Prescribed Burns and Minimizing Forest Fires
Identifying ways that the government has been directly responsible for the ever worsening fires across the western United States and how this can be addressed
ABSTRACT
In the United States, wildfires have been growing stronger year over year, threatening ever more millions of acres of forest. This trend has been going on for several decades. While there are many factors that can be attributed to this hazardous situation, one important one is the United States’ adoption of the “10 a.m.” policy, where fires were to be extinguished by the morning following the day they were reported. This zero tolerance policy enabled an abundance of dead vegetation and thick undergrowth to accumulate throughout woodlands, creating an ideal condition for massive wildfires to erupt.
While wildfires are an important step in ecosystem maintenance, they’ve reached a point where they do more harm than good. In order to undo much of the harm caused by the 10 a.m. policy and return to a more sustainable fire season, the United States must adopt prescribed burn techniques through legislation and interagency coordination.
In America, forest fires are a way of life. They’re routine and predictable to the point we designate July through October as wildfire season. For many decades the federal government, along with relevant agencies and state governments, have been deploying manpower and resources to combat these infernos. Unfortunately, we can no longer take this predictability for granted. There’s been a worrying trend over the past two decades that throws this “fire season” routine out the window. With global temperatures rising and weather patterns changing, the season has begun to start as early as May in some western states. In tandem with this, the intensity of the fires only seems to be getting worse with each passing year. With the horrific 2020 wildfire season fresh in the country’s memory, groups of all sorts around America have been looking for ways to reign in these calamitous fires.
While the U.S. spends millions every year to combat them, wildfires are here to stay. They’re simply a fact of life. They’ve been around far longer than humans have, and as long as forests remain on Earth they’ll continue to persist. That’s not a bad thing though. Fires help clear out dead plants and thick undergrowth that suffocate the forest, which in turn makes room for new growth to constantly regenerate the woodlands. There are even some species that depend on wildfires for reproduction. The seeds of one tree in the United States, the lodgepole pine, open up from the heat of a forest fire which ensures they start growing as soon as the ground has been cleared up. So, not only is it an impossible task to prevent all wildfires, but it’s one that would harm the natural balance of our forests.
Despite the important role that forest fires play in the maintenance of woodland ecosystems, they’ve been getting worse in recent years. The United States Environmental Protection Agency has compiled data from the U.S. Forest Service and National Interagency Fire Center dating back forty years. When looking at both the area burned as well as the severity of the burns, it’s immediately apparent that something is changing.
The final two decades of the 20th century saw the damage caused by forest fires remain mostly the same year to year. There were occasional spikes, but in general total area burned averaged somewhere around 2 million acres annually. The year 2000 was notable for seeing a spike in wildfire spread and damage when compared to the previous two decades. That wildfire season saw approximately 6 million acres fall to flames. That massive spike has since been dwarfed five separate times between 2004 and 2020, with 2020 being the worst year on record. What was once a natural part in the cycle of death and rebirth, a way of clearing the old growth to make way for healthy regeneration, has become a cancer that’s eating away at millions of acres of forest annually.
There are several factors that have contributed to the ever worsening state of forest fires. Climate change is a major actor for many reasons. Increased temperatures make fires all the more likely to start. In tandem with that, climate change is extending the dry season and shortening the wet. This results in less rain topping off reservoirs and snow covering mountains which now has to be rationed out for longer and longer periods. Weather patterns also seem to be shifting, moving rainfall away from troubled areas. There’s more than just climate change impacting the wildfire season though. The U.S. directly shot itself in the metaphorical foot nearly a century ago.
The early 1930’s saw several intense fire seasons, which led to the Forest Service enacting the “10 a.m. policy” in 1935. The goal of this policy was for any fire to be suppressed by 10 a.m. the morning following the day it was initially called in. This one move has been responsible for untold millions of dollars of fire damage over the last century. Because of the obsessive nature that the Forest Service and other related departments took on when it came to fire extinguishing, decades upon decades of dead trees and thick undergrowth were able to accumulate. This shortsighted decision to eradicate fires resulted in a perfect environment for even more and worse fires to spring up, which is exactly the world we’re living in today.
Several decades following the enactment of this policy, scientific research was beginning to show the benefits that fires have on the natural ecosystem. However by this time it was too late to simply let things go back to the way they were, where fires would naturally pop up and clean out unwanted and unproductive vegetation. Because so much had been allowed to accumulate, the Forest Service and other firefighting departments had to get involved. This problem has only been exacerbated in recent decades, forcing an ever-growing share of their annual budgets to get dedicated towards fire management, preventing any further work in the area of woodland management.
Recently, I was reading the book Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester. In it he wrote about the Aboriginal people in Australia and how they have tended to the vast dry grasslands of the island continent. For thousands of years they’ve implemented controlled burns by lighting “cold fires” in the dry bush and taking care of the easy-to-light vegetation that allows wildfires to grow unmanageable. These cold fires never grow large or hot enough to threaten large trees and therefore become a dangerous blaze. Instead it simply creeps through the low lying undergrowth, chewing away at it piece by piece to thin things out. So by frequently addressing the problem in small chunks while under the supervision of these firetenders, they can avoid the staggering scale that the 2020 wildfires rose to.
Unfortunately they’ve been prohibited from practicing these techniques for many decades. With English colonizers arriving in Australia in the 1700’s, setting up their government and forcing the Aboriginals to take a back seat in the management of the land, these prescribed burns happened less often and on much smaller scales. Much like how the 10 a.m. policy has been disastrous in America, this anti-aboriginal mindset has caused untold suffering in Australia. Look no further than early 2020 where headlines around the world were telling of the horrendous bushfires. Hoping to avoid another crippling wildfire season, the Australian government has begun to turn to the traditional stewards of the outback, and Australia is beginning to see the widespread reintroduction and usage of these cold fires and other prescribed burn techniques to clear out undergrowth.
In many ways America isn’t so different from Australia: we can trace our founding back to the English, our countries are vast and beautiful and wild, and we’ve both been plagued by ever worsening wildfires for decades. It’s time that America matches up in one more important aspect. At the time of writing, there’s no national policy for prescribed burns. Some states, such as Oregon and Michigan, have taken it upon themselves to address this issue head on, but there hasn’t been the same level of success at the national level. One Senator from Oregon introduced the 2020 National Prescribed Fire Act, but it died when the next Congressional session began. An updated 2021 version of the bill was then introduced, but has since stalled out.
Keeping something as crucial and important as funding and interagency support for prescribed burns locked in legislative purgatory is unacceptable. With each year we fail to act, we make the problem worse for ourselves. With climate change occurring at ever increasing speeds, temperatures will only rise and dry seasons will only lengthen. Each year more and more of the budget that the Forest Service and other related agencies that are tasked with fighting these fires gets spent on just that, when it could be used for proper maintenance and mitigation. It’s time to get our priorities in order and work to actually protect America’s woodlands
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