chapter five - fire management
FIRE MANAGEMENT FOR THE 21 CENTURY
Deconstructing the Culture of Fire Suppression
Over a century of national and global fire exclusion and suppression has led to what can only be called a global catastrophic firemergency. Governments in countries including the United States and Australia are now under siege, by man caused catastrophic fire. They should declare national states of emergency in order to cut through the red tape, bureaucratic inertia, special interest control, public ignorance and political stalemate to get light fire back into light fire ecosystems.
Over the past 120 years the growing culture of fire exclusion and suppression has evolved unwieldy, dysfunctional government land management bureaucracies unresponsive to reform. To make matters worse, a fire suppression industrial complex worth billions of dollars has developed dependent on the suppression of catastrophic fire. Any and all attempts to move quickly from fire suppression to sound ecological fire management policy have either failed or moved forward at glacial rates because of the above factors. The proof is that catastrophic fires are still increasing in intensity and surface area covered. If real progress was being made overall, the acres being devastated by catastrophic fire would be decreasing rather than increasing.
Any serious attempts at reform are going to have to have broad public support and that has been a long time coming in spite of the damage to life, property and nature’s ecosystems. It’s sad but true, that the pain is not yet great enough to overcome the obstacles to good fire management. Good fire management will come; it’s only a matter of time before the suffering from catastrophic fire becomes severe enough to force change and undo over 100 years of fire suppression propaganda. The question really becomes is there anything we can do now to facilitate reform and reduce the damage to both man and nature by removing obstacles to good fire management?
The book Burning Questions by David Carle has a section on my father and this one case that well illustrates that it takes much more than science to change the fire suppression culture in large government agencies. It’s going to take powerful activism by both individuals and institutions following in the footsteps of people like Ed Komarek Sr. The fact that catastrophic wildfire is on the increase in much of the world is an indication that now that we have the science done, emphasis should be shifted to powerful determined activist solutions to change the culture of fire suppression to that of one of a culture of good fire management.
“In December Komarek invited Weaver to speak at the 1963 Fire Ecology Conference. “I have been much impressed, both by your writings, as well as the practical application of fire on Apache, Klamath and Colville Reservations. The many objections raised by some foresters to the use of fire in Ponderosa seem awfully reminiscent, even to the actual phrases used, to what Mr. Stoddard and I have had to put up with, until recently. Now one would think the Forest Service invented the use of fire in Longleaf and Loblolly.” Komarek mentioned he had hoped to see Dr. Biswell during his western tour, but found out when he got to Berkeley that he was in Greece.
Weaver requested to BIA permission to attend the conference. His letter to his supervisor revealed concern that the request would be denied; Weaver made it a personal plea: “I have firmly in mind your letter to me of August 31, 1962, and my reply of October 5. In it I called your attention to the fact that my past advocacy of more research on fire in ponderosa pine has frequently made me the center of attention with respect to this subject.” He was aware of the “austerity program” within the BIA at the time, but “I would be anything but frank if I did not indicate that I would very much like to go to the conference. I have always wanted to visit the Southern Pine region and this looks like the best chance, if not the only chance, that I may ever get, for I am nearing the end of my career as a forester. I will not harm the Bureau’s relationship with anything that I may present. In fact, I may do them some good.”
Weaver, on the next day, also sent Komarek word that Biswell was back from Greece. Komarek, assuming that Weaver would attend, told him, “I am now hoping that we can get Dr. Biswell to also discuss fire and (southern) California at the conference. I heard some vague references among forest service personnel that he had some unhappy experiences because of his views, probably similar to what Mr. Stoddard and I had to contend (with) in years gone by.”
Weaver was denied permission to attend. He sent that disappointing news to Komarek on January 30, 1963: “The official letter refusing permission showed quite plainly that the Office does not want me to discuss the ecology of fire in Ponderosa pine under any circumstances. After enumerating the various jobs that I am expected to do this spring, the letter suggests quite pointedly that there will not be time available for me to go to Tallahassee.”
Komarek had to wait a week to let his anger cool before he wrote back. “We are mighty concerned about you not being allowed to attend, even at our expense and your time. Frankly, if you were not so near retirement I would force the issue” by seeking support from friends who were senators. “I had been somewhat afraid of this, “Komarek continued. “Mr. Stoddard and I had hoped that this sort of thing was behind us. You see some 25 years ago I was even threatened with arrest for burning a client’s land with his express permission. I would have written you earlier but I am still a bit hot under the collar. Mr. Stoddard and I have leaned over backward to be more than fair with the various services. However if some of them continue to try un-American tactics we can sure have a good discussion in Congress when appropriation bills come up for hearings.” Harold Weaver was allowed to attend the Third Tall Timbers Fire Ecology conference in 1964, where he spoke on “Fire and Management Problems in Ponderosa Pine.”
David Carle gives some information that shows what a powerful activist person can do in their own right if they are fearless, dedicated and have the passion to use force when necessary to make beneficial changes in human culture and consciousness. False beliefs once firmly entrenched die hard!
The struggle today to end catastrophic fire in light fire ecosystems is no easier today than in my Father’s time, the only difference is that the battle lines have shifted somewhat and the obstacles in some instances have become more subtle and devious.
“More than anyone else, E.V. Komarek . .. promoted the concept of fire as one of nature’s most potent evolutionary and ecological forces” Komarek directed the Tall Timbers Research Station for twenty-one years. He ultimately delivered lectures in twenty-four states and fourteen countries and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Florida State University. Komarek’s papers were donated to Tall Timbers in 1987 and became the genesis of a fire ecology database, named for him, that holds over 12,000 records and can be searched on the Internet. I believe Ed Komarek could sell a forest fire to Smokey Bear,” James Stevenson said at the 1989 Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference that honored Komarek.”
Obstacles to Good Fire Management
In writing this book, I can see how far scientific research of fire in nature has come since I was a bystander in the battle to put fire back into the environment. Anybody that does some research on the Internet or works their way through the Tall Timbers' Fire Conference proceedings can see the huge volume of research on light and catastrophic fire to date, either in the scientific papers themselves, or to the bibliographies on which the articles are based. But more research is not going to solve the problem. It’s also going to take political solutions to solve some of the political issues involved. It’s going to take strong grass roots educational and political activism to get things moving in the right direction. Here are some of the obstacles involved.
1. Need for continued good scientific research on fire. 2. Lack of awareness of native peoples contribution to good fire management. 3. Lack of integration of native knowledge and wisdom into fire
policies. 4. Bureaucratic inertia. 5. Academic and bureaucratic capture. 6. Lack of consistency of fire management. 7. Excessive central planning and control. 8. Lack of public awareness and trust. 9. Risk
After the catastrophic fire season in Arizona and in California in 2013, because of the severe loss of life and destruction of property, people as in other years speak out about the need for reform, but it seems the reform is only incremental and interest soon wanes. In this USA Today article titled Wildfire experts call for more controlled burns, some of these issues are addressed. [93]
“PHOENIX -- As families begin to return to the fire-ravaged communities of Arizona's Yarnell and Peeples Valley, and as investigators delve into why the blaze killed more firefighters than any U.S. wildfire in 80 years, fire experts are renewing calls to make prescribed burns easier to accomplish. Days after the fire, President Barack Obama said the incident "will force government leaders to answer broader questions about how they handle increasingly destructive and deadly wildfires." Firefighters say they know the answers: Ease environmental restrictions and spend more to clear brush and light prescribed burns. They are calling for political courage.”
"The reality is ... there are not enough money or people or resources to go around to make a dent,"
Broyles said. Regulations to protect habitats and clean air often interfere, as regulators balance protecting endangered species and people's lungs with the need to thin forests. It can take up to four years to get approval to do a burn, which has to happen in a three-month window in the fall. Even then, crews can burn only a few hundred acres at a time, and the backlog of acreage is in the millions. One in
five burns is halted midway by state regulators, Hughes said.”
“Hughes and others suggest these reforms for preventing future tragedies like the Yarnell Hill Fire: Loosen restrictions in the Clean Air Act to exempt prescribed burns, or at a minimum make them easier. Loosen restrictions protecting endangered species in the National Environmental Act, particularly when their native habitats rely on periodic fires.• Direct environmental regulators to follow policies uniformly.• Increase federal and state budgets for fire prevention.• Convince environmental activists that improving forest health is better, not worse, for the environment, and convince the public in fire-threatened areas that controlled burns are vital.• Pass and enforce stricter laws requiring property owners to clear dangerous fuels on their land and create "defensive space" from structures.• Hire more "hotshots" or specially-trained crews to do brush clearance and prescribed burns.• Promote volunteer crews to clear fuel.”
The Need for Good Scientific Research on Fire
I think we can safely say we are well on our way to having removed the first of seven major obstacles to proper global fire management, with evidence being the first obstacle to overcome. It was a long hard fight by the pro-fire advocates of my father’s day to get us this far. The way it looks to me, is that we now have plenty of good scientific research and evidence proving the importance of fire in nature and the need for the use of prescribed fire in most of the fire environments on earth.
Deconstructing the Culture of Fire Suppression
Over a century of national and global fire exclusion and suppression has led to what can only be called a global catastrophic firemergency. Governments in countries including the United States and Australia are now under siege, by man caused catastrophic fire. They should declare national states of emergency in order to cut through the red tape, bureaucratic inertia, special interest control, public ignorance and political stalemate to get light fire back into light fire ecosystems.
