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Go DeeperThe Nature Conservancy's Global Fire Initiative It is no small irony that the wildfire suppression efforts of the past century have greatly increased the risk of out-of-control wildfires today.
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Smoldering Crisis
Welcome to a typical day at the National Interagency Prescribed Fire Training Center, a 10-year-old institution that keeps offices in Tallahassee but does its real teaching in the forests, swamps and savannas of Florida and four other Southeastern states.
The fire school, as some call the training center, attracts fire crews and land managers from around the nation and the world and shows them the right way to play with matches. Since it first opened its doors, the training center has accommodated more than 1,200 students from federal and state agencies, tribal governments and nonprofit groups like The Nature Conservancy.
All of these organizations understand the critical role fire plays in natural systems. Many grasslands and forests throughout the United States have evolved together with fire, and they rely on it, to one degree or another, just like they rely on rain or sunshine.
Think of fire as a gardener: pruning and thinning choked forests, clearing bushes so prairie grasses can thrive, restoring nutrients to the soil, clearing habitat for fire-adapted species like the red-cockaded woodpecker or quaking aspen.
Despite the benefits, wildfire is scary — it’s a serious threat to homes, businesses, health and life.
Our national distrust of wildfires was cemented into policy around 1910, after several “megafires” charred millions of acres and took dozens of lives. That’s when American government, whether the U.S. Forest Service or local volunteer fire departments, adopted the practice of quickly snuffing out every fire. In California, for example, smoke jumpers and ground-based initial attack teams put out 99 percent of wildfires between 1961 and 1997, according to a report by the Forest Service and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
But putting out all those fires has created a new set of problems. Removing fire has allowed fuels to accumulate to treacherous levels, leaving many forests and grasslands ecologically off kilter — seriously overgrown and ready to burn more intensely than they might have in the past.
Now, when a fire gets away, the dangers multiply. In habitat where fire once crept along the ground, flames are increasingly likely to surge and race through the treetops. Even the most fire-adapted ecosystems are now seeing more severe fires as a result.
In Arizona, for example, the number of trees per acre has increased eightfold since 1883, largely because of fire suppression. Under natural fuel conditions, the state’s ponderosa pine forests will burn lightly every two to 12 years. Fire thins out the young trees while sparing the big ones. But wildfire suppression has created a logjam of fuels just waiting to burn. And when they do burn, it is much more likely that everything will burn — young and old trees alike — eliminating wildlife habitat, increasing erosion and threatening people and communities.
It is no small irony that the wildfire-suppression efforts of the past century have greatly increased the risk of out-of-control wildfires today. “For more than nine decades, the central goal of American wildfire policy was to protect natural resources and human communities from damages caused by wildfires,” wrote George Busenberg, a professor of public policy at the University of Colorado, Denver, in a 2004 study. “Yet, the consequences of this wildfire policy greatly increased the risk of wildfire damages in America.” And to complicate the situation, scientists are now warning that the threat is being compounded by climate change.
Longer and warmer summers throughout the West — average temperatures have increased more than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit over levels in the 1970s — are contributing to longer and more intense wildfire seasons, according to a study published in the journal Science by several researchers, including Anthony Westerling, a professor of environmental engineering at the University of California, Merced.
This warmer weather is causing earlier snowmelts, and that has meant Western forests dry out earlier in the summer and stay vulnerable to fire for longer periods. The study concludes that the fire season in the West is now 78 days longer than it was two decades ago, and the duration of the average burn has increased from eight days to 37 days.
The only way out of this wildfire predicament is to stop piling on the tinder, brush and logs and to start thinning out the fuel loads. But most of our federal fire budget is locked into an annual all-out battle against uncontrolled burning. In three of the past five years, the federal government alone spent more than $1 billion fighting wildfires. The funds come from agency appropriations at the expense of other programs such as trail maintenance, habitat improvements and land acquisition.
The folks at the fire school know a national policy to suppress nearly all fires can’t be sustained indefinitely. Even the dollars for firefighting don’t stretch like they once did. But effective controlled burns can help those dollars stretch further.
As of 2007, there were 450 to 460 trained 20-person firefighting crews in the nation, according to Wally Bennett, the veteran commander of an elite Type I firefighting team based in Montana. A few years earlier, there were 750 crews.
Plus, says Bennett, the number of aerial tankers ready and available to dump retardant on flames has fallen by half, from 32 to 16. “We’ve got a lot less of the toys than we need to do the job we’re doing out there,” he says.
And that means fire bosses will need to decide where they can safely put their increasingly scarce people and resources. For many years, when firefighters saw huge flames advancing in the distance, they would perform a “triage” on isolated homes and ranches, deciding which could be saved and which couldn’t.
With the current situation — bigger fires and fewer resources — the decisions are going to get tougher, Bennett fears. “We may have to be making decisions about which community to protect,” he says. “It’s a reality.”.
Nature picture credits: Photos © Michael Christopher Brown
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