We want good fire, not bad fire.
In the Western U.S., bad fire — infernos that destroy ancient fire-adapted trees; create towering, smoke-filled thunderstorms; and drive mass evacuations from rapidly moving flames — has often dominated the scene in recent years. Amid extreme dryness and heat, bad fire looms large in 2021.
Footage from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites and elsewhere over the past week shows the intense flames that often burn in our modern fire regime. These blazes are driven by overcrowded (and historically mismanaged) forests, a relentlessly warming climate, and bouts of extreme drought, among other factors.
The results are what you see below: Raging, severe blazes are more frequent than decades ago, fire experts say.
“What is really changing is that the kind of burning we are seeing is becoming more common and widespread,” Hugh Safford, a regional ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Region and a researcher at the University of California-Davis, told Mashable.
Yes, past fires at times burned intensely in certain pine forests and other areas, explained Safford. But these tended to be scattered events, unlike the common intense burning today.
In contrast, centuries ago, millions of acres burned every year in California alone, but these were healthy fires (good fire) that cleaned overgrown forest floors and spawned new life. Fires burned by Indigenous peoples were similarly light and kept forests and other ecosystems in good health. These are the regularly occurring fires Western forests need.
“The ideal is low-intensity fire,” Tim Brown, a wildfire researcher and director of the Western Regional Climate Center, told Mashable last week in reference to California’s Dixie Fire, now easily the largest single (non-complex) fire in state history and still growing. “Not destructive, high-severity events,” he added.
Taming this fire regime is a significant challenge. The atmosphere — loaded with the most heat-trapping carbon dioxide in some 3 million years, and still rising — will keep warming for at least a few more decades. This means increasingly dry, parched fuels (vegetation available to burn), a primary driver of today’s intense flames.
But forests can be managed much better, which, crucially, can limit the amount of fuel available to burn. As Mashable previously reported, this means federal, state, and local governments majorly ramping up intentional, prescribed fire (strategic burning often at cooler times of the year), and letting certain wildfires burn through forests (though this comes with controversy and risk).
“If we don’t do something to minimize the hazardous fuels, it’s going to burn big time,” said Brown.
Like this:
We naturally live in a fire world, so fire experts emphasize that it behooves us to embrace and use fire — good fire.
Last year, during intense, record-setting Western blazes, John Bailey, a forestry researcher at Oregon State University, noted that a forest is a magnificent, spiritual, and providing place. “But it’s also fuel. It’s fuel and it is going to burn,” he said.
