Wildfire is interesting, and images are compelling – brave men and women fighting an implacable foe, exciting machines and aircraft deployed in battle, human anguish, then resilience and rebuilding. What a narrative!
Most of what we “know” is wrong Yet, almost everything the media reports on wildfires and most of what people understand about them is wrong and harmful, starting with the basic battle metaphor and language of war. In fairness, by the time wildfires reach fire-fighting stage, we are at war and losing a battle means loss of life and property.
But fire is not an enemy. Fire is natural. Massive destruction comes from human choices, although not conscious human design; nobody is to blame. A system emerges when people make logical and good individual decisions that taken together and over time produce bad outcomes. We do not address emergent problems well. We prefer a culprit or policy to blame. We hate it that nothing we can demand politicians do immediately will immediately solve the problem. Politicians dislike solutions that produce good only after the next elections. It is encouraging, however, that we can do things today that – over time – will produce a resilient system and improve lives.
Don’t mimic nature; use its principles We cannot mimic nature. Humans are here to stay. We can try to understand and use natural principles to inform human-natural interaction. I like to start by looking at success rather than scrutinizing failure. Some places manage fire well. We do a decent job in Virginia, but the real superstar is Florida. Fires are not prevented. That is impossible. But they are managed, and prescribed fires have kept forests healthy and robust for generations.
Fuel burns, but we have choices about where, when and how How about places with less rain and tougher topography? For hundreds of years, the Ancestral Pueblo lived successfully in mountainous, arid and fire-prone forests of the Southwest. We cannot copy their lifestyles, but what were principles that kept them safe? Put simply, they removed combustible materials by frequent surface fires, that burned brush but left large trees, and by using firewood. This latter factor is so obvious that it is easy not to see it.
Anybody who has fed a campfire or wood stove knows that they consume prodigious amounts of wood. You need a big stack of wood to keep a small cabin warm on a cold night and a surprisingly big fire just to make a pot of coffee. Consider all this heat and that all this fuel has been removed from the forest. What burns in a fireplace, stove or campfire can’t burn in a forest fire.
The principle is that fuel burns, but we have choices about where, when and how. Responsible harvests to remove biomass are one key to forest health, and good fires that burn on the surface but not in the tree-tops are another. They will not stop all bad fires but will produce a system we can live with – over time.
Let’s just get the California politics out of current partisan bickering. Let me be plain about this. If you are blaming Trump or blaming Jerry Brown or thinking of this in any current political way, you are ignorant. Cut it out. This issue is too important and too long lasting for dummies to get upset about and upset others with partisan politics. Sorry to be so blunt, well not sorry.
I was looking for some perspective, so I went to the work of one of America’s leading authorities on wildfire. I read some of his books before, but this time I picked up the one specifically on California, “California: A Fire Survey” linked below.
Let me highlight a few points.
This fire controversy has been going on for more than 150 years. It is not a Trump problem or a liberal-conservative issue. It is a discussion of what is right AND it is protean, in that science is being developed constantly and practices are informing and shaping realities on the ground. There are few things more complex than wildfire and the politics (not the current partisan ones) make it worse. The controversy about prescribed fire is very old. Native Americans burned in patches. They had thousands of years of experience and practice living in an exceptionally fire-prone region. They evolved appropriate responses. Spanish and the Mexican colonization did not greatly impact fire regimes. Fires still burned regularly, sometimes still set by Native Americans and sometimes by ranchers. The population was not dense.
All this changed rapidly after the 1849 gold rush and rapid population growth. Californians debated fire. Some were on the side of what they called “light burning”, as the Indians had done. Others wanted to excluded fire. This was part of the original progressive wave that sought to rationalize everything and manage nature. In 1923, a commission formally anathematized the practice of light burning.
Let’s explain a little. You can identify at least three “fire cultures” in the USA. The SE has a tradition of burning that persists to this day. The Rockies manages fire over large areas and sometimes experiments with natural fire. California has been in the forefront of suppression. Fire there is put out and not started by humans. The idea is to protect assets, houses, infrastructure and timber.
The idea that goes with suppression is that fire is an enemy to be attacked and defeated. There exists a type of “fire-industrial complex.” It deploys fire fighters in military fashion and brings with it military style equipment, big machines, helicopters and airplanes. All these things make great and heroic pictures. There is also the wonderfully poignant quality of homeowners fighting flames and the profound sadness of loss of homes and lives. The problem with this whole Hollywood style narrative is that it is often very much effort and heroism applied to a problem that might better be avoided against an enemy (fire) which need not be our enemy and may be an ally in land management.