Over the past 120 years the growing culture of fire exclusion and suppression has evolved unwieldy, dysfunctional government land management bureaucracies unresponsive to reform. To make matters worse, a fire suppression industrial complex worth billions of dollars has developed dependent on the suppression of catastrophic fire. Any and all attempts to move quickly from fire suppression to sound ecological fire management policy have either failed or moved forward at glacial rates because of the above factors. The proof is that catastrophic fires are still increasing in intensity and surface area covered. If real progress was being made overall, the acres being devastated by catastrophic fire would be decreasing rather than increasing.
Any serious attempts at reform are going to have to have broad public support and that has been a long time coming in spite of the damage to life, property and nature’s ecosystems. It’s sad but true, that the pain is not yet great enough to overcome the obstacles to good fire management. Good fire management will come; it’s only a matter of time before the suffering from catastrophic fire becomes severe enough to force change and undo over 100 years of fire suppression propaganda. The question really becomes is there anything we can do now to facilitate reform and reduce the damage to both man and nature by removing obstacles to good fire management?
The book Burning Questions by David Carle has a section on my father and this one case that well illustrates that it takes much more than science to change the fire suppression culture in large government agencies. It’s going to take powerful activism by both individuals and institutions following in the footsteps of people like Ed Komarek Sr. The fact that catastrophic wildfire is on the increase in much of the world is an indication that now that we have the science done, emphasis should be shifted to powerful determined activist solutions to change the culture of fire suppression to that of one of a culture of good fire management.
“In December Komarek invited Weaver to speak at the 1963 Fire Ecology Conference. “I have been much impressed, both by your writings, as well as the practical application of fire on Apache, Klamath and Colville Reservations. The many objections raised by some foresters to the use of fire in Ponderosa seem awfully reminiscent, even to the actual phrases used, to what Mr. Stoddard and I have had to put up with, until recently. Now one would think the Forest Service invented the use of fire in Longleaf and Loblolly.” Komarek mentioned he had hoped to see Dr. Biswell during his western tour, but found out when he got to Berkeley that he was in Greece.
Weaver requested to BIA permission to attend the conference. His letter to his supervisor revealed concern that the request would be denied; Weaver made it a personal plea: “I have firmly in mind your letter to me of August 31, 1962, and my reply of October 5. In it I called your attention to the fact that my past advocacy of more research on fire in ponderosa pine has frequently made me the center of attention with respect to this subject.” He was aware of the “austerity program” within the BIA at the time, but “I would be anything but frank if I did not indicate that I would very much like to go to the conference. I have always wanted to visit the Southern Pine region and this looks like the best chance, if not the only chance, that I may ever get, for I am nearing the end of my career as a forester. I will not harm the Bureau’s relationship with anything that I may present. In fact, I may do them some good.”
Weaver, on the next day, also sent Komarek word that Biswell was back from Greece. Komarek, assuming that Weaver would attend, told him, “I am now hoping that we can get Dr. Biswell to also discuss fire and (southern) California at the conference. I heard some vague references among forest service personnel that he had some unhappy experiences because of his views, probably similar to what Mr. Stoddard and I had to contend (with) in years gone by.”
Weaver was denied permission to attend. He sent that disappointing news to Komarek on January 30, 1963: “The official letter refusing permission showed quite plainly that the Office does not want me to discuss the ecology of fire in Ponderosa pine under any circumstances. After enumerating the various jobs that I am expected to do this spring, the letter suggests quite pointedly that there will not be time available for me to go to Tallahassee.”
Komarek had to wait a week to let his anger cool before he wrote back. “We are mighty concerned about you not being allowed to attend, even at our expense and your time. Frankly, if you were not so near retirement I would force the issue” by seeking support from friends who were senators. “I had been somewhat afraid of this, “Komarek continued. “Mr. Stoddard and I had hoped that this sort of thing was behind us. You see some 25 years ago I was even threatened with arrest for burning a client’s land with his express permission. I would have written you earlier but I am still a bit hot under the collar. Mr. Stoddard and I have leaned over backward to be more than fair with the various services. However if some of them continue to try un-American tactics we can sure have a good discussion in Congress when appropriation bills come up for hearings.” Harold Weaver was allowed to attend the Third Tall Timbers Fire Ecology conference in 1964, where he spoke on “Fire and Management Problems in Ponderosa Pine.”
David Carle gives some information that shows what a powerful activist person can do in their own right if they are fearless, dedicated and have the passion to use force when necessary to make beneficial changes in human culture and consciousness. False beliefs once firmly entrenched die hard!
The struggle today to end catastrophic fire in light fire ecosystems is no easier today than in my Father’s time, the only difference is that the battle lines have shifted somewhat and the obstacles in some instances have become more subtle and devious.
“More than anyone else, E.V. Komarek . .. promoted the concept of fire as one of nature’s most potent evolutionary and ecological forces” Komarek directed the Tall Timbers Research Station for twenty-one years. He ultimately delivered lectures in twenty-four states and fourteen countries and was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Florida State University. Komarek’s papers were donated to Tall Timbers in 1987 and became the genesis of a fire ecology database, named for him, that holds over 12,000 records and can be searched on the Internet. I believe Ed Komarek could sell a forest fire to Smokey Bear,” James Stevenson said at the 1989 Tall Timbers Fire Ecology Conference that honored Komarek.”
Obstacles to Good Fire Management
In writing this book, I can see how far scientific research of fire in nature has come since I was a bystander in the battle to put fire back into the environment. Anybody that does some research on the Internet or works their way through the Tall Timbers' Fire Conference proceedings can see the huge volume of research on light and catastrophic fire to date, either in the scientific papers themselves, or to the bibliographies on which the articles are based. But more research is not going to solve the problem. It’s also going to take political solutions to solve some of the political issues involved. It’s going to take strong grass roots educational and political activism to get things moving in the right direction. Here are some of the obstacles involved.
1. Need for continued good scientific research on fire. 2. Lack of awareness of native peoples contribution to good fire management. 3. Lack of integration of native knowledge and wisdom into fire
policies. 4. Bureaucratic inertia. 5. Academic and bureaucratic capture. 6. Lack of consistency of fire management. 7. Excessive central planning and control. 8. Lack of public awareness and trust. 9. Risk
After the catastrophic fire season in Arizona and in California in 2013, because of the severe loss of life and destruction of property, people as in other years speak out about the need for reform, but it seems the reform is only incremental and interest soon wanes. In this USA Today article titled Wildfire experts call for more controlled burns, some of these issues are addressed. [93]
“PHOENIX -- As families begin to return to the fire-ravaged communities of Arizona's Yarnell and Peeples Valley, and as investigators delve into why the blaze killed more firefighters than any U.S. wildfire in 80 years, fire experts are renewing calls to make prescribed burns easier to accomplish. Days after the fire, President Barack Obama said the incident "will force government leaders to answer broader questions about how they handle increasingly destructive and deadly wildfires." Firefighters say they know the answers: Ease environmental restrictions and spend more to clear brush and light prescribed burns. They are calling for political courage.”
"The reality is ... there are not enough money or people or resources to go around to make a dent,"
Broyles said. Regulations to protect habitats and clean air often interfere, as regulators balance protecting endangered species and people's lungs with the need to thin forests. It can take up to four years to get approval to do a burn, which has to happen in a three-month window in the fall. Even then, crews can burn only a few hundred acres at a time, and the backlog of acreage is in the millions. One in
five burns is halted midway by state regulators, Hughes said.”
“Hughes and others suggest these reforms for preventing future tragedies like the Yarnell Hill Fire: Loosen restrictions in the Clean Air Act to exempt prescribed burns, or at a minimum make them easier. Loosen restrictions protecting endangered species in the National Environmental Act, particularly when their native habitats rely on periodic fires.• Direct environmental regulators to follow policies uniformly.• Increase federal and state budgets for fire prevention.• Convince environmental activists that improving forest health is better, not worse, for the environment, and convince the public in fire-threatened areas that controlled burns are vital.• Pass and enforce stricter laws requiring property owners to clear dangerous fuels on their land and create "defensive space" from structures.• Hire more "hotshots" or specially-trained crews to do brush clearance and prescribed burns.• Promote volunteer crews to clear fuel.”
The Need for Good Scientific Research on Fire
I think we can safely say we are well on our way to having removed the first of seven major obstacles to proper global fire management, with evidence being the first obstacle to overcome. It was a long hard fight by the pro-fire advocates of my father’s day to get us this far. The way it looks to me, is that we now have plenty of good scientific research and evidence proving the importance of fire in nature and the need for the use of prescribed fire in most of the fire environments on earth.
Public Recognition of the Contribution
to Fire Ecosystems by Native Peoples
The second obstacle just now being overcome is a deep profound appreciation of and for the intelligence of indigenous peoples among research scientists and land management organizations. It is just beginning to be recognized that native peoples have a very deep and abiding awareness of the land upon which they live that developed out of necessity, but it has yet to be very well incorporated into institutional public awareness. The fire skills these peoples developed and practiced to create a great diversity of habitats and ecosystems over tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years are still not well understood by modern scientists. Nor are they being integrated very well into public land management policies and procedures.
