New Mexico and southern Colorado have beautiful wilderness areas, designated, and protected under the federal Wilderness Act of 1964. We have the Pecos, the Weminuchi, the San Pedro Parks, the South San Juan and others. These are lands where mechanical travel is not allowed, and nature is meant to take its course “untrammeled by man.”
The Hermit Peak Fire in 2022 burned a substantial amount of the Pecos Wilderness at high severity. Scientific research shows that super-hot fires that kill large areas of high-altitude forest were unusual before 1990. Why? We’ve changed forests with fire suppression, livestock grazing, and by warming the climate with our fossil fuel air pollution.
Is there such a thing as “wilderness” in a world where people have changed every inch of the earth by altering the climate? Maybe not, but we need to leave these patches as refugia for species, for quiet, for nature to evolve and change as it will.
The livestock industry uses wilderness areas to make money and their cattle significantly alter vegetation and streams in wilderness areas. Why are there cows in wilderness? Because the powerful livestock industry would have blocked the Wilderness Act from passage in 1964 had they been barred.
Cows are native to Southeast Asia and no native animal in the West affects the land the way cattle do. Is a landscape where exotic animals eat off much of the vegetation and damage the streams a true wilderness area? Cows ruin grass which naturally carries fire across the landscape. Without the grass, healthy cleansing fires don’t work well and fuels build up for big hot fires that at the wrong times – during dry, windy times.
How should humans manage fire in designated wilderness areas? Fire is a natural ecological element that has been burning these landscapes since long before the first human being set foot in this region, when these lands were truly wilderness.
Should the Forest Service fight future fires that have started by lightning in wilderness areas? They often fight such fires if they could leave the wilderness and burn structures nearby. Or they fight these fires if dry or windy conditions could create a large wildfire.
Should the Forest Service start prescribed fires in wilderness to try to correct the abuses of fire suppression and livestock grazing? Prescribed fire attempts to imitate natural fires and restore the many positive impacts of low severity fire to wild lands. Is having a fire crew lighting a prescribed fire inside a wilderness area a violation of the spirit of the Wilderness Act. Is their effort to restore a natural process legitimate? Maybe we violate the spirit of the act when we do not restore fire.
To their credit, the US Forest Service was careful how they suppressed the Hermit Peak Fire inside the Pecos Wilderness last summer. They did not drive bulldozers into the wilderness as the agency has in California and Oregon wilderness fires. Instead, they had crews build hand-tool lines to try to stop the fire from advancing westward. They used aircraft to drop water and retardant. They treated the land with a light touch. In the future, the vegetation will recover to whatever new ecology evolves. But at least there won’t be long lasting remnants of heavy machinery in this beautiful and wild land.
Prescribed fire can be introduced without mechanical transportation. Firefighters on-foot can bring fire back to a landscape. Low-severity fire can correct many of the negative changes that fire suppression and grazing have caused, like thickets of trees, weeds, and built-up vegetation and debris like pine needs, dead sticks, logs and weeds.
Wilderness areas may be unlikely to be high on the list of places agencies plan to conduct prescribed fires. Places with logging and roads are far more likely to source a high severity fire so these areas get treated first. The lack of roads makes managing a prescribed fire more difficult than on roaded lands.
In the Gila Wilderness, the Forest Service managers allow lighting fires to burn is a normal part of wilderness management. Backpackers often find large areas of the wilderness burning with very low fire. It is wild and beautiful to meet native fire this way.
I hope we can make prescribed fire a normal part of wilderness management in the Colorado/New Mexico country. Beetle killed trees cloak the landscape in the Weminuchi Wilderness. Let these areas burn. In New Mexico fire can stimulate grasslands and open forests. Maybe it can slow insect outbreaks. Fire is normal and natural. Let’s bring it back.
