Communities in danger learn to fight fire with fire
New approach aims for massive increase in controlled burns
A series of megadroughts blamed in large part on climate change has resulted in unprecedented fires around the globe in recent years.
Two of the most prominent hotspots have been Australia and California, where residents have seen the most destructive wildfires ever.
The worst California fire ever recorded burned over a million acres in August 2020; on Friday, state officials reported that the first three months of this year were the driest period on record going back over 100 years. Fire season has already started.
For decades, forest management and fire fighting organizations have relied on suppression – aggressively attacking and extinguishing blazes that do break out – to control wildfires. But, this policy has led to overgrown forests and years of record wildfires. Obviously, it is not working as hoped.
Now, that approach is undergoing a radical shift. Thanks in part to new laws, California is implementing a new policy to encourage wide-scale controlled burns both as a way to minimize fires when they do occur and restore ecological diversity to forest ecosystems.
As someone who lives just a few miles from the urban-wildland interface, I have come to dread “fire season,” which used to extend from about April to October. It is no longer seasonal, with fires occurring even in wet winter months.
The reason California is experimenting with innovative new ways to fight wildfires is clear from recent history.
In 2021, fires in the state burned more than 3,000 square miles (7,800 square kilometers), destroying more than 3,000 homes, commercial properties and other structures.
Hotter and drier weather coupled with decades of fire suppression have contributed to an increase in the number of acres burned by wildfires and the intensity of the blazes, fire scientists say. And the problem is exacerbated by a 20-year megadrought that studies link to human-caused climate change.
The state agency CalFire summarized the situation in its CaliFire Incident Archive where it reports that in 8,835 incidents in 2021, fires burned 2.5 million acres, with 3 fatalities and 3,629 structures burned. Among the worst was the Caldor Fire in August which burned 221,000 acres.
Now, in Northern California – the area most affected by the fires – PBS Newshour reported March 26 that Communities are embracing ‘controlled burns’ to protect themselves.
“Decades of suppressing fires has led to overgrown forests, and a warming climate has increased their intensity and frequency,” the report noted.
Now, local community-led efforts are gaining ground to preemptively set controlled fires – with the goal of reducing the risk from large out-of-control blazes while also restoring the ecological health of the forest.
A prime example of such a community-based effort is the Plumas Underburn Cooperative (PUC), a group of landowners and community members helping each other to use prescribed fire as a management tool on private property.
According to its web site, “the Plumas Underburn Cooperative has resources to help landowners prepare for prescribed fire. No two burns are the same, so PUC staff and volunteers are available to walk landowners through the process for their property.”
The local group, however, has expert help. For the PUC, it comes from Lenya Quinn-Davidson, one of 23 members of the Humboldt County Fire Safe Council and a fire advisor at the University of California Cooperative Extension in Humboldt County. She's helped spread the concept of community prescribed burn associations like PUC around the state.
Talking to PBS, Quinn-Davidson explained that the nearly century-old emphasis on suppressing fire has left California and other western US states vulnerable, leaving forests overgrown with massive amounts of 'fuel' that can burn in a wildfire.
“There's almost like an uprising around prescribed fire that's happening in California right now, and we're shaking things up and communities are tired of waiting around for someone else to solve the problem for them,” she said. (emphasis added)
“For a long time, our primary focus around fires has been to put them out and to keep fire out of the landscape. And we thought that that would protect our forests and communities,” she said.
But there’s been a radical change in thinking in the last few years,
“Now we've seen that that was a big mistake,” Quinn-Davidson said, “and we are in the process of really trying to shift that attitude and that culture. A lot of people who work in fire management recognize that need.
“But it's not an easy thing. I mean, this is deeply ingrained,” she said.
What has spurred a significant change in fire management practices in local communities throughout Northern California has been a change in policy at the state level in California.
About six months ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a new state law known as SB332 which reduced the legal liability for prescribed fire burners as long as they aren't being grossly negligent. The legislation also acknowledged that purposely setting fire is not a new practice. For centuries indigenous communities have used fire as a tool for forest management.
The new law was reported by the CBS station in San Francisco.