Fire Ecologists even today are having a tough time trying to figure out where nature’s fire influence on global ecosystems ends and early man’s influence begins. Even today some scientists are questioning what should be obvious, that man has significantly altered natural ecosystems for a very long time. They suggest that lightning started most fires in the past history of man and are having to be proved wrong by research using lightning fire ignition statistics across the globe. So we see this second obstacle still has some legs. :-)
Putting Fire Managers Back on the Land They Manage
The third obstacle to be overcome is how we integrate what we are learning about native people’s intimate association and knowledge of the land into modern fire management institutional policy. One of the major factors is native people’s exquisite detailed knowledge of plants and animals, their habitats and fire ecology. The children learn from their parents by example through a very ancient apprentice system, where knowledge is passed down from generation to generation.
It is widely understood that children gain very basic fundamental knowledge, understanding and skills much more quickly than adults from their surroundings. As people age they gain in experience, but most lose perceptual abilities and sensitivity to their surroundings due to increased thought activity or mental dialogue. How can we even begin to compare the fire skills of a well-educated academic raised in the city with several hundred hours of fire training, with those of a primitive farmer or hunter-gatherer in intimate continuous contact with his or her land, fire and the changes to the land after fire for a lifetime?
Restructuring Public Land Management Bureaucracies
The forth obstacle to be overcome is a problem common to organizations and institutions in general and that a systemic failure to adapt to change. It’s a problem that the natural world takes care of through a kind of adapt or die policy, that is true also of the free market system of the business world that attempts to mimic nature and natural human tendencies in a way. With some regulations to keep predatory capitalism in check, the system works and much better that a central planning economy.
The problem with government institutions is that as they grow they tend to escape public accountability and increasingly are more interested in self-preservation of jobs and positions than serving the public. Another problem is that government institutions tend to become less adaptable to change as they age and fixed in their thinking, just as happens to individuals. In human society as in nature, this problem is solved as old people die to be replaced by their children. But institutions and corporations in theory live until they become so out of touch with reality that some catastrophe like war takes them down or forces them to restructure.
Large government land management agencies are no exception to this rule. The fact that huge fuel loads are continuing to build on the public lands resulting in more and more catastrophic fire caused by fire suppression is still not enough to rapidly shift away from fire suppression to extensive prescribed fire. In a sense they have gone to war against fire and as fire damage increases, they will either lose the
public’s confidence and support, or they will be forced to restructure by the severe public and environmental consequences.
These bureaucracies have become trapped by the Smokey the Bear propaganda monster they themselves created in the public mind. The destructive meme that all forest fires must be suppressed, combined with the fire suppression industry now dependent on fire suppression income, make needed change difficult and almost impossible.
The struggling fledgling prescribed fire divisions within these organizations have little political clout to obtain more funding in the face of a powerful fire suppression lobby also under financial pressures because of tough economic times. In addition, centralized control and central planning work well for military operations and for firefighting, but poorly for extensive controlled burning programs needed that seem to require more decentralization, intimacy with nature and knowledgeable community involvement.
Harold H. Biswell, in his book Prescribed Burning in California Wildlands Vegetation Management, lists as his last chapter excuses and obstacles that incompetent bureaucrats and bureaucracies can come up with as not to control burn and then proceeds to demolish the excuses. :-) I suppose the list is really endless, but Biswell identifies the major excuses of the incompetent, impotent and powerless to do anything bureaucrat!
"1. The Idea That All Fires Are Bad. 2. Confusing Prescribed Fires With Wildfires. 3. Too Much Danger of Fires Escaping Control. 4. Too Much responsibility. 5. Dislike of Smoke From Prescribed Burning. 6. The Public Won’t Let Us Burn. 7. We Need More Research. 8. There Aren’t Enough Burn Days. 9. Prescribed Burning Is Too Costly. 10. We Can Lose Our Jobs. 11. There Is No Money For Prescribed Burning. 12. Negative Influence of Powerful People. 13. Let It Be an Act of God."
The Issue of Academic and Bureaucratic Capture
The fifth obstacle we need to overcome is the problem of academic and bureaucratic capture in which we study the problem to death and do not apply what is learned to remedy the situation. There seems to be no lack of detailed scientific papers today as to the need to move from fire suppression to fire management. However, what good is this knowledge if it does not lead to movement away from fire suppression to fire management and prescribed fire?
Science does not tell us how to act, but culture does. Science can have some effect on culture as long as the political aspects of culture are not so strong as to deny good science. In a case where the political aspects trump the science, we have to deal with the political aspects as we deal with the science. If good fire management and good public fire policy was based on science, we would be much further along than we are today. Fire historian Steven Pyne accurately states in his article Fire, science and culture:
“The fundamental questions lie not in science but in politics – that’s why the national investment is poor. The science gets funded best when it adorns political purposes. The field requirements lie in a learned sense of how the fire guild operates and why. The chi-square conclusion is clear: while science can counsel, it cannot choose. “The science” doesn’t tell us how to act. Culture does.” [94]
“Prescribed fire resides overwhelmingly in the southeast. It continues for traditional reasons, not out of scientific discovery. People have always burned here. But old habits of woods burning can’t continue
any more than open-range ranching. What modern research has done is sharpen the prescriptions and help reconcile an inherited practice to a fast-changing environment. It has improved field operations indirectly by boosting technology. And in a historic reversal, it has sanctioned practice where it previously condemned it.”
to Fire Ecosystems by Native Peoples
The second obstacle just now being overcome is a deep profound appreciation of and for the intelligence of indigenous peoples among research scientists and land management organizations. It is just beginning to be recognized that native peoples have a very deep and abiding awareness of the land upon which they live that developed out of necessity, but it has yet to be very well incorporated into institutional public awareness. The fire skills these peoples developed and practiced to create a great diversity of habitats and ecosystems over tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years are still not well understood by modern scientists. Nor are they being integrated very well into public land management policies and procedures.
Fire Ecologists even today are having a tough time trying to figure out where nature’s fire influence on global ecosystems ends and early man’s influence begins. Even today some scientists are questioning what should be obvious, that man has significantly altered natural ecosystems for a very long time. They suggest that lightning started most fires in the past history of man and are having to be proved wrong by research using lightning fire ignition statistics across the globe. So we see this second obstacle still has some legs. :-)
Putting Fire Managers Back on the Land They Manage
The third obstacle to be overcome is how we integrate what we are learning about native people’s intimate association and knowledge of the land into modern fire management institutional policy. One of the major factors is native people’s exquisite detailed knowledge of plants and animals, their habitats and fire ecology. The children learn from their parents by example through a very ancient apprentice system, where knowledge is passed down from generation to generation.
It is widely understood that children gain very basic fundamental knowledge, understanding and skills much more quickly than adults from their surroundings. As people age they gain in experience, but most lose perceptual abilities and sensitivity to their surroundings due to increased thought activity or mental dialogue. How can we even begin to compare the fire skills of a well-educated academic raised in the city with several hundred hours of fire training, with those of a primitive farmer or hunter-gatherer in intimate continuous contact with his or her land, fire and the changes to the land after fire for a lifetime?
Restructuring Public Land Management Bureaucracies
The forth obstacle to be overcome is a problem common to organizations and institutions in general and that a systemic failure to adapt to change. It’s a problem that the natural world takes care of through a kind of adapt or die policy, that is true also of the free market system of the business world that attempts to mimic nature and natural human tendencies in a way. With some regulations to keep predatory capitalism in check, the system works and much better that a central planning economy.
The problem with government institutions is that as they grow they tend to escape public accountability and increasingly are more interested in self-preservation of jobs and positions than serving the public. Another problem is that government institutions tend to become less adaptable to change as they age and fixed in their thinking, just as happens to individuals. In human society as in nature, this problem is solved as old people die to be replaced by their children. But institutions and corporations in theory live until they become so out of touch with reality that some catastrophe like war takes them down or forces them to restructure.
Large government land management agencies are no exception to this rule. The fact that huge fuel loads are continuing to build on the public lands resulting in more and more catastrophic fire caused by fire suppression is still not enough to rapidly shift away from fire suppression to extensive prescribed fire. In a sense they have gone to war against fire and as fire damage increases, they will either lose the
public’s confidence and support, or they will be forced to restructure by the severe public and environmental consequences.
These bureaucracies have become trapped by the Smokey the Bear propaganda monster they themselves created in the public mind. The destructive meme that all forest fires must be suppressed, combined with the fire suppression industry now dependent on fire suppression income, make needed change difficult and almost impossible.
The struggling fledgling prescribed fire divisions within these organizations have little political clout to obtain more funding in the face of a powerful fire suppression lobby also under financial pressures because of tough economic times. In addition, centralized control and central planning work well for military operations and for firefighting, but poorly for extensive controlled burning programs needed that seem to require more decentralization, intimacy with nature and knowledgeable community involvement.
Harold H. Biswell, in his book Prescribed Burning in California Wildlands Vegetation Management, lists as his last chapter excuses and obstacles that incompetent bureaucrats and bureaucracies can come up with as not to control burn and then proceeds to demolish the excuses. :-) I suppose the list is really endless, but Biswell identifies the major excuses of the incompetent, impotent and powerless to do anything bureaucrat!
"1. The Idea That All Fires Are Bad. 2. Confusing Prescribed Fires With Wildfires. 3. Too Much Danger of Fires Escaping Control. 4. Too Much responsibility. 5. Dislike of Smoke From Prescribed Burning. 6. The Public Won’t Let Us Burn. 7. We Need More Research. 8. There Aren’t Enough Burn Days. 9. Prescribed Burning Is Too Costly. 10. We Can Lose Our Jobs. 11. There Is No Money For Prescribed Burning. 12. Negative Influence of Powerful People. 13. Let It Be an Act of God."
