Is fire bad or good?

[Jo Ann Fites-Kaufman]

Native Americans and others used fire for life survival for thousands of years...burning to improve food, basketry material and to clear travel routes. Then in the past 100 years, Europeans arrived and did an excellent job putting out fires. This has been getting more difficult in key situations lately, and more costly, when it is very dry, windy, terrain is rugged, or vegetation and fuels are dense and continuous.  More recently, many have realized that fires can be a very useful modern tool for more cheaply and effectively reducing fuel hazard and restoring ecosystem health. But smoke is a by-product that comes along with restoration as well as wildfires that are tough to put out. I think fire is a double-edged sword. Since fire in most of California is inevitable..."it is not if it will burn, but when"...the challenge is learning how to live with it and managing fire so that it benefits us. What do you think? The billion dollar question needs your help!

[Erik Piikkila]

Wildfires/Mega Fires have been impacted, controlled and continue to be shaped by many factors.  These include:

• Prehistoric & Historic Fire Regimes
• Climate Change & Global Warming
• Native American Fires for Berry Production & Wildlife Forage, & Land Clearing
• Harvesting Regimes over last 150 Yrs
• Harvesting Policies
• Utilization Standards
• Timber Supply & Jobs 
• 100 Yrs of Fire Suppression
• 100 Yrs of Interrupted Fire Cycles
• 100 Yrs of Fuel Build Ups
• Fire Management Policies
• Growth of Wildland Urban Interface 
• Continued Knowledge Growth in Ecosystems, Landscapes & Ecological Processes & Services
• Non Threatened, Threatened & Endangered Species Habitat and Disturbance Requirements

Many would like to know if the fires we have seen in the 1990's and especially in the 2000's have never been seen before and are increasing in intensities and extents.

Or were the fire events in the 1200 - 1700's, the 1800's and the 1920's & 1930's even larger & more intense than the fires of the last 20 years.

I believe that looking at the past 200 years with special emphasis on the last 150 years of harvesting and wildfires will allow us to:

Learn From The Past, To Understand The Present, To Predict The Future

The last 150 Years will be crucial as we look to a future of dry, warmer winters, increasing droughts, and hot dry summers.  

The last 150 Years of Harvesting and Wildfires was recorded and described in great detail in many reports that are hidden and forgotten on the shelves of archives & libraries.

As well, the impacts of 150 Years of Harvesting and Fires on many 10's of millions of acres across most Lower 48 States and in particular across the West, are also hidden and forgotten as well.

There is more to discuss but I have attached a graphic that shows the relative amounts of Native American Fires, Harvesting, Wildfires, and Fuel Build Ups over the past 200 Years. 

[Jo Ann Fites-Kaufman]

Justin makes a great point. Not all historic fire was "low intensity" or "low severity". What exactly the mix was in any one ecosystem, any one year, or any eon is difficult to quantify. We do know that it varied. We do know that some high severity fire occurred in all ecosystems, just the proportion varied. That is a big reason that when we described fire regimes and ecology in Fire in California Ecosystems Text, that we look at the "distributions" or mixture of fire intensity and severity and frequency, not just the average. I like to say, sometimes "means are meaningless". Do we really think that fires burned every 10 years in the ponderosa pine forests? Or was it more like 2 years, 15 years, 5 years etc that averaged together makes 10. In the higher elevation and moister parts of the mixed conifer (north slopes, lower slopes, northwest Sierras) it was probably more variable in frequency, severity and intensity. SO...I couldn't agree more!

[Justin Augustine]

I think we need to be very careful about the language we choose to use when describing fire.  I am seeing the word "uncharacteristic" thrown around by many folks but without much context.  While many people within the Forest Service continue to argue that we in fact know what is characteristic fire or not, the reality is much more nuanced.  There is a significant body of literature that has amassed over the past decade or so that demonstrates that the Forest Service's assumptions about moderate and high severity fire are no longer the whole story and that we need to reassess how we approach moderate and high severity fire.  To me, the role of a public agency like the Forest Service is to be up front and honest about the state of the science, which includes acknowledging the limitations of the literature being relied upon as well as explaining to the public the entire set of literature on the issue.  I hope that as the planning process goes forward there will be a much more open discussion about fire than there has been in the past and that the Forest Service will not continue to be entrenched in one particular point of view.

[John Hofmann]

It is not about Fire, it is about controlling and shaping forest growth.  Forest management, whether by Native American or Europeans, has always been about controlling forest growth.  Jo Ann is correct that for Native Americans, fire was the tool that worked.  It controlled wildfire by limiting forest density and created favorable forest conditions for their lifestyle.  Their life style did not include wood products that the lifestyle of Europeans did.  Europeans preferred to grow trees, then harvest them, rather than burn them as seedlings.  So the combination of fire suppression and harvest worked.  In the 1950s, the Administration determined that by the year 2000, national forest system lands would need to grow 21 BBF to meet the wood demands of the citizens of the United States.  Forest managers accomplished the mission, increasing the growth from 3 BBF to 22 BBF.  Our problem today is that we elected to import wood instead of harvesting our own, increasing imports by 18 BBF while lowering the harvest to 3 BBF.  Fire suppression without growth control such as harvest or prescribed fire does not work.  So today, we have forest conditions that Native American's and Europeans worked hard to avoid - dense forests that burn catastrophically.  Our decision, like previous generations, is to determine how to match our forests and our lifestyle.  We can use any combination of fire or harvesting, each with advantages and disadvantages.  Each has consequences to our lifestyle.

[Jonathan Long]

A key point from the science synthesis report is that in the specific context of the Sierra Nevada at this point in time, more fires similar to those that occurred centuries ago are needed to sustain important values, while many of the very large and uncharacterstically severe fires that have occurred in recent years should be avoided to protect important values. Also, smoke should not be regarded as an unintended byproduct, but rather as an essential component of the system when it occurs as it did in the past.

[Phil Bowden]

Fire is fire; it just is. Fire only becomes good or bad if it affects something someone values. Terms like Fire resiliency and Fire Severity are value laden and have to be put in the context of what value is being affected; there is no universal fire resiliency or fire severity. The main thing is fire is just fire; the good and bad part is all in the eye of the beholder. The main question we should always ask 1st is what do we value then later get to how fire may change what we value.