Fire is unavoidable. It is not an enemy that can be defeated. It is not an enemy at all. It is a part of the natural order. If you think in ecological terms, fire is an apex predator. It orders much of the natural landscape and when it is taken away that landscape declines Unlike an animal predator, however, it cannot really be extirpated. There is no extinction. In fact, it grows bigger, angrier and more destructive when excluded and transforms from a cleaner of the landscape to a destroyer.
In the midst of these big fires, it is inappropriate to fix blame, but when they go out, we need to put in better fire regimes. We need to recognize fire’s power and know that we cannot defeat it but we can live with it and thrive in fire adapted landscapes. We can get more if we do not try to have it all.
These are some of my thoughts related to the big fires in California. They are keyed off the articles at the top.
Megafires More Frequent Because Of Climate Change And Forest Management It is very distressing that President Trump has jumped in on one side of the wildfire issue and that many of his critics have felt it necessary to jump in on the other as a consequence, as if this was like a football game where you could cheer for one side. Two or more things can be true at the same time. We do not have to choose sides on MOST things. This is not a game where somebody wins and another loses. Rather the only way for one side to win here is for them the other side to win too.
The linked article is good and has the right title. But even here, we have the competitive set up discussed. “California Gov. Jerry Brown …hit back …”
Many factors contribute to increase in the destructiveness of wildfires. There are three big ones – climate change, population growth in the wilderness-urban interface (WUI) and land management. Far from having to choose which one we need to address, we need to recognize that NONE of them can be addressed properly w/o addressing all three. If you think climate change is the big issue, you better address land management, since it is the most effective way you can adapt to the coming changes. If you believe land management is the big issue, you better consider climate change, since decisions made today must be adapted for the situation decades from now in a changed environment. And no amount of good management can save houses from burning if we do not develop and build in “fire wise” ways. This is true no matter how the climate changes.
Trump is right. Jerry Brown is right. Lots of other people are right too, but nobody can understand the whole situation, and no solutions apply equally to every particular situation That is why we need to respect the myriad idea and let them create the synergy we need to do things that need to be done.
And we will never know the truth. We have to think, try, assess and think again in this never ending quest. And just stop with the fighting each other. We need all the ideas.
Maybe this is working out okay. Trump’s tweet was unfortunate and I worried that it would set up land management for a fall. But the attention is bringing the complexity of land management to a wider audience. I do not believe it will long hold the public attention, but it may move the discussion.
The author of this article is one of the gurus of fire management. I read a couple of his books and treasure his insights.
There is no single answer to this problem, nor an answer that will be right for all time even for the same places. We need appreciate the nuance. Maybe Donald Trump, perhaps the lease nuanced of our presidents, has helped contribute to a better understanding.
There Are 200 California Inmates Fighting the Camp Fire. After Prison, They Likely Won’t Be Allowed to Become Firefighters Part of my fire theme but also my deep belief in redemption. These guys are risking their life and health. They should feel the consequence of their crimes but at some time there should be redemption. “… most of California’s inmate firefighters will not be able to work in the firefighting profession after they are released because of the state’s deliberately exclusionary licensing laws. Firefighters in California are required to be licensed as emergency medical technicians (EMTs), which requires taking classes and passing a few state-administered exams. No problem there, but state law allows licensing boards to block anyone with a criminal record from getting an EMT license.” Give them a break. Wouldn’t it be better if guys getting out of prison could then be of service to their society while helping themselves.
I hate to look at it, but I have to learn from the mistake. The lesson that I take is not to do a fire during the growing season, especially when they trees are throwing up new growth. Southern pine can survive scorching, but if the fire gets too hot & knocks out the new candles, the tree dies. I lost a couple dozen.
You can see the damage on the first picture. Look closely at the middle of the picture that dead ones and the live ones next to them The two live ones right past the middle have fire marks on them. The surface fire went under them too, but did not kill them. The second picture looks down the road. Trees on both sides were burned, but they did not die, at least not yet. Picture #3 is the stump. Picture #4 is me after the cutting. Hard to see, but my shirt is soaked through with sweat. It was good exercise, but I will not do it again. Last picture is some of our wildflower/pollinator plantations. It looked really good in person. The photo did not do it justice.