The Issue of Academic and Bureaucratic Capture
The fifth obstacle we need to overcome is the problem of academic and bureaucratic capture in which we study the problem to death and do not apply what is learned to remedy the situation. There seems to be no lack of detailed scientific papers today as to the need to move from fire suppression to fire management. However, what good is this knowledge if it does not lead to movement away from fire suppression to fire management and prescribed fire?
Science does not tell us how to act, but culture does. Science can have some effect on culture as long as the political aspects of culture are not so strong as to deny good science. In a case where the political aspects trump the science, we have to deal with the political aspects as we deal with the science. If good fire management and good public fire policy was based on science, we would be much further along than we are today. Fire historian Steven Pyne accurately states in his article Fire, science and culture:
“The fundamental questions lie not in science but in politics – that’s why the national investment is poor. The science gets funded best when it adorns political purposes. The field requirements lie in a learned sense of how the fire guild operates and why. The chi-square conclusion is clear: while science can counsel, it cannot choose. “The science” doesn’t tell us how to act. Culture does.” [94]
“Prescribed fire resides overwhelmingly in the southeast. It continues for traditional reasons, not out of scientific discovery. People have always burned here. But old habits of woods burning can’t continue
any more than open-range ranching. What modern research has done is sharpen the prescriptions and help reconcile an inherited practice to a fast-changing environment. It has improved field operations indirectly by boosting technology. And in a historic reversal, it has sanctioned practice where it previously condemned it.”
Long Term Consistency of Fire Management
The sixth obstacle to sound micro and macro fire management is the problem of long term consistency of fire management. In early hunter-gather and farming, society’s knowledge of land management is passed down from generation to generation through the family. The children learn from their parents the history of the land and so come to understand what their contribution to that history is going to be.
The situation is different with institutions where people come and go and take their institutional knowledge and wisdom with them when they depart leaving a gap in institutional historical knowledge. History is important because it’s how we orientate ourselves and find our true calling in the timeline of history. Land management is a form of artistic expression where each land manager paints upon the painting that came before, be it a poor painting or a masterpiece.
It’s extremely frustrating to me to see a very good land manager using fire to create a masterpiece, a model of diversity of plant and animal species in a micro or macro ecosystem, only to have that masterpiece neglected and painted over by a land manager that does not even recognize the masterpiece and elements that he is painting over. Such a poor land manager in his or her ignorance thinks what they are doing is just as good as what came before.
One of the things that helped me a lot in understanding the history of our Birdsong Plantation was the Dickey daily diaries written during the Civil War period. They were short entries, but they recorded a consistency of land and agricultural management during the time period valuable to the history of the time and future generations. I combined that thought with a ship's log and came up with the idea of institutional land management log for the parcel of property being managed.
No matter if it is a quail plantation or Yellowstone National Park, if a detailed log exists of the land and fire management year to year, including pictures, this would go a long way toward maintaining consistency of fire management. When a new manager arrives to manage the parcel of land he studies the log so as to build on this consistency of management and not destroy prior works of others that came before out of ignorance, but only upon considerable deliberation should a change in management take place.
Additionally, a published log would allow better oversight of management by supervisors and the public. We could go even further and do something like Google does by traveling down roads and through neighborhoods to build a database of the situation on the ground. This could be done every year or every several years and give a good record of the management of a property.
If someone has spent a lifetime creating a masterpiece of art, it’s pretty stupid for a second class inexperienced artist to come in and paint it over without even recognizing or appreciating the masterpiece being painted over. In the old world, apprentices would spend years copying the paintings and techniques of the masters, before going out to try to paint a masterpiece of their own. In the case of land management, a person gets a little academic training and field experience and they think that they are already a master, or as least soon to be one. :-) Sorry, but that’s not good land management.
Rebuilding Public Awareness and Trust
The solution to the eighth obstacle (that of public ignorance) is to rebuild public awareness as to the importance and the role of fire in nature based on good scientific investigation and research. It’s going to be a public relations offensive the equivalent of the propaganda operation that government agencies like the Forest Service mounted and implemented in the 20th century against fire and the public consciousness.
For heaven’s sake, some of our own environmental groups are working against putting light fire back into light fire ecosystems because of this public ignorance. For example in the USA Today article called Wildfire experts call for more controlled burns, it shows a good chunk of the endangered Spotted Owl habitat was destroyed because of public and environmental group opposition to prescribed fire. [95]
“A 1996 blaze that destroyed thousands of acres in Four Peaks shows what can go wrong without a burn. The year before, a controlled-burn permit was denied to protect the spotted owl. The entire range went up, and with it, the owl's habitat. Fires in Arizona at Alpine, Mount Baldy and Prescott show that brush mulching and prescribed burns stopped worse devastation.”
Key to this is that the agencies involved must admit and not paper over their responsibility for the assault on public consciousness and the suppression of scientific research into fire. Just as happens with individuals, organizations and institutions must take responsibility and admit error if they are to reform themselves and regain public confidence. Part of this reform process is to make sure that in institutional publications, as well as interactions with the press, that an accurate account of history be recorded for the present and for prosperity. I see a considerable amount of denial and other attempts to downplay systemic failures of these institutions in the past that even shows up on Internet sites such as Wikipedia.
The first step toward rebuilding public awareness and confidence must be the unequivocal admission, confession and regret by the institutions responsible for the damage to public awareness by 120+ years of propaganda assault. The U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management must research the fire history in detail of their organizations and not just expect independent organizations like Tall Timbers to do it for them.
Nobody likes reviewing past misdeeds or having to confess to the world the damage they have done and why. Just as with individuals, there is no other way for institutions to begin and implement rapid serious reform in the present if the past continues to distort the present and future.
The sixth obstacle to sound micro and macro fire management is the problem of long term consistency of fire management. In early hunter-gather and farming, society’s knowledge of land management is passed down from generation to generation through the family. The children learn from their parents the history of the land and so come to understand what their contribution to that history is going to be.
The situation is different with institutions where people come and go and take their institutional knowledge and wisdom with them when they depart leaving a gap in institutional historical knowledge. History is important because it’s how we orientate ourselves and find our true calling in the timeline of history. Land management is a form of artistic expression where each land manager paints upon the painting that came before, be it a poor painting or a masterpiece.
It’s extremely frustrating to me to see a very good land manager using fire to create a masterpiece, a model of diversity of plant and animal species in a micro or macro ecosystem, only to have that masterpiece neglected and painted over by a land manager that does not even recognize the masterpiece and elements that he is painting over. Such a poor land manager in his or her ignorance thinks what they are doing is just as good as what came before.
One of the things that helped me a lot in understanding the history of our Birdsong Plantation was the Dickey daily diaries written during the Civil War period. They were short entries, but they recorded a consistency of land and agricultural management during the time period valuable to the history of the time and future generations. I combined that thought with a ship's log and came up with the idea of institutional land management log for the parcel of property being managed.
No matter if it is a quail plantation or Yellowstone National Park, if a detailed log exists of the land and fire management year to year, including pictures, this would go a long way toward maintaining consistency of fire management. When a new manager arrives to manage the parcel of land he studies the log so as to build on this consistency of management and not destroy prior works of others that came before out of ignorance, but only upon considerable deliberation should a change in management take place.
Additionally, a published log would allow better oversight of management by supervisors and the public. We could go even further and do something like Google does by traveling down roads and through neighborhoods to build a database of the situation on the ground. This could be done every year or every several years and give a good record of the management of a property.
If someone has spent a lifetime creating a masterpiece of art, it’s pretty stupid for a second class inexperienced artist to come in and paint it over without even recognizing or appreciating the masterpiece being painted over. In the old world, apprentices would spend years copying the paintings and techniques of the masters, before going out to try to paint a masterpiece of their own. In the case of land management, a person gets a little academic training and field experience and they think that they are already a master, or as least soon to be one. :-) Sorry, but that’s not good land management.
Rebuilding Public Awareness and Trust
The solution to the eighth obstacle (that of public ignorance) is to rebuild public awareness as to the importance and the role of fire in nature based on good scientific investigation and research. It’s going to be a public relations offensive the equivalent of the propaganda operation that government agencies like the Forest Service mounted and implemented in the 20th century against fire and the public consciousness.
For heaven’s sake, some of our own environmental groups are working against putting light fire back into light fire ecosystems because of this public ignorance. For example in the USA Today article called Wildfire experts call for more controlled burns, it shows a good chunk of the endangered Spotted Owl habitat was destroyed because of public and environmental group opposition to prescribed fire. [95]
“A 1996 blaze that destroyed thousands of acres in Four Peaks shows what can go wrong without a burn. The year before, a controlled-burn permit was denied to protect the spotted owl. The entire range went up, and with it, the owl's habitat. Fires in Arizona at Alpine, Mount Baldy and Prescott show that brush mulching and prescribed burns stopped worse devastation.”
Key to this is that the agencies involved must admit and not paper over their responsibility for the assault on public consciousness and the suppression of scientific research into fire. Just as happens with individuals, organizations and institutions must take responsibility and admit error if they are to reform themselves and regain public confidence. Part of this reform process is to make sure that in institutional publications, as well as interactions with the press, that an accurate account of history be recorded for the present and for prosperity. I see a considerable amount of denial and other attempts to downplay systemic failures of these institutions in the past that even shows up on Internet sites such as Wikipedia.
