Here is what I don’t understand about wildfire. Humans have used fire as a tool for millennia. In our era, for the last 200 years we have tried to stop wildfires because they are destructive to property and life. As a result of this thinking, there is now a whole industry related to putting fires out. But we now know native Americans used fire to clear paths especially in the deciduous eastern forest for ease of travel and creation of trade and hunting routes. Thus, just as we have disputes now about how we should treat fire, those differences of opinion have been around for a long time. We also know a great deal about what to do to repair, remediate, and restore after a fire. In spite of all this information about fire, we may be entering a time when all we can do is learn to live with fire.
There are many opinions about what humans can do to lessen the possibility of wildfires starting and becoming catastrophic. To this end there are tools available that have been tested practically and been subject to scientific research that can be implemented now. Fine fuel loads can be reduced. Forests can be thinned. Lightning storms can’t be stopped by human intervention, but they can be predicted with increasing accuracy. There are herbicides that have been developed to aid in the reduction of fine fuel loads as well.
Wildfire is a subject on many minds currently. The next Farm Bill passed by Congress will likely have policy changes and some money to help implement those changes. The insurance industry has assessed risks associated with wild land urban interface and in some cases has canceled policies and decided not to write new business in fire prone areas. This decision has caught the attention of legislators so there will be more protection efforts by policy leaders in legislatures and other local government bodies.
Every rancher using private or public ranges for forage knows prescriptive grazing by livestock is one of the best methods to reduce fine fuel loads. Annuals which, for the most part,are invasive species are good forages when timed correctly to be consumed. However, the permits on public range allotments are inflexible for timing seasons of use and the land management agencies don’t stray very often from the permitted seasons of use even when it is obvious from a ground observation the fine fuel loads could be significantly reduced by a prescriptive grazing strategy.
This, of course begs a question. Why aren’t more preventive measures employed prior to fires even starting? It just seems to me more effort and resources are brought to bear after a wildfire starts than before. Spending a fraction of the money it would take to control a hundreds of thousands acre wildfire by using some of the methods mentioned above and other defensive strategies like timber thinning, brush clearing around structures and carbon fuel sources, and being more flexible in grazing seasons of use could go a long way in reducing the severity of wildfires and possibly even preventing the explosion from a few acres to thousands of acres.
I just attended a two-day meeting in Las Vegas sponsored by the Desert research Institute, part of the University of Nevada System. The title of the conference was “Wildfire Recovery and Resilience: Working Across Silos to Drive Solutions”. Notable in this title is no reference to “prevention.” Even so, the conference was a wealth of information and opinion about the global problem we humans face in this new age of basically constant, not seasonal, wildfire threats.
Attendance was a valuable experience for me to broaden the way I think about the subject in general, but also to focus that thinking on the need for a new way to address this problem by elected governments, land management agencies and people about the way they need to adapt their minds to a different paradigm about ways to prevent, be more flexible in responding and better manage limited resources for post fire recovery and pre- fire defense and prevention.
One major thing I took away from this experience which was echoed by many other attendees and speakers was the need to be more inclusive by people who create good defenses, fight fires as quickly as possible after they start, use prescribed fire in a more effective way and bring local expertise into the discussion. There is wealth of information which could be useful for those decision makers by tapping into resource users such as ranchers, mining companies and logging companies, not to mention people who live in wildland areas.
Another thing that surprised me from the conference is the complexity of the whole subject of wildfire. My eyes were certainly opened to areas of inquiry and discussion that I frankly never considered in my experience and thoughts about wildfires. I have worked on wildfire fighting as a heavy equipment operator and on the fire line using hand tools to prevent the spread of fires. Also, in my capacity as a leader in the livestock industry I have heard presentations and discussions about the subject for many years.
Now I have a more global perspective about the subject and an awareness that we as a people are not doing enough together to work on the problem of prevention, recovery and resilience in the wildfire arena. Let us hope there is an increasing awareness of the necessity to work together on all the aspects of fire and its impact on our world.
Finally, I want to make a comment on a subject in the arena of politics that I have rarely touched in the many years I have written this. Nothing you read next should lead you to guess what my political leanings are or that this publication endorses or agrees with my view. Recently, a major national public figure compared the Medal of Freedom that he gave to a political donor as being more important than the Congressional Medal of Honor. He said the Presidential Medal of Freedom was” equivalent” and “much better” than the Medal of Honor. I am compelled as a disabled veteran of the Vietnam War to respond.
The Medal of Honor is given to real heroes, people who gave their lives or endangered their lives in acts of bravery that usually saved or protected other lives. In no possible way is the Medal of Freedom equivalent to the Medal of Honor. In no possible way should a recipient of the Medal of Freedom be compared to a recipient of the Medal of Honor. I will acknowledge that past recipients of the Medal of Freedom have, for the most part, made significant contributions to our society in many important ways. But until you have been in a war zone and experienced the pressure and danger of life there, there is no way you could agree with the assertion that the Medal of Freedom is more important than the Medal of Honor.
I’ll see you soon.