I also think some of the trees died because their roots roasted. The fire dwelt a too long on the edge, smoldered for days.
Nature is resilient and something good will happen.I have still not decided what to do. I might under plant with longleaf, or maybe just let the natural regeneration of loblolly. My guess is that there is a little more than a acre killed. Letting it be natural or planting won’t make that much difference.
I thought I would take advantage of the bad situation by cutting down one of the dead trees and counting the rings. I did own this land when the trees were planted and the previous owner did not have perfect records. Cutting the tree was a mistake. I had only my hand saw and I get really tired about half way through. I had to finish, however. Could not leave a half cut hazard. I cut the tree about waist high and counted 30 rings. I may have missed a couple and it took it a couple years to get waist high, so those trees are probably around 32-35 years old. The rings showed that the tree grew very fast at first, but then slowed a lot, probably because it got crowded out. We thinned this tract in 2017, so it was too early to see results, especially because it was killed early in the season this year. Also down on the farms I did my usual walk around. It is looking good. Wildflowers are past prime and settling down for winter. They grew a bit longer and thicker this year with all the rain. The pines are done with their last splurge and hardening for the cooler weather. I thought I needed some comparisons, so I took pictures of my car near the trees. Could not get very close to the trees for fear of getting stuck. The car has all wheel drive but is not an all terrain vehicle.
Back in the 1930s and 1940s, professional and expert opinion was firmly against any fire in the forest. The only ones who still burned the woods were Southerners and Native Americans. Both groups were ridiculed for their outdated habits. The authorities mounted an advertising campaign against them. “Scholarly” articles were written attacking Southern bad habits and authorities unleashed PR campaigns against burning. They called burning by Native Americans Paiute forestry. Fortunately, neither group stopped burning and gradually ecologists came to a better understanding of fire in the forest.
The experts were not entirely wrong. If your only goal is to produce as much wood as possible in the short term, you should exclude fire. But trees are more than wood and forests are more than trees. A holistic approach is better.
We cannot always justify this with bottom line thinking, but it fits better into the “triple bottom line,” the sweet spot at the intersection of something being good ecologically, economically and culturally.
This triple bottom line – holistic – thinking was much in evidence when we visited the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. They want to make their timber lands profitable, but they also have other priorities. I very much agreed with their philosophy. It is like what I want on my own land.
My first picture shows a fire managed ponderosa pine forests. It is open and park-like, since the fire cleans out the brush. Ponderosa pine forests used to burn every 3-15 years. The little fires make the forest healthy and can prevent big fires. Notice how high the branches are. The fire does not get into the crowns of the trees. Next shows the tribal forestry folks explaining their methods. After that is a field of camas. The roots are edible and were a culturally valuable food for the Native people. W/o burning, the camas had just about disappeared. Next two are just some more beautiful pictures.
Tribal foresters explained that fire had been a tool their ancestors used for generations. At the end of the season, they set the woods on fire. The fires burned until put out by the snows. When the people came back next spring, the land was again rich with new growth. This virtuous cycle was stopped when fire was excluded. It is coming back now, but restoration takes time. Fortunately, forestry folks understand the need for patience.
I have studied systems theory and complexity since the 1990s. I did not expect to find those things so prominent in a seminar on wildfire but I should have. Very few things we “manage” are as complex as wildfire. A lot of it depends on weather conditions, which are themselves notoriously difficult to predict in detail. Fuels are unknowable in detail. Behaviors of smoke are known in theory, but not in practice. Layer onto all of this the social dimensions. Complex.
Mark Finney, the day’s keynote speaker, talked about the need for models to simplify reality, but the models do not equal experience. He contended that techniques have run ahead of science. Burn bosses have learned from trial and experience in ways that are not codified.
Fire science divided into two divergent streams. One stream is structural fires. This is a true science in that it takes place in human made structures and there can be standardization. You can do actual experiments that can be replicated concerning materials and conditions. Engineers can build whole structures just to burn them down and then specify what works in building codes. Wildfires do not offer this. Conditions are always dynamic.
This does not mean that we cannot learn from wildfires and develop better strategies. Mr. Finney said that we need to continue to work to improve. We can get better, even if we cannot get perfect.
