Learning a lesson about fighting wildfires

Fighting more forest fires will come back to burn us, by Michael Kodas 6/19/13

This is a model for coexisting with, and benefiting from, forest fires. The USFS is still trying to bounce back from a longstanding policy of fire suppression, and this is proof of how misguided that policy was.

"For almost 40 years now, the U.S. Forest Service has been managing the Gila Wilderness according to a “let it burn” policy that allows small, natural fires to thin overgrown forests, getting rid of dead brush and excess timber that can spark a massive conflagration. So when the Whitewater Baldy fire raged through the ponderosa pines last June, it found far less fuel, and therefore had less destructive potential, than it would have in a forest where every previous fire -- no matter how small or harmless -- had been immediately snuffed."

Photo credit: http://ow.ly/mfbEJ

After the Black Forest Fire last week became the most destructive fire in Colorado history, (the previous record-holder happened only last year in a disturbing trend), people are talking about fire. Colorado has one of the biggest Wildland-Urban Interfaces (WUI) in the country, where such a large population lives in close proximity with the forest. Fires here are a fact of life, and they will destroy property. But they don't have to be this bad.

Fire suppression, as described in Kodas' article, was the order of the day for most of the 20th century. It's another ill-fated example of playing God, much like the effects we are starting to see from a century of damming and diverting our rivers (leading to aquifer depletion, for example). We thought we could outsmart the fires, only to have them come back larger and stronger. Dry fuels and shrubs little the forest floors, having thrived without their natural predator. Now, when a fire starts, it is almost impossible to put out, raging at full force instead of a brief, cleansing burn.

Luckily, there were some forests, such as the Gila Wilderness, that escaped the brunt of this policy, and still burned with manageable regularity. Now, they provide a control for analyzing the effects of fire suppression. The results overwhelmingly favor "let it burn" over fire suppression, for the health and safety of humans in the WUI, as well as the forests themselves. If anyone is keeping track, that's another slam dunk for nature.

Photo credit: http://ow.ly/mfbOI

An excellent article article summing up the ecological damages of fire suppression was written Helen Poulos and James Workman, a fire ecologist and former firefighter, respectively, in the Los Angeles Times.

Here's a brief sequence of events -

Without fires, forests grow thick. Fuels build up and trees grow closer together, creating a fire hazard. Extra trees suck up more water, and prevent rain and sunlight from reaching the forest floor and providing nutrients to animals and vegetation below. Removing these "trash trees" would not only provide timber, but release valuable water, benefit wildlife which has suffered from ecosystem alteration, and prevent wildfires from posing such a threat to human life and property.