Entering the firefight

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

By Melanie Stein

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-After years of drought, a low-snow year and a warmer than usual spring, the upcoming wildfire season is on many residents’ minds in Jackson Hole.

Writer, photographer and conservationist George Wuerthner will speak about wildfire and about his new book, “Wild Fire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy,” at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday at the Jackson Campus of the Teton Science Schools. Wuerthner is the author of 34 books. His free lecture and slideshow are sponsored by the Western Watersheds Association.

Wuerthner first became interested in fire ecology in college and has been closely following forest and fire management policy ever since. Like many others, he believes that the nation’s fire management policies have shifted over the past 20 or 30 years to view fire as a destructive and devastating force, rather than a rejuvenating part of the natural world.

From a hotel room in Sheridan, Wyo., where he was preparing to give a talk, Wuerthner likened the state of fire management to that of predator ecology in the West. For many years, wolves and other high predators were seen as nuisances and threats rather than as playing an important role in nature.

In “Wild Fire,” he writes, “Our major goal in creating this book is to promote a greater appreciation of the role of wildfire on the landscape, to challenge commonly held assumptions about wildfire, and to encourage development of an ecologically based wildfire policy for public lands.”
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Planet Jackson Hole: How long were you a firefighter?

George Wuerthner: I was never a firefighter in the sense of hired to fire fight. What happened was, a lot of times when you work for these agencies – I don’t know if it’s true anymore – back in the ’70s when they were shorthanded, when they got all the regional firefighters out there, they would get everybody else they could get on the fire lines. And so I worked doing it both when I worked for the Forest Service as well as the [Bureau of Land Management]. I was put out on a number of fires to hold the lines and control the end of the fire lines … .

PJH: In the book you talk about the fact that while you were on those frontlines those couple times, it sort of sparked a few questions.

GW: … I started to wonder if putting out the fires was really the best thing or a good thing at all. And there were a lot of other people of course raising such issues as well, and they were influential on me. This one time I finally went out there on the line – and you had to volunteer to be put on like that – so I just said I didn’t want to go out on any more fires, because I just didn’t feel good about trying to put them out.

PJH: What was the reaction to that?

GW: Most people wanted to go out on fire lines because you got a lot of overtime, so they thought I was crazy because, you know, you’re passing up big bucks! …
Some of the people … knew that there was no good reason to be putting out all these fires so aggressively. …

I think that the agencies were on a good track through the ’80s in terms of allowing a lot of fires to burn, and then the Yellowstone fires of ’88 sort of traumatized everybody. Because there was the perception – and this is an important thing – a perception that somehow that those large fires were the result of mismanagement in terms of a sense that, well, if the Park Service had only done more prescribed burning or if they had only … logged in the parks or whatever we wouldn’t have big fires.

But that’s a failure to understand how large fires burn, and one of the things I talk about in my talks as well as in the book is that when you have conditions for large fires, like the ’88 fires in Yellowstone, which is an extended drought coupled with wind and low humidity, you really can’t stop fires. And a lot of the firefighters know that, and I think a lot of the agency folks know that. But the public has been given the perception … that it’s sort of like you can decide to turn on a fire or turn it off …

But, anyway, the agencies were traumatized, and they kind of went back and looked at how they managed fire and so forth, and they’ve gradually come back to the conclusion that they’re wasting their money and time trying to put out fire under those conditions.

PJH: So are you saying then that there has been a shift back to allowing these big fires to just burn on their own or –

GW: … The Forest Service has a new policy … . They call it appropriate management response. And that’s sort of the new term. But basically what it says is, you know, look at the situation and if you know you can’t put out the fire, don’t even try to start, don’t risk people’s lives, don’t waste money doing it.

PJH: Does that go for fires in more urban, populated areas as well?

