How Wildfire Affects Recreation and What We Can Do About It
Photo credit: Marcus Kauffman. Jones Fire in the Willamette National Forest, Oregon.
This piece was co-authored by Jamie Ervin and Tania Lown-Hecht.
It seems that every year, the lamentations about wildfires and their effects on outdoor recreation, our communities, and our health start even earlier. More than 3 million acres have already burned this year, and many experts anticipate another intense year of smoke, fire closures, and the loss of property and life across the West. What used to be contained to a few bad months in late summer in the driest states in the West have evolved from “fire seasons” to “fire years” and Americans are feeling the impact of smoke and poor air quality across the entire country.
The outdoor recreation community is profoundly affected by wildfires. Wildfires—or even the risk of them—regularly close National Forests, Parks, and other public lands. They have destroyed trails and other outdoor recreation infrastructure (as well as businesses, homes, and roads). Air quality and wildfire smoke are an additional hazard that affect far more people than just those who live near where fires happen. Smoke that travels across the U.S. is one of the biggest and most visible effects of increasingly long and severe fire seasons, and often makes outdoor activity impossible. Poor air quality and smoke are also hazardous to our health, especially for vulnerable populations, like children, pregnant women, and people with asthma.
Lawmakers are deeply concerned with how best to address wildfire risk, but not always on the same page about what policies will be most effective to manage fires and reduce the risk of future fires. The science on fire is clear, however, and there are a number of solutions that can help build resilience to wildfire. Understanding these solutions, though, requires understanding fire’s ecological role on our landscapes, and how our actions over the past two centuries have changed fire behavior, fire’s impact on people, and our cultural relationship with fire.
Wildfire is a natural ecological process. Though we have become accustomed (partly due to decades of fire suppression and the Smokey the Bear campaign) to the idea that landscapes shouldn’t burn, many areas of the country—notably forests in the west and southeast where outdoor recreation opportunities are plentiful—historically had regular fires. These fires regularly removed “fuels” like leaves, pine needles, shrubs, and trees from forests that cause wildfires to burn more intensely. Scientists use terms like “fire regime” (the pattern, frequency, and severity of fire) and “fire return interval” (meaning the average number of years between fires) to describe how certain ecosystems are adapted to different types of fire. For example, scientists estimate that Sierra Nevada mixed conifer forests (common around Yosemite Valley and Lake Tahoe) burned approximately every 14 years prior to the era of fire suppression (source). That’s a far cry from how fires have been managed over the last century.
Fires are getting more intense. A series of actions over the past 150 years have dramatically altered the role that fire plays in our ecosystems, bringing the relationship between people, nature, and fire out of balance. First, the genocide and forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands halted cultural burning, an important traditional cultural practice refined over millennia by Indigenous peoples. Second, fire suppression policies by the federal government effectively removed fire from fire-adapted ecosystems across the country starting in the early 1900s. For many years, the Forest Service used a “10 a.m. policy,” where their goal was to completely suppress any fire that started by 10 a.m. This caused an unnatural build-up of fuels in our forests that increases fire risk over the long term. Third, logging practices that targeted larger, more fire-resilient trees and replanted trees too densely also increased the risk of severe wildfire. Development in fire-prone areas has also contributed, making it more likely that wildfires will burn down homes and other infrastructure. Finally, climate change is rapidly changing the fire environment by making extreme fire conditions like longer droughts, extreme winds, hotter temperatures, longer fire seasons, and less snow, more common and less predictable. Combined, these conditions lead to more intense, more damaging fires, which in turn are harder and more expensive to suppress. These modern “megafires” threaten our communities, as well as critical ecological values like wildlife habitat, carbon storage, and water quality, that forests and other natural lands provide.
We can (and must) live sustainably with fire. Fire is both inevitable and ecologically necessary throughout much of the U.S., but it can also have catastrophic impacts for people and nature. Learning to live with fire requires a comprehensive approach that considers a full range of wildfire impacts—from urban areas all the way to our most remote wilderness. For example, local policies like planning and zoning laws—combined with investments in home hardening and defensible space—are needed reduce the direct threats to communities when wildfires occur. We also need to invest in updating powerlines and other key infrastructure in order to prevent unwanted wildfires from igniting in dry, hot, or windy conditions when fire risk is high. On the broader landscape, projects that remove some trees, especially in dense or overgrown forests, can help address the legacy of fuels from fire suppression and logging in order to reduce the severity of future wildfires.
More “good” fire is important. One especially critical tool where more attention and investment from policymakers is needed is prescribed fire, which involves strategically returning fire to the land under safe, pre-planned conditions. Prescribed fire removes smaller non-commercial fuels (like branches, brush, and pine needles) that can make fires worse. Prescribed fire can also treat steeper, more remote areas that are inaccessible for forest thinning and other mechanical fuel reduction tools. There is broad scientific consensus that the Forest Service and other agencies—along with key partners like tribes—must greatly increase the pace and scale of prescribed burning (particularly in the West), but they need public support for these efforts, including support from the recreation community.
Recently, the Forest Service’s prescribed fire program came under scrutiny, in part due to an escaped prescribed burn that sparked a large, destructive wildfire in New Mexico. This event caused the agency to pause all prescribed fire operations for the remainder of the spring while they consider how to prevent similar outcomes in the future. This fire had serious consequences for air quality for weeks in the state, and destroyed several hundred homes. Ensuring the safety of prescribed fire is incredibly important.
Outdoor Alliance supports the Forest Service’s effort to increase the safety and efficacy of prescribed fires, of which 99.84% go as planned. We also acknowledge that the conditions that require more prescribed burning—high fuel loads in our forests and climate change—are not going away. We can either work to experience fire on our terms through prescribed fire, or we can experience fire under the worst possible conditions when fire suppression operations fail. There is no “no-fire” option. Continuing to build the agency capacity and public understanding needed to support more prescribed burning, while doing everything possible to ensure burning is done safely, are essential.
We recently shared a letter of support for the Forest Service’s prescribed fire program, which you can read here. There is more that Outdoor Alliance and the broader outdoor community can do to address fire. Along with supporting managed fire, we can encourage our lawmakers and land managers to invest in fire mitigation, including through a proposed Civilian Climate Corps, which will employ Americans to do important fire preparedness, fire mitigation, and climate recovery work.
We’ve made it simple to ask your lawmakers to support these efforts: