bridges environmental, labor, and community interests, and can speak the language of these different but interrelated constituencies. For info on FUSEE’s mission and board of directors click here.

Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) was launched in early 2005, sparked by a group of current and former wildland firefighters who saw a huge need for a nonprofit organization dedicated to changing fire management policies and practices from the ground-up.

After a century of fire suppression, grazing, and logging, most public lands in the United States are subject to increasingly severe wildfires unimaginable by the firefighters of the first half of the 1900s. Hazardous fuel accumulations, dense forests, a warming climate, and exotic weeds all lead to dangerous wildfire conditions for firefighters, rural communities, and the landscape alike. FUSEE’s founders saw a need to educate and advocate for progressive policies ensuring safe, ethical, ecological fire management.

No other nonprofit organization does what FUSEE does with the expertise and experience of its board and members. We hope you will engage and join us so we may become ever more effective. For info on how to join FUSEE click here.

FUSEE got off to a roaring start, not unlike a head fire going uphill in heavy brush. We staged two national news conferences in January to announce our formation, and then the Board met in Eugene in March for strategic planning to craft our education and advocacy actions. Our first goal was to establish a national identity within the forest conservation and fire management communities, and begin constructively contributing to the forest and policy debates. With FUSEE “ignited,” we launched into:

“A Reporter’s Guide to Wildland Fire” was sent to hundreds of environmental reporters and news outlets across the country. Written by FUSEE executive director, Timothy Ingalsbee, it offers reporters inside information on wildland fires and how they can get good information beyond the incident command’s press release. The distribution snowballed as public affairs and fire information officers in the Dept. of Interior agencies (U.S.G.S., N.P.S., and U.S.F.W.S.) emailed the Reporter’s Guide to each other. It is not clear what the exact impact of the Reporter’s Guide had on journalists, but there was a noticeable lack of media hype and hysteria in the 2005 fire season despite a near-record amount of acres burned.

You can download the Reporter’s Guide yourself from the “Spotfire” section of the FUSEE website: www.fusee.org

FUSEE is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization whose members include current and former wildland firefighters, other fire management professionals, rural property owners, and other citizen supporters. Our board of directors comes from all of the major fire regions (the Southeast, Southwest, California, Northern Rockies, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska), and has years of experience working in federal fire agencies and the private contract firefighting industry. We embody a new kind of organization that