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Acacia trees
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This stubborn species of acacia tree chokes out natural grasslands and attracts treeborne ticks that carry livestock diseases.

Go Deeper

Press Release
Iowan Scott Moats Selected to Lend Fire Expertise in Ethiopian Grasslands

Fire, Ecosystems and People
Read our new report on fire’s role in conservation — and find out how the Conservancy uses prescribed burns to prevent damaging wildfires.

Fire 101
A Conversation with Ayn Shlisky, director of The Nature Conservancy’s Global Fire Initiative

Fire training
U.S. fire experts (Scott Moats at left) teach Ethiopian pastoralists to safely manage prescribed burns, which reinvigorate grasslands and control thorny acacia trees.

The United States is not the only country where wildfires have been aggressively suppressed in the past century—often with destructive and expensive results. Fires have been outlawed around the world, even in countries where communities had relied on fire as a management tool for centuries.

In Ethiopia, fire had been a key tool for pastoralists until burning was outlawed in the 1970s. However, the Ethiopian government has begun to rethink its ban on fire.

“Fire is a positive, even essential thing for many of our natural systems,” says Scott Moats, a Nature Conservancy fire expert who was invited to Ethiopia earlier this year to help educate Ethiopian livestock herders in a skill their forefathers knew well: how to burn rangeland to improve the grazing for cattle, goats, sheep and camels in a nation often ravaged by famine.

Moats’ day job includes managing planned fires at the Conservancy’s Broken Kettle Grasslands Preserve in Iowa, where burning helps combat encroaching trees and encourage native grass growth. Fire, Moats says, can play a similar role in Ethiopia, where a stubborn species of acacia tree chokes out natural grasslands and attracts tree-borne ticks that carry livestock diseases.

This past March, when Moats arrived in the southern Ethiopian town of Negele, he began by meeting with local pastoralists—under an acacia tree, no less. The locals had already agreed on the burn area, about 2,500 acres near a tiny mud-hut village. The first burn didn’t go quite as planned, with so many locals trying to join in that they accidentally put out the fire. Twice.

The burn ultimately went well, says Moats, and over the next several days he taught pastoralists from around the area how to plan, ignite and safely manage fires. Fire management is a complex discipline that can take many years to master, Moats says, but some of his students quickly learned the skills needed to conduct burns themselves.

Moats attended a feast of roasted goat before he left Negele, and he has high hopes of returning. “In Iowa,” he says wistfully, “you don’t see camels on a regular basis.”

—Brandt Goldstein

Nature picture credits (top to bottom, left to right): Photos © Scott Moats/TNC (Meeting); © Scott Moats/TNC (Acacia trees); © Tim Sexton/USFS (Fire training)