Got to Missoula for the opening of the Fire Continuum Conference on wildfire. Great so far. Tony Incahola from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes explained how Native Americans successfully used fire as a management tool in the years before settlement. Members of the Salish and Kootenai also performed a welcome ceremony. You can hear it in the video below.
Dave Calkin, PhD, Supervisory Research Forester, Human Dimensions Program, USDA Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station gave the keynote for the conference. I have linked to an article about it in comments.
He called wildfire a “wicked problem.” By this, he did not mean evil. A wicked problem is one that defies solution because information about it is incomplete and contradictory. Feedback is difficult to recognize and may not be meaningful and requirements are always changing. He proposed we make it less wicked by making evidence-based decisions, recognize risk and commit to its management. Each fire is unique in some ways,but like others too. Fire managers need to share information and together become a learning organization.
Science & experience tells me that everything will be okay, but I still worry about my trees. Convention from the hot fire gets all the way up the trees and singes the needles. I expect that lots of them will fall off. I have reasonable confidence intellectually that most of the trees will grow back better than ever, but I don’t feel it.
Found time between presentations to rush down and look at my newly burned forest. The forest floor is very clear now. You can easily walk through. We are doing patch burns of 1/3 each year for three years. This is great for wildlife and it puts more life, and carbon into the soils.
You can judge the fire by the color it leaves behind. Black is good. That means the fire has put a good char w/o destroying the life of the soil. White is not good but still okay. That is ash. The fire was a little too hot, but things are still okay probably. When you see red, you got trouble. Virginia clay is red (actually kind of orange.) If you burned down to that, the fire was too hot and destructive. In the really bad cases, the fire essentially bakes the clay into a kind of porcelain and nothing much will grow for a long time. Fortunately, we got the black.
My first three pictures show the forest floor. #3 shows part of the place where my friends & neighbor Larry Walker planted some pollinator plants. It will be very pretty soon. Picture #4 shows my longleaf and the last picture is the gas station in Lawrenceville, even cheaper than Exit 104.
Virginia Department of Forestry (Adam Smith) did the first understory burn on the Brodnax place today. This was a growing season burn. The science tells us that this should kill the brush and encourage the growth of grass and forbs. A dormant season burn top-kills the brush, but they grow back. the wildlife and ecological effects are significant. It is likely that the “natural” burns were more likely in the growing season, since they were set off by lightning and thunderstorms come a lot more often in May than in December.
We are burning 1/3 of the property each year, following a plan we agreed with the NRCS. This is supposed to encourage wildlife habitat and add carbon to the soils. It is a fun experiment. The pictures show the woods after the burn and the part not burned for comparison.
The hunt club is going to plant pollinator habitat on the loading decks and around the burned area. Next fall the seeds should spread into the burned area and next spring it should be glorious.
I have to get down and have boots-on-the-ground experience.
Fires like the Cerro Grande fire in 2000 and the Las Conchas fire of 2011 are knocking down even fire-adapted ponderosa pine communities. The Las Conchas fire burned through more than 43,000 acres in 15 hours. Driven by strong winds that produced horizonal vortices (like tornadoes on their sides), the fire burned about an acre every second.
There is real chance that if fires like this persist that they will permanently deforest parts of the Southwest until recently covered by thick forests, converting them into bush or grassland, as forest gaps become so big that there is no seed source for regeneration or fire-prone brush burns so hot and so frequently that forests cannot reestablish.
Ponderosa pine are fire adaptive, even fire dependent. Fires are essential to the health of ponderosa pine forests. But it can get to be too much even for them. (The ponderosa ecology is analogous to longleaf pine, but the Southeast is not like the Southwest. Fire in the Southeast can destroy much of the above ground vegetation, but plants and trees will be back within a year or two. You can see the results of a prescribed fire in Virginia at this link. In the Southwest, the ground may stay barren for a long time. )
The hot fires in fire adapted ponderosa can be driven by winds up into the spruce-fir forests on top of the mountains destroying them too. Since these ecological communities are often remnants of climates of the last ice age clinging to “sky islands,” where altitude maintains the cooler climate, they may not come back until the next ice age.
Fires have been common in the Southwest for more than 10,000 years, but there is nothing in the historical record like the fires we have experienced in recent decades. They are altering rich ecological and cultural landscapes. We can blame climate change, and warmer and drier weather are certainly contributing to the situation, but changes in land management is the proximate cause, and would trouble even absent the climate changes. Tom Swetnam, Professor Emeritus of Dendrochronology at the University of Arizona, studies historical ecological disturbances, using tools like tree ring analysis. He spoke at our National Tree Farm Leadership Conference in Albuquerque. Using tree rings, scientists have mapped the changing climate and conditions in the Southwest with decent precision going back more than 400 years and make decent estimates farther back.
