‘It felt like the apocalypse’: Colorado wildfires destroyed hundreds of homes.
Wildfires in the American West have been worsening — growing larger, spreading faster and reaching into mountainous elevations that were once too wet and cool to have supported fierce fires. What was once a seasonal phenomenon has become a year-round menace, with fires burning later into the fall and into the winter.
Recent research has suggested that heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires, as rainfall patterns have been disrupted, snow melts earlier and meadows and forests are scorched into kindling.
The U.S. government is wasting billions on wildfire policy that doesn’t work
More than 6.5 million acres in the U.S. have been affected by fire so far this year. The Dixie Fire, at nearly 1 million acres burned, was the second-largest fire in California’s history. Faced with such catastrophic wildfires, it seems only natural for fire services to respond with every resource available. But according to many of the country’s most respected fire experts, there is little evidence that most of these fire suppression campaigns are effective. These critics say that the current practice of trying to suppress every big wildfire is foolhardy, especially given the huge, climate-driven fires more and more common in the West. Some blame this policy on what they call the fire-industrial complex: a collection of the major governmental fire agencies and hundreds of private contractors, who are motivated by a mixture of institutional inertia, profiteering, and desperation.
Wildfires are erasing Western forests. Climate change is making it permanent.
Now that the winter has cooled the 2021 fire season, scientists are looking at the big burn scars across the West with the grim understanding that, in some places, the pine and Douglas fir forests will not return.
The devastation of the Gatlinburg wildfires offered hope, in a way, for scientists
National park personnel have been intentionally burning sections of the park since the 1990s, for conservation purposes and to thin out debris. But for a prescribed fire to work as intended it needs to mimic the effects of a natural fire.
"I thought it was interesting that the prescribed fires done in earlier years by the park staff had similar effects to wildfire," Franklin wrote in an email to Knox News. She explained that it was difficult to mimic the effects of more intense wildfire with safe, controlled fires set during the wet season. The 2016 fire revealed that it is possible to get some of the effects of a wildfire without a fire going wild.
Using the old burns to help lessen the new burns
When you hear that a fire burned 100,000 acres, the degree of burning can vary wildly inside that perimeter. In fact, some patches may not have burned at all.
This is the "mosaic" of fire, where burned land is not burned evenly. The firefighter group FUSEE--Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology--advocates making use of the fire mosaic to lessen the intensity of future fires in the same area.
We explore the concepts with FUSEE Executive Director Timothy Ingalsbee and Mike Beasley, retired Fire Management Officer for the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service.
Timber, Interrupted
Anti-logging environmentalists protest Freres Lumber Company's executive's presentation at Knight Law Center, the day after activists announce an occupation to stop post-wildfire logging.
Hotter Summer Days Mean More Sierra Nevada Wildfires, Study Finds
Wildfires are increasing in size and intensity in the Western United States, and wildfire seasons are growing longer. California in particular has suffered in recent years, including last summer, when the Sierra Nevada experienced several large fires. One, the Dixie Fire, burned nearly a million acres and was the largest single fire in the state’s history.
Recent research has suggested that heat and dryness associated with global warming are major reasons for the increase in bigger and stronger fires.
Environmental groups, scientists raise concerns over Monsanto’s Phos-Chek
Tim Ingalsbee, a fire ecologist, told EHN that aerial retardant is used wastefully, and that resources should instead be directed towards preventative strategies like prescribed burns, ecological fire management, and getting more firefighters.
U.S. firefighters on climate frontline face 'broken' health system
From 2017 to 2020, 2,500 work-related injuries or illnesses were reported on average each year by the roughly 10,000-strong U.S. Forest Service wildland firefighting force – the nation's biggest wildland force, a database provided to the Thomson Reuters Foundation showed.
"Our occupation is very risky, with high consequences ... We have to make sure we're taking care of people," said Kelly Martin, president of Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, a group lobbying for better workplace protections.
Too often, that is not the case, she said.