The first step toward rebuilding public awareness and confidence must be the unequivocal admission, confession and regret by the institutions responsible for the damage to public awareness by 120+ years of propaganda assault. The U.S. Forest Service, U.S. Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management must research the fire history in detail of their organizations and not just expect independent organizations like Tall Timbers to do it for them.
Nobody likes reviewing past misdeeds or having to confess to the world the damage they have done and why. Just as with individuals, there is no other way for institutions to begin and implement rapid serious reform in the present if the past continues to distort the present and future.
It’s going to take a tough hard hitting approach to prescribed fire activism in the mainstream and alternate media to reverse this 120 year old assault on public consciousness. I
figure a good example of the kind of approach needed would be my own press release for this book. Such a press release might go something like this:
For Immediate Release - Prescribed Fire Activist Blames Smokey the Bear for Catastrophic Wildfire -
Fire activist Ed Komarek has just released his book (Fire in Nature, A Fire Activists Guide) that blames government misguided fire exclusion policies and propaganda the past 120 years for horrific wildfires in the Western United States and Australia. Ed Komarek says, “It is not fire, arson, global warming drought etc. that is primarily responsible for catastrophic wildfire. He and other fire ecologists claim that the real cause for most catastrophic wildfire is the growing unnatural fuel accumulations caused by fire exclusion in the Nation’s forests and grasslands that lead to catastrophic wildfire.”
According to the statistics in Wildfire Today [4] the average number of acres devastated by wildfire in the United States lower 48, has risen steadily from above 2 million acres in 1990 to above 6 million acres in 2013. An article in Headwaters Economics [5] states that U.S. National wildfire fighting costs have averaged $1.8 billion annually for the past five years, with costs are set to explode to between $2.3 and $4.3 billion.
We are told that the science has been done, the jury is in, and the verdict is that light fire is essential to healthy Ponderosa Pine forest in the West, and Longleaf Pine forest in the East etc. These are fire adapted ecosystems that need fire to survive. Light fires sweep away the dead yearly debris accumulation without hurting the trees, thus maintaining healthy species diverse, ecosystems.
Ed conclusively shows in his book that fire has sculpted ecosystems for hundreds of thousands of years, helped along by evolving mankind the past one hundred thousand years at least. With this book, Ed follows up on his father’s earlier fire ecology work throwing his hat into the ring to join in the still ongoing fight to put light prescribed fire back into our remaining fragmented ecosystems worldwide. Ed’s book is for sale on Amazon both in print on Kindle, but free as a public service to all on the book’s website. fireinnature.weebly.com/
Risk
David Carle points gives us an example of how as old obstacles to prescribed fire diminish, others rise to the fore continuing to hinder change. This 9th obstacle of risk and short sighted cultural behavior by the public, bureaucrats and politicians is well stated.
“Knowledge reduces risk, yet risk remains one of the major obstacles slowing the implementation of the National Fire Plan. After forty years with the U.S. Forest Service, Bob Mutch retired in 1994. Now a private fire management consultant (his work, in 2001, took him to Italy, Ethiopia, and Mongolia), Mutch is particularly concerned about a double standard that impairs “our ability to prescribe fire on the landscape on a large enough scale to sustain healthy systems. A prescribed fire can be well-planned and well-executed by qualified people, but the moment something starts to go awry the support from politicians and the public is quickly lost.
In contrast, practically any professional strategy can be adopted in suppressing a wildfire and vast amounts of money can be spent in implementing that strategy. No matter how adverse the outcome … politicians and the public generally side with the firefighter. For example, in a Malibu neighborhood in 1993 where practically every house burned to the ground, the signs on the street said, “Thank you, firefighters.” This double standard is part of our tradition and culture."
Now that we have defined these obstacles to sound global fire management, let us try to continue to expand our understanding of each to these to find a better way forward to remove the obstacles much quicker than they are presently being removed. Time is not on our side as more and more damage to the environment is accumulating through catastrophic fire and lack of detailed and intimate knowledge and policy for plant and wildlife management in fire ecosystems. Every day that we drag our heels in confronting these problems results in more damage to both ecosystems and human society.
Let’s get back to this issue of bureaucratic inertia and lack of political will. We would no longer be having these serious conflagrations in the western United States if the land management institutions and political institutions were not still seriously dysfunctional and unhealthy. When an individual is mentally ill and dysfunctional he goes to a mental health professional, and I suggest that some kind of equivalent of a mental health professional be consulted by the institutions in question as to how best to achieve wellness. I suppose one way can be to bring in independent consultants to give seminars on institutional health, who can supervise and grade the institutions and publish the results. :-)
On the issue of incorporating folk wisdom into modern ecological management, the Southern Quail Plantation can offer public institutions a better way forward. On well managed quail plantations in Southeast Georgia, the plantations hire independent foresters on a fee basis to manage the timber and to burn the woods where they are not able to do so themselves competently. In fact, the better managed plantation offers a template for better healthy institutional management of land that incorporates intimate native knowledge combined with modern professional advice and support. One way to heal an unhealthy institution is for the unhealthy institution to search out, study and emulate healthy institutions.
The Art of Managing Longleaf by Leon Neel should be required reading for public institutional land managers and their supervisors. The Stoddard-Neel Approach to timber harvesting and wildlife management simulates natural process to bring in income from timber, while at the same time improving forest health, density and quality of trees and improvements in plant and wildlife habitat. This approach requires great awareness that includes examining each individual tree on the property to be thinned when appropriate or if healthy and straight be allowed to grow so as to improve the whole forest. I quote from the Art of Managing Longleaf as to forest and land management on Greenwood:
“But neither of us was quite prepared to make to make sense of the unusual beauty of Greenwood. Yet that aesthetic reaction is the foundation of the Stoddard-Neel Approach. Many foresters are quick to dismiss aesthetics as a proper measure of good forestry, or they are uncomfortable with a set of values that seems not only far removed from the efficient production of timber, but sometimes even hostile to it.
Leon Neel and Herb Stoddard before him, however, used the look of the woods as a gauge to measure their health. First, he instructed, a healthy longleaf woodland allows one to see a great distance through the trees but also always to see trees. As he makes clear in the memoir that follows, that long look through the forest, which early quail hunters in the region prized, is an important metric of several critical functional aspects of longleaf ecology and management
Second, Leon was quick to point to the many small patches, or “domes” of regeneration that dotted the understory. These are where the future of the forest, he insisted, as important as the gnarled flattops to his practice of forestry beyond one generation. When inspecting the woodlands he manages, Leon is quick to admire good, thick patches of regeneration in the small openings made by his careful forestry practice, and we have come to take joy in them too. Third, was the diversity of the understory as it existed across a landscape gradient defined by altitude and moisture.
We stopped frequently to admire the seasonal blooms of orchids and other wildflowers and to note how the dry uplands gave way to thicker growth in the hardwood drains that ran through the Big Woods. While Leon insists that you can gauge the health of a longleaf woodland by how it looks, he also has taught us that no two healthy longleaf woodlands look exactly alike. Indeed part of the aesthetic joy to be taken from these landscapes comes precisely in recognizing how geology, soils, micro-climates, moisture gradients, and disturbance histories sculpted them into a once-vast mosaic.
Many of Stoddard’s and Neel’s most important ecological and management insights came from plumbing their sense of the diverse beauty of these woodlands. This is one reason why Leon has consistently insisted that the Stoddard-Neel Approach is an art, not an exact science."
At the deepest levels, land managers are landscape artists painting on the living canvas, just as other artists paint on canvas or shape stone. If the new land manager is not intimately familiar with the land past and present, he might just be painting over a masterpiece, a real national treasure. My father saw this happening when he was collecting mammals in the Great Smokey Mountains in the 1920s, the part that was in the process of becoming a park.
Because my Dad had empathy for the people around him as well as with nature, he really felt for the displaced local people he had become good friends with. These families, who for generations had managed the land in this area, were being thrown off their properties and he deeply felt the suffering, this breaking of their deep bonds to the land.
He also watched as I was growing up how park managers lost much of the qualities of the land they so admired because they did not realize that one cannot separate the land manager from the land any more than you can separate an artist from his painting. In my opinion and in Dad’s opinion, the Park Service and the public were as much the losers for this as were the local people displaced from the land they had grown to love and appreciate for generations.
This greater awareness and intimacy with nature continues into the management of wildlife habitats, ground cover, cover from predators, accessibility and aesthetics for hunting etc. This is something that is common amongst native peoples. The best way to get this kind of profound understanding of the land is to grow up on the land where one works and to apprentice with a master who may not even be an academic. The first person to let a fire get out on Tall Timbers was a PHD and not a locally educated land manager. :-)
Academics are good at specialization through indoctrination but usually poor at synthesis because academic indoctrination gives academics tunnel vision and an inability to understand and comprehend the big picture into which they are imbedded. I suspect that the Great Depression did my father a great favor by removing him from academia while still an impressionable young man and to cast him to the likes of such a mentor as Herb Stoddard who was a self-taught scientist who greatly expanded Ed’s and Roy’s horizons at a critical juncture in their lives. Leon Neel got some academic training as a forester, but he already had an intimate knowledge of the land in the Thomasville region before he too was mentored by Herb.
A second step in the institution healing process for public land management institutions should be that once error is openly and widely acknowledged that public education policies be implemented to restore public awareness of the importance of fire to the environment. A part of this public outreach should be to advise public landowners through workshops and through the press on how to protect their property from wildfire conflagrations.
