Climate changing: Research shows times for ‘prescribed burns’ in the West shifting
Deciding when and where to conduct prescribed burns is becoming increasingly important as the climate warms, and, according to a recent study, the timing and frequency of appropriate weather will also play a larger role.
Prescribed burns are an essential tool land managers use in reducing fuel availability for extreme wildfires, and conditions favorable to prescribed burns will become far less frequent in much of the West, especially the Southwest, according to a study published in October 2023 in Communications Earth & Environment.
However, the study found that parts of the northern Rocky Mountains will have more days to use prescribed burns, especially during the early and late winter months.
Living with wildfire: How to protect more homes as fire risk rises in a warming climate
Humans have learned to fear wildfire. It can destroy communities, torch pristine forests and choke even faraway cities with toxic smoke.
Wildfire is scary for good reason, and over a century of fire suppression efforts has conditioned people to expect wildland firefighters to snuff it out. But as journalist Nick Mott and I explore our new book, “This Is Wildfire: How to Protect Your Home, Yourself, and Your Community in the Age of Heat,” and in our podcast “Fireline,” this expectation and the approach to wildfire will have to change.
Over time, extensive fire suppression has set the stage for the increasingly destructive wildfires we see today.
Prescribed fire training in Central Oregon aims to make communities safer, forests more resilient to wildfires
Forty firefighting professionals from the U.S. and Canada gathered recently in the Deschutes National Forest in Central Oregon to gain hands-on experience with prescribed fires.
Such fires help reduce fuel load, improve forest health and protect communities from wildfires which have grown more intense due to climate change and 100 years of suppressing fires.
Since its launch 15 years ago by the U.S. Forest Service, the Department of the Interior and The Nature Conservancy, the Prescribed Fire Training Exchange Program, or TREX, has taken place in more than a dozen states and has grown to include the involvement of Tribal nations, state and local governments, private landowners and other partners.
Indigenous fire practices can help Oregon wildfires, land management
As fires appear to haunt Oregon’s imagination of summertime, we sit to reflect on the need to define our collective relationship with fire through an engagement with Indigenous science or ways of knowing and understanding the world.
Native American communities in western Oregon have been tending the land with fire since time immemorial. This practice, known today as cultural burning, offers many lessons on the value of fire to care for land and water. Cultural burnings are an ecological practice grounded in Indigenous science that prevents disastrous fire seasons, nourishes watersheds, sustains traditional food sources and maintains cultural practices and keeps memories alive across generations.
In western Oregon, Native communities have carefully burned to maintain oak groves for acorns, used mindful fire in meadows for camas and other foods and pruned and burned hazel patches for basketry materials. These practices, among many others, require the use of fire as a transformational element — fire to clear grassland, maintain forest health and encourage new growth, while rejuvenating springs and water tables.