It’s happened again. A big forest fire is spreading in the border country of California and Oregon, nestling in among the scars of big fires of years past like the Carr and the Camp Fire. The Siskiyou country tends to burn often, and the inevitable fires ignite passions among people of the area, all with their own ideas on why the smoke clouds keep appearing and whose fault it might be. Across the West big fires are common now, traumatizing locally and boosting statistics nationally.
The political arguments about ever increasing scale and intensity of wildfires in the West are a big distraction to solving problems we collectively face. Having culture wars mixed in with public land policies makes matters even worse. As the right pushes “solutions” to ever bigger fires plaguing the West, public land agencies are caught between historical realities and an impatient and fatigued public and the looming uncertainty of climate change. Where do we go from here? We start by understanding how we got to the point of having ever larger fires throughout the West.
The right in the US with its dislike of government has long opposed public ownership of half a billion acres of land in the US. They argue private ownership or state ownership would allow for commercial development which would lead to more logging and more livestock grazing which they claim would calm down or eliminate wildfires in the West. At the same time, some of their leaders have long denied that global warming exists. Some believe that the people talking about science and global warming are cultural enemies of the conservative movement which is engrained in the rural West.
On the left, some people are saying we should leave the public lands entirely alone. Leave them “natural” they say. (What is “natural” in 2022?) These people also have an anti-government bent but for entirely different reasons than the right does. They feel betrayed by federal agencies who have allowed the exploitation of the natural world and the pollution of the atmosphere. They argue that thinning forests is “logging” and that the land will manage itself if left alone. They are right, it will manage itself, but will the outcome benefit wildlife or the people living near it?
Here in New Mexico, we’ve learned about leaving a fire suppressed, overgrazed, logged landscape alone. We have high severity burn scars covering hundreds of thousands of acres to show what leaving it alone does. Yet our landscape used to burn over hundreds of thousands of acres before 1850 with fires that would nurture big old trees and a diversity of wildlife. Scientists have found evidence of fires that were 400,000 acres large before 1850, fires that nurtured old growth and rich grasslands.
Both extremes offer no solution to the crisis of increasing size and severity of Western fires. If we are going to try to get a grip on the firestorms in the West, we must be honest about why the land is out of balance, why the fires of the not-too-distant past that were beneficial to the land have been replaced by fires that change forests into brush fields or worse.
We are the victims of our own history. When the US Forest Service was born around the turn of the 20th century, they brought ideas from wetter country about fire and logging to the dry West. The early Forest Service set out to put out fires as fast as possible. It didn’t occur to them that fire was a natural and necessary part of Western ecosystems that had been burning here for millions of years. With typical human arrogance they set out to correct the ways of nature and in the process began to throw forests completely out of balance.
In the drier parts of the country the livestock industry was allowed to overgraze our public forests and ruin beds of grass that had long carried low intensity fire through the forests. Once the grass was ruined by livestock, millions of small trees sprouted in its absence and thickets of trees filled in below larger trees or in places where logging had removed larger trees. These thickets carry hot fire into treetops, killing forests.
Keep in mind that the US Forest Service manages 245 million acres of land and the National Park Service another 80 million acres. These are vast areas of land. Managing these lands deliberately is a huge and expensive job.
Had these agencies allowed fire to continue in its natural role we would not be having the firestorms of today. Yet the colonizers of the West were fearful of fire, predators, and of Native people. The agencies institutionalized fears that newcomers had of a big wild land. The government sought to protect people from the wilderness by killing bears and wolves, and putting out fires.
In wetter parts of the country the Forest Service allowed widespread logging, often clearcut logging where vast areas of forest were destroyed. Young trees planted into these openings have proven to be exceptionally flammable. Today fires such as the McKinney Fire in northern California are feeding on areas that have been logged in the past in many areas. Climate change is warming and drying Northwestern forests, making forests that used to have few fires into places of frequent high severity fire. The public is understandably frustrated and some are seeking someone to blame.
Climate change, on top of the abuse of forests through fire suppression, grazing and intensive logging have created the fire storms of today. Hotter summers, drier winters, drier soils, and insect outbreaks nurtured by climate change are making fire management much more difficult. In many cases high severity fires can only be controlled by weather changes. For example, the Hermit Peak Fire in New Mexico was extinguished by rain after burning 341,000 acres and hundreds of homes over almost two and a half months.
The West is a vast place. We have national forests that are hundreds of millions of acres. Bureau of Land Management lands include more than 300 million acres of arid, usually overgrazed lands. These lands are infested with oil wells, cattle and exotic, highly flammable grasses that spread fire rapidly and kill native plants.
All our federal agencies have stopped the natural fire cycle on their lands, causing buildups of fuels that are now burning in the hotter and drier conditions of global warming. Not until the late 1970s did the National Park Service wake up to this fact and the US Forest Service didn’t realize its historic error until the 1990s. Prescribed burning helps correct this monumental mistake but there has been too little, too late.
And then we have the Forest Service badly botching the Las Dispensas prescribed fire which grew into the Hermit Peak Fire in New Mexico in summer 2022. The burn crew made multiple mistakes and violated federal policy on prescribed fire on various fronts. The result was hundreds of burned homes, a burned wilderness area, and a local public incredibly angry at the obvious stupidity of the burn crew and their supervisors. This error will set back efforts to get good fire on the ground for a long time to come. It will have negative repercussions for prescribed fire nationally.
Once everyone calms down from this calamity, we need to start doing prescribed fire on a far larger scale. But it must be done professionally as the windows of opportunity that the warming climate will provide will be fewer and farther between. The cost of mistakes in dry, overstocked forests with insect infested trees will be high. Prescribed fire is an art, and the federal agencies will need to find hundreds of young artists to take this craft into the 21st century on an unprecedented scale.
Meanwhile we need to come so some consensus about thinning some of our forests to reduce fuels and correct the effects of fire suppression. Today, a great deal of disagreement centers on the idea of thinning.
Thinning is not logging. Thinning means removing small diameter trees from the understory below larger trees to prevent fire from climbing small trees into the overstory. In dry forests like those of the Rockies, thinning means cutting trees less than 10 inches DBH. In the Pacific Northwest where trees grow faster, thinning is a more difficult problem.
Logging is commercial removal of trees for sawmills. Usually with thinning operations, the small trees are chipped or piled for winter burning. This material has little commercial value and it exists in the forest because regular natural fire has not killed the trees before they became ladder fuels.
The National Park Service, for example, often thins forests because prescribed fire will not kill larger diameter understory trees without burning with such heat that the fire could become a hazard for escape. Killing dense understory trees with fire also risks killing the overstory as well. Usually, NPS thinning is aimed at creating old growth forest conditions for the future.
Some people say that thinning is a bad idea because it increases wind through forests which can carry fire. Others say that thinning is logging (see above). The consensus among fire scientists and most agency managers is that thinning understory trees left from fire suppressions is the right thing to do to restore forests and reduce the likelihood of high severity fire. Prescribed burning is far less expensive than thinning.
In the last 30 years we’ve seen increasingly intense fires killing even forests that have been thinned or subjected to prescribed fire. At the same time, we’ve seen other forests that have been treated surviving fires that killed untreated stands. It all depends on the conditions and weather when fire reaches a forest. Under hot, dry, windy conditions all forests are in danger of being killed by high severity fire regardless of past treatments.
This is the state of the science among responsible agency managers and fire scientists. Science does not support the idea we should be hands-off in land management. Nor does it support the idea that intensive grazing or logging will reduce the risk of large high severity fires. Quite the opposite in fact.
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