The same Forest Service departments that issue fire permits should be available to the individual private landowner for a visit and free consultation. They can explain how to reduce wildfire risk through house construction, debris removal, thinning, and prescribed fire. They can suggest not planting high fire species of trees close to the home that are adapted to burn out the competition, in this case the home. :-)
Partnering with insurance companies that have a lot to lose from wildfire should also take priority. Much property damage from wildfire conflagrations has to do with flying embers traveling ahead of the fire. When these burning embers land on debris and dry vegetation near the home, shingle roofs, or in the private forest around the home, they ignite and burn the land and home. The fire itself may not even reach the home. The work of doing an assessment and debris removal can be shared with other partners who have a common interest to protect their investments.
This same partnering with insurance companies can result in incentives to the landowner to maintain a fire-safe environment through reducing premiums for those that keep a fire-safe environment and increasing premiums for those that don’t. Such creative measures such as these will help increase public awareness and action having the additional effect of improving relations with the large public land management institutions in the area.
This is the sort of creative thinking forced upon a healthy individual or institution by necessity when there is not a lot of money to throw at a problem. On the other hand, an unhealthy institution or person, tends to make excuses like, we don’t have the resources and manpower, just give us more money and resources to fight fire and things will be fine.
Or when a prescribed fire gets too hot and kills or damages pine trees, or gets away creating an massive catastrophic fire, a unhealthy institution says, “we were not able to get the burning done in winter, so we had to burn in May when the candles (new growth) were out on the pines. Because of smoke regulations we had to burn in the heat of the day and light the head-fire away from the road.” (I am thinking of a controlled burn, I noticed recently on my way down to Saint George’s Island with a friend this spring.) :-)
A good indication of a failing management team is the degree to which they make excuses for their mistakes and errors. Often the ingrained incompetence is so severe that in a company the only way to rectify the problem is to have a hired gun infiltrate the company to observe, fire, and reposition employees to return the company to health and competitiveness. The problem with government institutions is that they are not in competition with each other as happens in the free market, so there is not this check on incompetent management that will turn management around before external conditions create catastrophe.
How are you going to be able to regain public confidence if entrenched management is refusing to adapt to change? What good is it going to do to try to educate the public when the institution has lost the public trust? I think the old adage, “Take the timber out of one’s own eye before attempting to take the splinter out of the eye of another,” applies here. Self-education and understanding go hand in with teaching!
Getting back to public education and activism, there are some bright spots beginning to develop across the country resulting from private property destruction by wildfire. A group known as Fire-wise communities [96] is doing good activist work to get home owners to clean up the land around their houses and make their house more fire resistant.
“Find out what the experts know about the best way to make your home and neighborhood safer from wildfire. From the basics of defensible space and sound landscaping techniques to research on how homes ignite (and what you can do about it), there are tips, tools and teachings you can use!”
I am also reminded that an insurance company is working with the Nature Conservancy to promote public education on the need for fire and how to protect property from wildfire. So in the continuing battle we can find allies with deep pockets to help counter the special interests deep pockets who continue to profit from man caused catastrophic wildfire. I quote: [97]
“Jamestown – A team combining ecological know-how with hotshot firefighting is being deployed in Front Range forests to try to address Colorado’s wildfire predicament needing the purge of fire but not wanting it. The team members, assembled by the Nature Conservancy, carry the axes and chain saws used to fight fires. But they also light fires, 47 controlled burns over the past four years.”
Of course this is an insignificant amount against the many millions of acres needing this sort of treatment in the Western United States but it’s a start I suppose. All this seems to be occurring within the context of great upheavals in land use and land management. Stephen J. Pyne who has done so much to educate the public and bureaucracies though his many books has addressed another complicating factor in land management and fire management in his book Tending Fire.
“The great upheavals of land use continue. Among the Big Four both the re-colonization of rural lands and the decolonization of public lands is accelerating, leaving for the latter, only the rump of imperial institutions. The era of the public lands as a big-government commons overseen by state-sponsored forestry is dying on its feet. This is true in the United States as it is in Australia, Canada and the rest of a hollowed-out European imperium. The means and ends of fire management on those lands reflect these momentous trends. Whether by creep or rupture, from sheer accumulated internal strain or from sharp external stresses, the American way of fire has been significantly altered. Subjected to enough heat and pressure, even granite can melt and warp. The Forest Service that joined a national mobilization to fight the 2000 fires is not the organization that sought to suppress the Wenatchee and Southern California conflagrations of 1970.
Which is to say, the institutions, not merely the politics of fire protection, have rapidly and probably irreversibly undergone a metamorphosis. The evidence lies all around. Privatization, partnerships, the devolution of political decision-making to more local jurisdictions, indigenous land claims, and near civil war over the destiny of the public domain—all are changing the attributes of how governments administer these lands and how they cope with fire. Such reforms have challenged not just the hegemony of the Forest Service but the command-and-control model of federal administration itself. They are not restricted to the quirks of fire management. In their aggregate they promise for public-land fire protection a reformation equivalent to welfare reform."
figure a good example of the kind of approach needed would be my own press release for this book. Such a press release might go something like this:
For Immediate Release - Prescribed Fire Activist Blames Smokey the Bear for Catastrophic Wildfire -
Fire activist Ed Komarek has just released his book (Fire in Nature, A Fire Activists Guide) that blames government misguided fire exclusion policies and propaganda the past 120 years for horrific wildfires in the Western United States and Australia. Ed Komarek says, “It is not fire, arson, global warming drought etc. that is primarily responsible for catastrophic wildfire. He and other fire ecologists claim that the real cause for most catastrophic wildfire is the growing unnatural fuel accumulations caused by fire exclusion in the Nation’s forests and grasslands that lead to catastrophic wildfire.”
According to the statistics in Wildfire Today [4] the average number of acres devastated by wildfire in the United States lower 48, has risen steadily from above 2 million acres in 1990 to above 6 million acres in 2013. An article in Headwaters Economics [5] states that U.S. National wildfire fighting costs have averaged $1.8 billion annually for the past five years, with costs are set to explode to between $2.3 and $4.3 billion.
We are told that the science has been done, the jury is in, and the verdict is that light fire is essential to healthy Ponderosa Pine forest in the West, and Longleaf Pine forest in the East etc. These are fire adapted ecosystems that need fire to survive. Light fires sweep away the dead yearly debris accumulation without hurting the trees, thus maintaining healthy species diverse, ecosystems.
Ed conclusively shows in his book that fire has sculpted ecosystems for hundreds of thousands of years, helped along by evolving mankind the past one hundred thousand years at least. With this book, Ed follows up on his father’s earlier fire ecology work throwing his hat into the ring to join in the still ongoing fight to put light prescribed fire back into our remaining fragmented ecosystems worldwide. Ed’s book is for sale on Amazon both in print on Kindle, but free as a public service to all on the book’s website. fireinnature.weebly.com/
Risk
David Carle points gives us an example of how as old obstacles to prescribed fire diminish, others rise to the fore continuing to hinder change. This 9th obstacle of risk and short sighted cultural behavior by the public, bureaucrats and politicians is well stated.
“Knowledge reduces risk, yet risk remains one of the major obstacles slowing the implementation of the National Fire Plan. After forty years with the U.S. Forest Service, Bob Mutch retired in 1994. Now a private fire management consultant (his work, in 2001, took him to Italy, Ethiopia, and Mongolia), Mutch is particularly concerned about a double standard that impairs “our ability to prescribe fire on the landscape on a large enough scale to sustain healthy systems. A prescribed fire can be well-planned and well-executed by qualified people, but the moment something starts to go awry the support from politicians and the public is quickly lost.
In contrast, practically any professional strategy can be adopted in suppressing a wildfire and vast amounts of money can be spent in implementing that strategy. No matter how adverse the outcome … politicians and the public generally side with the firefighter. For example, in a Malibu neighborhood in 1993 where practically every house burned to the ground, the signs on the street said, “Thank you, firefighters.” This double standard is part of our tradition and culture."
Now that we have defined these obstacles to sound global fire management, let us try to continue to expand our understanding of each to these to find a better way forward to remove the obstacles much quicker than they are presently being removed. Time is not on our side as more and more damage to the environment is accumulating through catastrophic fire and lack of detailed and intimate knowledge and policy for plant and wildlife management in fire ecosystems. Every day that we drag our heels in confronting these problems results in more damage to both ecosystems and human society.
Let’s get back to this issue of bureaucratic inertia and lack of political will. We would no longer be having these serious conflagrations in the western United States if the land management institutions and political institutions were not still seriously dysfunctional and unhealthy. When an individual is mentally ill and dysfunctional he goes to a mental health professional, and I suggest that some kind of equivalent of a mental health professional be consulted by the institutions in question as to how best to achieve wellness. I suppose one way can be to bring in independent consultants to give seminars on institutional health, who can supervise and grade the institutions and publish the results. :-)
On the issue of incorporating folk wisdom into modern ecological management, the Southern Quail Plantation can offer public institutions a better way forward. On well managed quail plantations in Southeast Georgia, the plantations hire independent foresters on a fee basis to manage the timber and to burn the woods where they are not able to do so themselves competently. In fact, the better managed plantation offers a template for better healthy institutional management of land that incorporates intimate native knowledge combined with modern professional advice and support. One way to heal an unhealthy institution is for the unhealthy institution to search out, study and emulate healthy institutions.
