The Nature of Jeff Hardesty

By Dan Ferber

Jeff Hardesty © Cade Martin

The leader of The Nature Conservancy’s Global Fire Initiative grew up hearing the stories of men in his family who died fighting western wildfires. Now, Hardesty seeks to return fire to its rightful ecological role, by stopping some blazes and starting others.

Home on the Ranges / My family roots are in Oregon and Idaho, and my relatives included farmers, loggers and ranchers who also enjoyed camping, hunting, fly-fishing, running rivers and climbing mountains. I grew up doing that, and as a young man it became a natural thing for me to turn that love of the outdoors into being a professional mountain guide and a ski mountaineering instructor.

I also worked a stint as a climbing ranger in North Cascades National Park, responsible for technical search and rescue in the most rugged backcountry in the lower 48 states. I was fortunate to spend a lot of time in some of the most beautiful and rugged wilderness in Alaska and the American West and I wanted to give something back. I decided to become a biologist and focus on conservation. My very first job was working for the state of Washington on a controversial and contentious project in collaboration with several Tribes on the Olympic Peninsula managing wild steelhead and salmon runs.

Conservation Writ Large / My interest has always been large-scale conservation. How do you restore ecosystem structure, function and composition, not on the scale of acres but on the scale of millions of acres? One of the ways is to focus on ecological processes that cut across boundaries, such as fire.

Reconsidering Smokey Bear / In 1910, following huge wildfires that burned millions of acres, killed dozens of people and leveled several towns, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service put the federal government on what some argue was a misguided path toward a blanket policy of suppressing all fires.

In the United States, the vast majority of our ecosystems depend on or are influenced by fire in some way—ponderosa pine forests in the West, tallgrass prairies in the Midwest, longleaf pine forests in the Southeast and so on. When fire is removed from these systems in the near-term, you see a shift in the way ecosystems are structured, often from fire-dependent species to species that are fire-sensitive. A grassland might become a woody shrubland or a forest might shift from being pine and oak dominated to maple. And if fire is removed long enough, you alter the way fire behaves when it reoccurs—which it always will eventually-sending ecosystems on a trajectory that may be irreversible.

It’s fascinating to look at fire-dependent ecosystems that straddle the Mexico and United States border. On the Mexico side, people have used fire to manage forests and grasslands largely in ways that are ecologically beneficial. In the United States, we have been pretty successful at suppressing fire, resulting in major fuel accumulations and destructive wildfires rarely seen across the border. So the same ecosystems that are healthy in Mexico are oftentimes not so in the United States.

In My Backyard / My wife and I burn our backyard in Florida occasionally, with help from others trained to conduct prescribed fires. We own eight acres of live oak and wet prairies and it needs fire to maintain its openness. Burning that prairie is also one of the ways we defend against the inevitable wildfires that are so common where we live (we’ve had two in the neighborhood in the last 10 years). Compared to our neighbors, we think we have a greater diversity of plants and more birds, and more diversity of insects, snakes and small mammals.

Bad Burns / Altered fire regimes—too much, too little or the wrong kind of fire—are a major threat to native plants and animals and ecosystems around the world. Scientists estimate that more than 80 percent of globally significant conservation ecoregions are currently undergoing changes in fire regimes. Over the past two decades, huge fires in Central America, Southeast Asia and Africa literally destroyed—and I don’t often use the term “destroy” with fire—millions of acres of tropical forests.

Recent work in the Amazon Basin has shown that even fairly low-intensity fires, such as agricultural and logging fires, burn across the floor of fire-sensitive tropical rain forest during times of drought. A few canopy trees die. That opens up the forest floor to sunlight and creates more burnable fuels. Next time, a fire burns hotter and deeper in the forest, kills even more trees, opens more of the canopy. These fires set the stage for catastrophic outbreaks later, especially during times of El Niño droughts.

Learn to Burn / The Conservancy first developed the capacity to use fire as an ecological management tool on our own preserves, and later working with partners on their lands. We’re the only international conservation organization with significant fire management experience. That experience gives us credibility that most other organizations don’t have.

In the United States, we’ve partnered with the five big federal land management agencies to sponsor regional networks of on-the-ground practitioners and their community and agency partners to share new technology and lessons learned. They develop conservation plans that account for the dynamics of fire in landscapes and include specific actions that will take restoration to a meaningful scale.

In the U.S. Fire Learning Network we now have more than 50 projects that encompass more than 60 million acres. And the number of projects and acres is growing monthly. The idea is to accelerate action across all those places by sharing ideas and resources and it appears to be working.

Similarly, our Latin America and Caribbean Fire Learning Network is bringing together scientists, nongovernmental organizations, federal agencies and decision-makers from 10 countries and dozens of key protected areas to craft policies and strategies that address fire issues, both in fire-dependent ecosystems like tropical grasslands and savannas, and in fire-sensitive ecosystems such as tropical broadleaf forests.

A Global Challenge / One of the interesting things about fire is that it doesn’t pay attention to political boundaries. It forces you to think holistically about landscapes and about the people and institutions that manage them or who live there. For me, it provides a really interesting window on the world.

So, for example, at a recent experts workshop that we convened as part of our Global Fire Partnership with WWF and IUCN, the problems that we were grappling with ranged from unsustainable fires in Africa related to the fact that so many people with experience managing the land have died of AIDS, to problems in Russia, where we’re seeing an increasing number of fires stemming from the movement of people back to rural areas and illegal logging following the collapse of the Soviet Union’s state sponsored economy.

Revived by Fire / I’m very proud of a restoration project I started in 1992 in collaboration with the Department of Defense at Eglin Air Force Base and many other partners in Florida. Now you can drive around on that 500,000-acre base and see a marked difference in the forest’s health, thanks to science-based adaptive management, ecological burning and targeted thinning of pines and oaks. As far as the eye can see are rolling hills of longleaf pine, grasses, wildflowers, birds and rebounding populations of federally listed plants and animals. Our collaborative work there led to creation of the Gulf Coastal Plain Ecosystem Partnership, an agreement among adjacent landowners to collaboratively manage a million acres of the largest contiguous example of the once-vast southern longleaf pine forest. Professionally, it’s one of the most gratifying experiences I’ve ever had.

Search for Solutions / Experts believe that in many parts of the world, fires are burning unlike they’ve ever burned before. We need to have a much better understanding of why that’s happening, to be able to predict where destructive fires are likely to occur—or where fires should play a role and aren’t—and then to develop strategies that are affordable and ecologically appropriate to get in front of the problem. Fire almost never acts alone, but rather is influenced by other land uses such as agriculture, forestry and patterns of land development—and of course, climate change.

It’s a race against time. Losing is not an option.