“Senate Bill 332 … adds legal protections for private landowners and those who manage the blazes by raising the legal standard for seeking wildfire suppression costs from simple negligence to gross negligence,” the report said.
The impact of this is to minimize the legal costs when things go wrong – as they sometimes do because prescribed burns can get out of control and have done so in the past.
“Such costs can include not only fighting the fire, but related rescues and investigations,” CBS reported.
Entities like Native American tribes and community fire safe councils must generally use professional, certified “burn bosses” or government forestry officers to plan and manage the controlled blazes.
“While government employees are generally already protected from liability, the new law makes it more difficult to sue private burn bosses.
“The burns must be for wildfire hazard reduction, ecological maintenance and restoration, cultural burning, forest management or agriculture.”
But even as controlled burning ramps up around the state, the scale of what's needed is immense.
That is where local organizations such as Fire Forward come in. They are playing a crucial role at the grass-roots level.
Fire Forward trains community members how to safely and effectively perform prescribed burns.
It is a program of Audubon Canyon Ranch in Stinson Beach, CA, and explains on its web site that it “brings a unique blend of science-based program design and community organizing to our region as it seeks to become a model of fire-adapted communities tending fire-adapted landscapes.”
Fire Forward is funded by donations and grants from individuals, businesses and foundations, as well as by landowners who share the costs of prescribed fire on their land.
Its most important offering to local landowners who want to use controlled burns on their property is training and equipment.
“Our Basic Wildland Firefighter training is designed to build a local team of prescribed fire participants. Our mobile unit of prescribed fire and understory thinning tools is available as a shared resource across the region,” the group explains.
“We partner with agencies, subject-matter experts, organizations, landowners, and diverse community stakeholders … to get good fire on the ground.”
Sasha Berleman, a woodland scientist, is director of Fire Forward.
“Fire helps clean up the understory,” Berleman explained on PBS. “It's like cleaning up your room or brushing your teeth. If you do it frequently, then it's easy, right? It's not a challenge, but what's happened with suppression is we've seen a massive amount of fuel accumulate underneath these trees.”
Instead of allowing this undergrowth to accumulate year after year, Fire Forward and organizations like it arrange prescribed burns by private landowners to clear it on a regular basis.
However, while the U.S. Forest Service and CalFire have committed to burning or thinning a million acres annually by 2025, they are not currently burning anywhere close to that target, reaching about a tenth of that goal in 2019.
Berleman believes that community-led fire initiatives like Fire Forward can fill some of that void.
“If we have people who own relatively small tracts of land that do include some wild-land, we can make a huge cultural shift in a short time,” she explained.
Adding many smaller prescribed fires like she advocates would avoid having to wait for large-scale burns of hundreds or thousands of acres controlled by one agency that can't keep up with the need for prescribed fire across a whole region.
“We've spent billions of dollars creating an army of people to put fires out. I believe we need to do at least as much on the culture of stewardship and culture of good fireside,” Berleman says.
“To me, that's a cultural change. Rather than creating an army, we are we are building it into our very being in California. This new ethos [requires] that to live here means to understand the landscape more deeply and to put good fire on the ground as as part of the responsibility of being in this place.”
New movement spreading
Fire Forward and other organizations like it are in the vanguard of a new movement spreading quickly in California (and elsewhere) which aims to change attitudes about fire and how to live with it – rather than seeing it as an enemy that must be fought at every turn.
The idea is not new. It has been practiced for eons by indigenous peoples who originally inhabited what became California. Too them, regular controlled burning was their main tool to manage wild-land forests, and it was incorporated into their culture.
But their traditions were subsumed by modern forest management policies which required maximum fire suppression. This is not only hugely expensive but has proved only somewhat effective in battling the mega-fires that have caused so much death and destruction in recent years.
Using fire to fight fire in controlled burns performed under strict conditions by experts in the field seems to be an idea whose time has come again.
It’s at the least a fascinating experiment, and if it can be scaled up fast enough as its advocates hope, it is likely to become a major new tool in the battle to minimize the damage from huge wild-land fires that are expected to become a routine part of the human experience as the climate changes.
Very informative
very interesting article, Warren and positive feedback for the future of fires in California.