The Art of Managing Longleaf by Leon Neel should be required reading for public institutional land managers and their supervisors. The Stoddard-Neel Approach to timber harvesting and wildlife management simulates natural process to bring in income from timber, while at the same time improving forest health, density and quality of trees and improvements in plant and wildlife habitat. This approach requires great awareness that includes examining each individual tree on the property to be thinned when appropriate or if healthy and straight be allowed to grow so as to improve the whole forest. I quote from the Art of Managing Longleaf as to forest and land management on Greenwood:
“But neither of us was quite prepared to make to make sense of the unusual beauty of Greenwood. Yet that aesthetic reaction is the foundation of the Stoddard-Neel Approach. Many foresters are quick to dismiss aesthetics as a proper measure of good forestry, or they are uncomfortable with a set of values that seems not only far removed from the efficient production of timber, but sometimes even hostile to it.
Leon Neel and Herb Stoddard before him, however, used the look of the woods as a gauge to measure their health. First, he instructed, a healthy longleaf woodland allows one to see a great distance through the trees but also always to see trees. As he makes clear in the memoir that follows, that long look through the forest, which early quail hunters in the region prized, is an important metric of several critical functional aspects of longleaf ecology and management
Second, Leon was quick to point to the many small patches, or “domes” of regeneration that dotted the understory. These are where the future of the forest, he insisted, as important as the gnarled flattops to his practice of forestry beyond one generation. When inspecting the woodlands he manages, Leon is quick to admire good, thick patches of regeneration in the small openings made by his careful forestry practice, and we have come to take joy in them too. Third, was the diversity of the understory as it existed across a landscape gradient defined by altitude and moisture.
We stopped frequently to admire the seasonal blooms of orchids and other wildflowers and to note how the dry uplands gave way to thicker growth in the hardwood drains that ran through the Big Woods. While Leon insists that you can gauge the health of a longleaf woodland by how it looks, he also has taught us that no two healthy longleaf woodlands look exactly alike. Indeed part of the aesthetic joy to be taken from these landscapes comes precisely in recognizing how geology, soils, micro-climates, moisture gradients, and disturbance histories sculpted them into a once-vast mosaic.
Many of Stoddard’s and Neel’s most important ecological and management insights came from plumbing their sense of the diverse beauty of these woodlands. This is one reason why Leon has consistently insisted that the Stoddard-Neel Approach is an art, not an exact science."
At the deepest levels, land managers are landscape artists painting on the living canvas, just as other artists paint on canvas or shape stone. If the new land manager is not intimately familiar with the land past and present, he might just be painting over a masterpiece, a real national treasure. My father saw this happening when he was collecting mammals in the Great Smokey Mountains in the 1920s, the part that was in the process of becoming a park.
Because my Dad had empathy for the people around him as well as with nature, he really felt for the displaced local people he had become good friends with. These families, who for generations had managed the land in this area, were being thrown off their properties and he deeply felt the suffering, this breaking of their deep bonds to the land.
He also watched as I was growing up how park managers lost much of the qualities of the land they so admired because they did not realize that one cannot separate the land manager from the land any more than you can separate an artist from his painting. In my opinion and in Dad’s opinion, the Park Service and the public were as much the losers for this as were the local people displaced from the land they had grown to love and appreciate for generations.
This greater awareness and intimacy with nature continues into the management of wildlife habitats, ground cover, cover from predators, accessibility and aesthetics for hunting etc. This is something that is common amongst native peoples. The best way to get this kind of profound understanding of the land is to grow up on the land where one works and to apprentice with a master who may not even be an academic. The first person to let a fire get out on Tall Timbers was a PHD and not a locally educated land manager. :-)
Academics are good at specialization through indoctrination but usually poor at synthesis because academic indoctrination gives academics tunnel vision and an inability to understand and comprehend the big picture into which they are imbedded. I suspect that the Great Depression did my father a great favor by removing him from academia while still an impressionable young man and to cast him to the likes of such a mentor as Herb Stoddard who was a self-taught scientist who greatly expanded Ed’s and Roy’s horizons at a critical juncture in their lives. Leon Neel got some academic training as a forester, but he already had an intimate knowledge of the land in the Thomasville region before he too was mentored by Herb.
A second step in the institution healing process for public land management institutions should be that once error is openly and widely acknowledged that public education policies be implemented to restore public awareness of the importance of fire to the environment. A part of this public outreach should be to advise public landowners through workshops and through the press on how to protect their property from wildfire conflagrations.
The same Forest Service departments that issue fire permits should be available to the individual private landowner for a visit and free consultation. They can explain how to reduce wildfire risk through house construction, debris removal, thinning, and prescribed fire. They can suggest not planting high fire species of trees close to the home that are adapted to burn out the competition, in this case the home. :-)
Partnering with insurance companies that have a lot to lose from wildfire should also take priority. Much property damage from wildfire conflagrations has to do with flying embers traveling ahead of the fire. When these burning embers land on debris and dry vegetation near the home, shingle roofs, or in the private forest around the home, they ignite and burn the land and home. The fire itself may not even reach the home. The work of doing an assessment and debris removal can be shared with other partners who have a common interest to protect their investments.
This same partnering with insurance companies can result in incentives to the landowner to maintain a fire-safe environment through reducing premiums for those that keep a fire-safe environment and increasing premiums for those that don’t. Such creative measures such as these will help increase public awareness and action having the additional effect of improving relations with the large public land management institutions in the area.
This is the sort of creative thinking forced upon a healthy individual or institution by necessity when there is not a lot of money to throw at a problem. On the other hand, an unhealthy institution or person, tends to make excuses like, we don’t have the resources and manpower, just give us more money and resources to fight fire and things will be fine.
Or when a prescribed fire gets too hot and kills or damages pine trees, or gets away creating an massive catastrophic fire, a unhealthy institution says, “we were not able to get the burning done in winter, so we had to burn in May when the candles (new growth) were out on the pines. Because of smoke regulations we had to burn in the heat of the day and light the head-fire away from the road.” (I am thinking of a controlled burn, I noticed recently on my way down to Saint George’s Island with a friend this spring.) :-)
A good indication of a failing management team is the degree to which they make excuses for their mistakes and errors. Often the ingrained incompetence is so severe that in a company the only way to rectify the problem is to have a hired gun infiltrate the company to observe, fire, and reposition employees to return the company to health and competitiveness. The problem with government institutions is that they are not in competition with each other as happens in the free market, so there is not this check on incompetent management that will turn management around before external conditions create catastrophe.
How are you going to be able to regain public confidence if entrenched management is refusing to adapt to change? What good is it going to do to try to educate the public when the institution has lost the public trust? I think the old adage, “Take the timber out of one’s own eye before attempting to take the splinter out of the eye of another,” applies here. Self-education and understanding go hand in with teaching!
Getting back to public education and activism, there are some bright spots beginning to develop across the country resulting from private property destruction by wildfire. A group known as Fire-wise communities [96] is doing good activist work to get home owners to clean up the land around their houses and make their house more fire resistant.
“Find out what the experts know about the best way to make your home and neighborhood safer from wildfire. From the basics of defensible space and sound landscaping techniques to research on how homes ignite (and what you can do about it), there are tips, tools and teachings you can use!”
I am also reminded that an insurance company is working with the Nature Conservancy to promote public education on the need for fire and how to protect property from wildfire. So in the continuing battle we can find allies with deep pockets to help counter the special interests deep pockets who continue to profit from man caused catastrophic wildfire. I quote: [97]
“Jamestown – A team combining ecological know-how with hotshot firefighting is being deployed in Front Range forests to try to address Colorado’s wildfire predicament needing the purge of fire but not wanting it. The team members, assembled by the Nature Conservancy, carry the axes and chain saws used to fight fires. But they also light fires, 47 controlled burns over the past four years.”
Of course this is an insignificant amount against the many millions of acres needing this sort of treatment in the Western United States but it’s a start I suppose. All this seems to be occurring within the context of great upheavals in land use and land management. Stephen J. Pyne who has done so much to educate the public and bureaucracies though his many books has addressed another complicating factor in land management and fire management in his book Tending Fire.
“The great upheavals of land use continue. Among the Big Four both the re-colonization of rural lands and the decolonization of public lands is accelerating, leaving for the latter, only the rump of imperial institutions. The era of the public lands as a big-government commons overseen by state-sponsored forestry is dying on its feet. This is true in the United States as it is in Australia, Canada and the rest of a hollowed-out European imperium. The means and ends of fire management on those lands reflect these momentous trends. Whether by creep or rupture, from sheer accumulated internal strain or from sharp external stresses, the American way of fire has been significantly altered. Subjected to enough heat and pressure, even granite can melt and warp. The Forest Service that joined a national mobilization to fight the 2000 fires is not the organization that sought to suppress the Wenatchee and Southern California conflagrations of 1970.
Which is to say, the institutions, not merely the politics of fire protection, have rapidly and probably irreversibly undergone a metamorphosis. The evidence lies all around. Privatization, partnerships, the devolution of political decision-making to more local jurisdictions, indigenous land claims, and near civil war over the destiny of the public domain—all are changing the attributes of how governments administer these lands and how they cope with fire. Such reforms have challenged not just the hegemony of the Forest Service but the command-and-control model of federal administration itself. They are not restricted to the quirks of fire management. In their aggregate they promise for public-land fire protection a reformation equivalent to welfare reform."