What it’s like to fight a megafire
In 2017, Timothy Ingalsbee, the executive director of the organization Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology, published an article in the International Journal of Wildland Fire in which he argued that firefighters know that large fires will defy suppression until weather conditions change or fuels run out. Steve Pyne, a historian and a former wildland firefighter, asked me, “Why are firefighters there at all? That’s the fundamental question.” Putting out too many fires contributes to the creation of even bigger blazes: fire ecologists call this the “fire paradox.” Today’s wildland firefighters are trapped within it.
Wildfire, drought provisions in infrastructure bill bring new funding to old ideas on Western Slope
Tim Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, told Energy & Environment News that other portions of the infrastructure bill reflect a legacy of misguided wildland firefighting tactics, citing a provision in the bill which calls for $500 million in creating fuel breaks, areas near communities in the wildland interface which have been cleared of vegetation to contain a fire. “But fuel breaks have proven ineffective in wildlands, because embers can travel so far on the wind,” Ingalsbee told E&E News, citing the 2017 Eagle Creek Fire in Oregon that jumped the Columbia River.
California burning: A special edition on wildfires — Debate rages amid smoke and flames: How do we stay safe?
Our ‘California Burning’ series originally ran in Fall 2020. It was recently awarded First Place by the National Newspaper Association for Investigative Reporting. We are reprinting the series in the next several weeks, because issues covered in this reporting still pose threats to our Mountain Communities. We also have many new residents who have settled here in the past year who may benefit from understanding these urgent issues.
Opinion: Don’t clearcut in fire-adapted, mature forests
Additionally, according to Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee, executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology (FUSEE) and senior wildland fire ecologist certified by the Association for Fire Ecology, “Studies show that forests that have been degraded by past commercial logging, livestock grazing, or fire suppression typically burn more severely than native forests that have not been subjected to these past land abuses and are more resilient to fire.”
Climate change is now the main driver of increasing wildfire weather, study finds
In a finding that scientists believed was still decades away from becoming reality, California researchers say that climate change is now the overwhelming cause of conditions driving extreme wildfire behavior in the western United States.
The Native American way of fighting wildfires
Curiously, as partisan and ideological divisions deepen in America, something that looks an awful lot like consensus has been forming around wildfire policy in the West. Government agencies, academic researchers, Native American tribes, rural dwellers and environmentalists have all been reaching a similar conclusion: The 20th century approach to forest management was a long, tangled, disastrous mistake.
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“This idea of indigenous knowledge as a true source of knowledge and time-tested learning is just flooding into the scientific space right now,” said Paul Hessburg, a scientist at the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest research station. “Increasingly, as I’m getting into the last season of my career, I’m working with tribes and indigenous burning methods, and sometimes the knowledge that I’m learning blows my mind.”
For tribes, ‘good fire’ a key to restoring nature and people
Scientific research increasingly confirms what tribes argued all along: Low-intensity burns on designated parcels, under the right conditions, reduce the risk by consuming dead wood and other fire fuels on forest floors.
To the Yurok, Karuk and Hupa in the mid-Klamath region, the resurgence of cultural burning is about reclaiming a way of life violently suppressed with the arrival of white settlers in the 1800s.
Current approach to wildfires risks lives and wastes money, say experts
Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a fire adviser at the University of California, said: “We’re seeing our historical approach to fighting fires is no longer working. We saw this summer in California that going out, attacking fires and putting them out was totally ineffective.”
See how the Dixie Fire created its own weather
From California to Canada, the landscape was primed to burn: A severe drought and high summer temperatures magnified by climate change left vegetation tinder-dry, with low humidity and strong winds further amplifying the risk. Given a spark, new fires grew explosively. Several became so large and intense that they powered their own weather systems, spawning towering storm clouds, lightning and even some “fire whirls,” spinning vortices of flames.
Ancient Native American forest practices demonstrated in burn near Eugene
Kimbol’s with a nonprofit group called Maqlaqs Gee’tkni, meaning “Place of the People.” He brought several youth along to share Indigenous fire practices, which were suppressed for generations after colonization.
“The idea is to change the mindset that most people have about fire, which is one of fear. And change that to an empowered mindset around how to use fire, how to employ it, and how to relate to land and culture through it.”
To that end, the tribal trainees’ families — including children — were invited to watch the burn, to view fire more as a tool, versus something to be feared.