Month: April 2020

Dr. Timothy Ingalsbee’s paper, Getting Burned: A Taxpayer’s Guide to Wildfire Suppression Costs, outlines the past and present topics plaguing national fire policy and operations. Amid the social, economic and ecologic issues burdening fire management efforts, Ingalsbee offers three explanations for contemporary increases in wildfire size and severity. Ingalsbee’s three highlighted factors effecting fire size and severity consist of, 1) excessive fuel loads from past fire suppression actions and fire exclusion policies, 2) the continued of expansion of new housing and 3) climate change (Ingalsbee, 2010). Socioenvironmental, institutional and operational issues afflicting fire management are exacerbated by these three represented factors and are causing the fire management fiscal and managerial systems to spiral out of control.

Ingalsbee begins his narrative with the 1908 Forest Fires Emergency Act that provided the Forest Service with the initial deficit spending concept or more commonly known as a “blank-check”. Building upon the history, Ingalsbee establishes a framework that provides a strong basis for understanding today’s skyrocketing suppression costs. Beginning with the “Siege of 87”, as referred to by Ingalsbee (2010), the fire suppression model began to collapse. Spending increased exorbitantly in order to maintain some proportion of perceived control over wildland fires.

As spending increased and fires grew larger, a lack of firefighter safety became apparent with a series of fatality fires in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. Due to policy structure and cultural trends, managers turned to further suppression with anything and everything at their disposal, regardless of costs, pinning expenses to the “blank-check”. As management complexities increased, both on the fire-line and off, management spending increased to not only suppress fires, but to provide managers with safety nets in the event of disaster and to maintain public/political support.    

Ingalsbee’s 43-page paper, for the most part, concisely and accurately represents the issues impacting fire management at the socioenvironmental, institutional and operational levels. From working within the field, it is clear that many of the discussed conditions impacting fire management’s fiscal predicament are true. However, Ingalsbee’s synthesis of fire management problems, may lead a reader to conclude that fire managers are to blame for most of these issues. I find this problematic. Fire managers are there to do their job, and most are very well practiced at maintaining effective, seamless and safe operations. The barriers restricting progressive fire management lie within the lack of incentives for resource benefiting fire operations.   

Ingalsbee, Timothy. 2010. “Getting Burned: A Taxpayers Guide to Wildfire Suppression Costs.” FUSEE 1-43.

In the early twentieth century Forest Service Chief Greeley produced an article titled “Paiute Forestry or The Fallacy of Light Burning” sparking controversy throughout land management spheres. Greeley’s article highlighted the stark differences in fire management ideals across the North American landscape at the time. Light fire was labeled by the Forest Service as a destructive nuisance that only served to remove timber volume from forests and render them unproductive. Chief Greeley’s position on the use of light fire as a tool to increase and maintain forest health was that of distaste and disagreement. Greeley’s formal European forestry training did not align with such incendiarism focused tactics and methods for managing forests. To the contrary, Greeley’s management tactics proposed the complete suppression of all wildfires, thus retaining and maintaining heathy stands for future harvest. Fire that was to remain of the landscape should be used solely for site preparation for the establishment of new marketable plantations. Greeley did comprehend that severe fires would occur in climatically conducive regions, however these forests would regenerate more quickly than landscapes experiencing light burning tactics. These utilitarian approaches to forest management drove many of the policies that were put into place during the 1900’s. The Weeks Act of 1911 and in 1935 the development of the 10am rule drove home these conceptions of appropriate forest and fire management. Management practices became increasingly progressive through the later decades of the 1900’s. Modifications to operations and objectives were eventually molded to reflect a more appropriate use of fire to improve forest conditions, resiliency and health. These changes in policy and management were brought to light as the unintended consequences of fire suppression became visible and apparent in North America’s forests.

In the later decades of the 1900’s acts such as the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960, the Wilderness Act of 1964 and the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 indicated alterations in public and legislative views of fire on North American landscapes. In addition to these legislative measures, the Leopold Report, produced in 1963, highlighted the need for fire to be returned to fire-dependent environments for proper ecosystem functioning. The National Park Service (NPS) was arguably the first agency to realize the implications of fire’s removal from ecosystems. In 1968 the Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park established the nation’s first fire use program, NPS also notably being the first agency to establish dedicated Wildland Fire Use Modules for conducting and managing resource benefiting fires. These changes in fire management opinions were brought about by a lack in the ability of federal agencies to effectively and efficiently suppress wildfires. Eventually federal agencies such as the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service followed suit in applying managed fire to their lands. Fires today are known to play critical roles in providing ecosystem services and allowing stand successional trajectories to progress, ultimately allowing for the development of more complex landscapes.