GW: … I think that when they say appropriate management response, it’s mostly related to places with fewer risks to housing and so forth. But that’s part of this new response, or firefighting plan, is a response to the growing problem of ex-urban sprawl, of people building houses back in the woods. And that is taking up more and more money and time to fight, and it also puts firefighters at greater risk, and here’s why: If you’re fighting a fire, you do so strategically.

You say, OK, I’m going to try to hold the fire line at this river, which is a natural firebreak, or I’m going to try to hold the fire line at the top of this rocky ridge, where it’s going to run out of fuel … You pick your place for your battle, so to speak. But when you have a house out there, you don’t get to pick where the battle is. … I think the Forest Service is recognizing that trying to put out fires that you can’t put out, number one, takes money and resources away from other fires or parts of a fire that they might be better off spending their money on, or … they have to spend their money on it, in a sense that somebody’s house or cabin is there.

PJH: What’s the difference, then, between the Forest Service policies and the National Park policies?

GW: They’re getting closer and closer together, but in the past the Park Service has always been much more interested in ecological protection and values, and so they were more inclined to recognize the value, the ecological value of fire … . The Forest Service, in the past, part to the reason, the rationale, for firefighting was to protect … logging, forest that they wanted to log, and with the Park Service … it didn’t have that economic incentive. It was much more willing to allow trees to burn up and not see it as a problem. That’s one of the changes that I see. …

The Forest Service is doing far less logging than it used to do in the past. … When you look back historically over a long period of time, what I’m talking about is not the last couple hundred years but, say, the last couple thousand years. You see that there have been other periods of time when we had extended drought – multi-decadal type of drought … The last major drought like that was around a 1000-1100 AD … At that same time period there were massive wildfires all around the West and huge fires in places that today such large fires are unheard of.

PJH: Could you give me an example of where that might be?

GW: … The western slope of the Sierra Nevada, which is characterized as having high-frequency but low-intensity fires – in other words fires that don’t kill most of the trees. In the last several hundred years, that’s how it’s been characterized, and yet they have evidence from that time period, around 1100-1200 AD, of a big fire or maybe many fires, because they can’t tell necessarily what it is, but massive fires along the whole western slope of the Sierra Nevada. …

It’s very likely that global warming, if it continues and is real – as many people believe it is, and there’s sure a lot of evidence that it is – we’re likely moving into a period of time where we’ll have conditions very similar in terms of fire flammability as happened a thousand years ago. The implications of this – and there are several implications for fire policy – one is that we are probably going to see a lot more large fires … .

PJH: And in places where we haven’t been seeing them, perhaps?

GW: That’s right, and in ecosystems that we haven’t typically seen large fires as well. And they’re going to be the kind of fire that we probably can’t stop … In other words, we may be getting into different climatic regimes, and it doesn’t take much. It’s not just warming. We have changes in precipitation. For example, when the precipitation comes, that will affect then what plants are there. When I say plants I’m mostly talking about trees, but it’s everything. … At the same time, some other plants might become more restricted.

PJH: So then it might be fair to say that climate change or global warming-induced fires may also, in addition to fires getting bigger and in places where they haven’t been, it may dramatically change the re-growth of some of these [plants].

GW: Exactly, exactly. You may have places where, let’s say, there’s a fire and, let’s say, ponderosa pine used to grow there. It may become too dry for ponderosa pine, so they don’t re-grow back on that spot. There’s two things going on. It’s not just the response of the plant to the change in climate, because certain plants need moisture at certain times … but the other thing that happens is you also change the other plans that are there, and there may be other more aggressive plants that can take over a site. …

PJH: Which would, of course, affect all sorts of other ecosystems aside from the trees.

GW: Right. …

PJH: Jackson Hole had a relatively light snow year and a fairly warm spring, and there’s already sort of been a buzz around town that certain areas of the Gros Ventre are seeming like late summer conditions or drought-like conditions. Does that sort of put us in a high risk situation for a big fire this summer?

GW: It does. It doesn’t mean you will have a big fire … I flew over Yellowstone about a month ago … just north of Yellowstone Lake over the Hayden Valley … I was thinking about how in 1989 – that’s the year after the big fires – I took a picture on July 10 on the road between North Geyser Basin and Hayden Valley, there by the Grand Canyon, where the snow there was still six feet deep on July 10.

And it occurred to me as I flew over Yellowstone a month ago that there wasn’t any snow anyplace there, and this is … two months earlier, and my thought was, “This is a lot like 1988.” …

There are key ingredients to having a big fire. One is drought, the other is wind, and the third thing is low humidity, and the fourth thing of course to have a big fire, you’ve got to have an ignition source and then fuels. It doesn’t mean just because you have say a drought that you’re going to have a big fire because you may not get any ignitions.

PJH: Humans naturally desire to live in these beautiful places where they can be outside and enjoy and appreciate wilderness and forests. Are places like Jackson and other mountain towns examples of communities that have sprung up in places that are really dangerous in terms of wild fires? Or is that something that’s more of a concern with places like southern California, where there’s massive growth adjacent to these forests.

GW: Most of the ecosystems around Jackson are characterized by what we call stand replacement fires, and stand replacement fires don’t happen very often. When they do happen, they tend to be big ones, like Yellowstone.

So, in some ways the risk is relatively low for any one year compared to someplace like southern California, where you have Santa Ana winds every year and you have chaparral, which is highly flammable stuff that burns really well and burns more frequently then say the lodgepole pine forests might be in the Jackson Hole valley. …

One of the things that I push is that we’re still seeing a lot more sprawl out from urban areas, and that creates problems for firefighters because they’re trying to defend those houses and they’re not in good places. … A better thing to have is to have concentrated growth in and close to the city of Jackson, for example, so that the outer perimeter is pretty well defined.

PJH: So what’s the solution to that? What do you talk about?

GW: I think that particularly county commissioners have to start biting the bullet and institute planning to try to reduce sprawl, not only for fire reasons but for a whole host of other reasons as well. … Individual homeowners have to take responsibility for the safety of their homes. …

There’s a lot of research showing that if you take the proper precautions as far as clearing vegetation – that doesn’t mean cutting down every single tree by any means, but it might mean cutting down some trees right next to your house, it might mean making sure you have a metal roof … things like that – but if you take those kinds of precautions, 95 percent of the houses that have done that properly will live through a stand replacement fire sweeping right past them.

PJH: If you could write this Forest Service management policy to allow fires to take over naturally and restore forests, as they’re intended to do, what would your policy be?

GW: I would shift most of my resources towards community protection, and I mean community, not real far from community. … I would focus in on trying to get, like I said, houses on the periphery … of towns so that they’re fire safe, maybe creating a buffer zone around the community. …

One of the things that can be done, for example, is doing a lot of prescribed burning. And right now, agencies do do it, but they spend a lot more money fighting fires then they do, say, setting fires under prescribed conditions. Yet if you do that frequently around a community – and I emphasize it has to be done frequently, it can’t be done just once – and you make that part of your management over time, you can of course reduce the risk that a fire will invade a town.

PJH: How do we begin to change society’s attitude towards fire and stop treating it like the enemy and start appreciating it for what it does for our ecosystems?

GW: … I was in and around Yellowstone a lot through the 1980s and ’90s and so forth, and I’d be just standing there at some overview at the side of the road and somebody would pull up and they’d look out and say, “God, you know it doesn’t look that bad, I thought the whole park was burned down.” …

The more people actually get out and see these places, particularly after a number of years, they tend to have a more positive view. … Changing the perception that way I think goes a long way, and I see that change happening, I think. I think we’re getting there as a society, and every time we have a big fire and a bunch of houses burn up, it gets pushed back a little bit. But I think it’s like one step back and then two steps forward.

Courtesy Photo
George Wuerthner will speak about fire policy tonight at 7:30 at the Teton Science Schools.

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Entering the firefight | Planet JH News Article: General Environment

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