful input.
Even more troubling is the elimination of the State Fire Capacity Grants ($76M) and Volunteer Fire Capacity Grants ($21M) through the USDA budget, despite the EO’s call to “expand partnerships” with state, Tribal, and local governments. These grants have long been lifelines for rural and Tribal firefighting capacity. Removing them while investing in AI tools and DoD satellite data sends a clear message: centralized, automated suppression is the priority—not local capacity, not Indigenous knowledge, not ecological stewardship.
Fire isn’t just a hazard. It’s a keystone ecological process. It’s a mode of land care. It’s a cultural inheritance passed down through generations by firelighters, firefighters, and Indigenous knowledge holders alike. Suppressing all fire, especially under the guise of “smart” technology, will leave our landscapes more volatile and our communities more vulnerable.
This isn’t a call to reject technology. It’s a plea to ground technology in ecological values, not erase them. We must resist attempts to reframe fire as a purely technical problem and instead demand a fire culture rooted in place-based knowledge, community participation, and reciprocity with the land.
If we allow the future of fire to be dictated by algorithms, we will lose not only forests—but our relationship to place.
FUSEE and our allies offer a different vision: fire with people, fire with purpose, fire in balance with nature. This is the leadership our fire-adapted future requires.