The tree rings tell a story of wet and dry years and fires that go with them. Not surprisingly, fires are more common in dry years, but fire scars indicate that centuries ago fires were frequent but not very hot. The record of the area around the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico experienced frequent low-intensity burns until around 1680. After that, fires become less frequent but hotter. This fire regime persists until just before 1900, when fires are almost gone, until the serious upsurge a few decades ago. What happened?
The tree ring record fits well with the historical record if you know what was going on. Around 1600 Pueblo people lived in the mountains and on the plateaus, i.e. in the forests. They set fires to clear land, improve hunting or discourage insects, and sometimes cooking and campfires got out of hand. The Pueblo also used wood gathered from the nearby woods for fuel and building materials. They especially used small diameter wood for ramadas and roofs. In other words, they kept the woods clear of fuel that would drive large fires. The ponderosa pine forests of those days were open. We would call them park-like, with as few as twenty large trees per acre. When fires went through, they stayed on the ground, doing little hard to big trees, but conveniently marking them for our future study. Spanish colonist and missionaries started showing up in growing numbers after 1600. This started to pull or drive some of the Pueblo out of their mountain homes. Others died of introduced diseases and later started to be the victims of raids by tribes made mobile by the newly introduced horses. No matter the reasons, the human population of the New Mexico mountains declined and so did the health of the forests. Fire became less common and more often ignited by lightning, but they were bigger and hotter.
(Nature does not always do better w/o human intervention. That is controversial, and it is my thought. I cannot attribute it to Mr. Swetnam. There is a dynamic balance to be struck.) This less frequent but still common low-intensity fire regime continued until the late 1800s. That is when fire disappeared for around a century. We would be wrong to credit or blame fire suppression for most of this. It is true that settlers tended to put out fires and that roads and cultivated fields functioned as fire-breaks, but the big factor from around 1890-1945 was grazing. Sheep and cows grazed down the grass and w/o the grass to carry the fire, fires just did not get going. After 1945, fire suppression became a bigger deal. Suppression was enabled by technologies and techniques developed during World War II. Aircraft could stop and fight fires even in remote regions. They could also parachute in fire fighters and general organization and discipline appropriate to the exigencies of war translated from fighting war to fighting fire. In fact, the Forest Service and others approached the fight against fire with warlike vigor and metaphors.
And it seemed to work. Fires were suppressed most of the time. Trees grew thicker than ever and that seemed a good thing. Managing forests like a factory fit in well with organizational theories of the time. But fuels were building. Fire can be avoided and postponed but not banished.
This brought us to where we are today. Western forests are overgrown with trees and brush. We have come to see this as natural, but it is not. In a robust ponderosa forest, there are big trees and not much else near the ground. Over the last century, brush grew and wood lays on the ground. Beyond that, there are lots of trees of various heights. This provides ladders to pull fire from the ground to the canopy, where whole trees, even big ones are killed. This sets up a negative cycle, where the hot fires kill the big trees, allowing brush to grow in thick fueling other hot fires.
Managing this flammable situation is exacerbated by people moving into the woods and building homes, sometimes expensive ones, that need to be protected against the old nemesis of fire.
This is often called the Wildland-Urban Interface or the WUI (pronounced WOOEE). Most forest fire managers dislike WUI because it complicates their burn management and risks the lives of civilians and firefighters.
Swetnam, however, thinks that people can live in harmony in the woods, IF they do it right. The Pueblo lived in these fire-prone woods for hundreds of years. Their villages seem never to have been overtaken by fire. Their success depended on managing fuels, as described above. The Pueblo also practiced seasonal movement. During the winter, they hunkered down in central areas, but in summer they dispersed around the countryside. The result was fuel management, whether that was the goal.
The good news is that we can manage fire. If we recognize that we cannot banish fire, we can manage it. We can build in lots of places but not in all places. The bad news is that it is hard politically and socially to do the right thing even when we are reasonably sure we know the right thing. We will also almost always lack the public resources to do all that we can or should.
Above are notes and thoughts from todays Tree Farm National Leadership Conference and speaker Tom Swetnam.
