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Humans have been affecting the way fire occurs on landscapes for millennia. In many areas, over many years, fires started by people may have played an important role in creating certain ecosystems that we now value for the unique plants, animals or natural communities they support.
Using Fire: Benefits and Consequences
People burn the lands around them to meet their basic needs and help with their livelihoods. Many important activities – hunting, stimulating the growth of plants used for food or other needs, clearing vegetation for agriculture, improving forage for domestic animals, controlling pests, easing travel and communicating over long distances – are facilitated by using fire.
In places where vegetation is naturally likely to burn (fire-dependent ecosystems), people tend to burn it for a variety of reasons, and they tend to burn it frequently. The natural characteristics of this type of vegetation allow it to withstand the frequent fires that people use.
People also use fire as a tool in places where vegetation does not naturally tolerate fire well (fire-sensitive ecosystems). Such uses almost always create changes that affect the very nature of the surrounding landscape. With regular burning, fire-sensitive plant species are supplanted by vegetation that is more naturally prone to fire. Eventually, the entire ecosystem can shift to be more prone to fire. In many places, expanding rural populations and the subsequent use of fire to convert natural lands are overwhelming the capacity of some ecosystems to survive.
Conservation Issues
An ecologically appropriate fire regime maintains the viability of the ecosystem regardless of whether the fires that maintain it or created it are of human or natural origin. As conservationists, the questions we must ask are: “What ecosystem type or vegetation structure do we want to conserve?” and “Are the fires that are occurring in that ecosystem helping to maintain it or are they causing the ecosystem to change?”
An altered or undesirable fire regime is one that has been modified by human activities, such as fire suppression and prevention, excessive or inappropriate burning or landscape fragmentation, to the point where the fire is harming the ecosystem we are trying to conserve.
Finding Sustainable Solutions
Managing fires and creating ecologically appropriate fire regimes requires understanding:
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How and why different cultural groups view, use and exclude fire in their environment;
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How economic incentives affect decisions about land use and subsequently fire use; and
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How government policies affect and become ingrained in human attitudes about fire that may either help or hinder the implementation of ecologically-friendly fire management efforts.
To develop solutions, we must first understand why people burn the way they do. People burn in different ways depending on their environment, and often in ways contrary to what fire managers might do. For example, farmers may burn with the wind or upslope, creating fires that are more likely to escape control. But they may be burning this way because that is the only way to achieve the results they need. In this situation, it does little good to try to convince the farmers to burn at night or with fires backing into the wind or downslope. Other options such as creating fire breaks between agricultural fields and adjacent forests would probably be more effective in this case.
By understanding why people burn the way they do, we can develop effective fire management and education programs, and garner support among local communities for ecologically-friendly fire use.
Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photo © Kevin Sink (rancher and fire); Photo © Mark Godfrey (fire specialists, Mexico).
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