Creating a Franchise System of Fire Management
It’s been a learning process for me to catch up with the learning curve on fire management since my childhood and youth as I write this book. I think what we need to begin to seriously think about is major long term restructuring of land and fire management bureaucracies in order to address these multiple issues and obstacles outlined in this book.
We need to decentralize these large public special interest controlled dysfunctional land management bureaucracies into a franchise organizational system with experienced local control and management. Maybe it is already happening as Stephen Pyne suggests in some kind of organic fashion. The individual franchises would only be controlled on the macro level by implementation of scientifically recognized general land management and fire management standards of quality control like what we have in many types of businesses today. If the franchise is not up to these quality control standards then it is replaced by another franchise that can do the job.
To a degree, the individual franchises will cooperate together but would also be in competition with each other with the public being the ultimate arbiter to determine what these standards are. Each franchise would be influenced by both local and national public interest with the overall public interest always at the forefront. Local timber companies, for instance, cannot be allowed to pressure for local timber cutting in excess of what is good sustained forestry and wildlife practices. On the other hand, lobbying by national institutions can’t be allowed to micro-manage the franchises either. Stephen Pyne point out in his book Tending Fire that:
“Arguably, the momentum for fire management no longer resides with the large bureaus at all, but with private landowner, NGOs, and the like, which stand outside the blood feuds. The comfortable polarization that has dominated discourse for the past few decades and mustered every interested party to one polarity or the other is an anachronism. (So fixated are some critics on hindering misuse that they prevent legitimate use as well. Fearful, for example, that good forest thinning and burning might lead to bad, they would rather ban the practice altogether.) Increasingly, fire management is the work of consortia, of projects conceived, staffed, and funded by public, private, and non-governmental organizations. In this game no one holds a stronger hand than the Nature Conservancy (TNC)
TNC’s reach is astonishing. It cultivated fire expertise, originally, because many of its holding were prairie or fire-adapted savanna and required burning. What astounds, first, is not the volume of burning, however, but its variety—from Kansas prairie to Carolina sandhills to Albany scrubland; and what astonishes, secondly, is the density of the institutional support behind it. TNC trains its own crews, devises its own fire plans, negotiates with neighbors about its fires (and their smoke), contacts for what science it requires—the whole constellation of fire practices. In effect, it has created and NGO that does what, over the past century, only government institutions had increasingly claimed for themselves alone. Perhaps not surprisingly, TNC’s fire offices are sited on the grounds of the Tall Timbers Research Station, that vital critic of state-sponsored fire programs.”
The TNC’s offices have been moved from Tall Timbers. On the Nature Conservancy web site [98], the article titled Fire and Conservation What We Do explains their advanced concept of integrated fire management.
“In many of the places where we work, fire can be a conservation threat, a natural and even necessary ecological process, and an irreplaceable, life-sustaining tool for rural communities. Where the fire-related needs of ecosystems and people are at odds, The Nature Conservancy has found that it is possible to reconcile these needs through a framework called Integrated Fire Management.”
“Integrated Fire Management is defined as an approach to addressing the problems and issues posed by both damaging and beneficial fires within the context of the natural environments and socio-economic systems in which they occur, by evaluating and balancing the relative risks posed by fire with the beneficial or necessary ecological and economic roles that it may play in a given conservation area,
landscape or region.”
The Nuclear Option – Lawsuits to Force Fuel Reduction and Proper Light Fire Management
Lawsuits to force public land management agencies to put light fire back into light fire ecosystems could be a very important tool in our pro-fire activist arsenal. Lawsuits could also remove bureaucratic and private obstacles to fire hazard reduction that keep cropping up and secondarily be used as a means for further public education. These lawsuits could focus on two separate but interconnected issues, one being fire hazard reduction and negligence and the other mismanagement of public and private lands endangering light fire ecosystems.
Carnival Cruise Lines has faced a lawsuit for failing to address a known fire hazard risk caused by fuel leaks in its engine room that resulted in a fire on one of its ships. Management had known about the risk of fire and had done nothing about it prior to the fire aboard ship. My thinking is that public land management bureaucracies have known for decades that fire suppression leads to increases in fuel loads in light fire ecosystems causing huge catastrophic fires that destroy lives and property.
Like Carnival Cruise Lines they have been negligent in allowing these fuel loads to accumulate, granted that they are often hamstrung by other private and public agencies like the EPA and even Congress. In my opinion, these other players are also participating and supporting the mismanagement of public and private lands and also could be subject to class action lawsuits to cause them to stop creating obstacles to overall fire hazard reduction.
In the case of the mismanagement of light fire ecosystems, this would appear to be a violation of the public trust to competently manage public lands and maintain biodiversity. Clearly we are dealing with an entrenched system or culture with many different players contributing to the problem, so lawsuits should be both narrowly focused and broad spectrum to clear obstacles to adequate management of light fire ecosystems.
There is plenty of finger pointing among all players, but there is plenty of blame to go around causing these outrageous fuel buildups resulting in catastrophic fire in light fire ecosystems. The end result is that as shown by the continued increase of catastrophic fire globally, that the current situation needs a series of powerful shocks to bring about major changes in fire management policies. A series of high profile lawsuits could make all players supporting dysfunction on notice, creating a willingness to support change on all fronts.
It’s been a learning process for me to catch up with the learning curve on fire management since my childhood and youth as I write this book. I think what we need to begin to seriously think about is major long term restructuring of land and fire management bureaucracies in order to address these multiple issues and obstacles outlined in this book.
We need to decentralize these large public special interest controlled dysfunctional land management bureaucracies into a franchise organizational system with experienced local control and management. Maybe it is already happening as Stephen Pyne suggests in some kind of organic fashion. The individual franchises would only be controlled on the macro level by implementation of scientifically recognized general land management and fire management standards of quality control like what we have in many types of businesses today. If the franchise is not up to these quality control standards then it is replaced by another franchise that can do the job.
To a degree, the individual franchises will cooperate together but would also be in competition with each other with the public being the ultimate arbiter to determine what these standards are. Each franchise would be influenced by both local and national public interest with the overall public interest always at the forefront. Local timber companies, for instance, cannot be allowed to pressure for local timber cutting in excess of what is good sustained forestry and wildlife practices. On the other hand, lobbying by national institutions can’t be allowed to micro-manage the franchises either. Stephen Pyne point out in his book Tending Fire that:
“Arguably, the momentum for fire management no longer resides with the large bureaus at all, but with private landowner, NGOs, and the like, which stand outside the blood feuds. The comfortable polarization that has dominated discourse for the past few decades and mustered every interested party to one polarity or the other is an anachronism. (So fixated are some critics on hindering misuse that they prevent legitimate use as well. Fearful, for example, that good forest thinning and burning might lead to bad, they would rather ban the practice altogether.) Increasingly, fire management is the work of consortia, of projects conceived, staffed, and funded by public, private, and non-governmental organizations. In this game no one holds a stronger hand than the Nature Conservancy (TNC)
TNC’s reach is astonishing. It cultivated fire expertise, originally, because many of its holding were prairie or fire-adapted savanna and required burning. What astounds, first, is not the volume of burning, however, but its variety—from Kansas prairie to Carolina sandhills to Albany scrubland; and what astonishes, secondly, is the density of the institutional support behind it. TNC trains its own crews, devises its own fire plans, negotiates with neighbors about its fires (and their smoke), contacts for what science it requires—the whole constellation of fire practices. In effect, it has created and NGO that does what, over the past century, only government institutions had increasingly claimed for themselves alone. Perhaps not surprisingly, TNC’s fire offices are sited on the grounds of the Tall Timbers Research Station, that vital critic of state-sponsored fire programs.”
The TNC’s offices have been moved from Tall Timbers. On the Nature Conservancy web site [98], the article titled Fire and Conservation What We Do explains their advanced concept of integrated fire management.
“In many of the places where we work, fire can be a conservation threat, a natural and even necessary ecological process, and an irreplaceable, life-sustaining tool for rural communities. Where the fire-related needs of ecosystems and people are at odds, The Nature Conservancy has found that it is possible to reconcile these needs through a framework called Integrated Fire Management.”
“Integrated Fire Management is defined as an approach to addressing the problems and issues posed by both damaging and beneficial fires within the context of the natural environments and socio-economic systems in which they occur, by evaluating and balancing the relative risks posed by fire with the beneficial or necessary ecological and economic roles that it may play in a given conservation area,
landscape or region.”
The Nuclear Option – Lawsuits to Force Fuel Reduction and Proper Light Fire Management
Lawsuits to force public land management agencies to put light fire back into light fire ecosystems could be a very important tool in our pro-fire activist arsenal. Lawsuits could also remove bureaucratic and private obstacles to fire hazard reduction that keep cropping up and secondarily be used as a means for further public education. These lawsuits could focus on two separate but interconnected issues, one being fire hazard reduction and negligence and the other mismanagement of public and private lands endangering light fire ecosystems.
Carnival Cruise Lines has faced a lawsuit for failing to address a known fire hazard risk caused by fuel leaks in its engine room that resulted in a fire on one of its ships. Management had known about the risk of fire and had done nothing about it prior to the fire aboard ship. My thinking is that public land management bureaucracies have known for decades that fire suppression leads to increases in fuel loads in light fire ecosystems causing huge catastrophic fires that destroy lives and property.
Like Carnival Cruise Lines they have been negligent in allowing these fuel loads to accumulate, granted that they are often hamstrung by other private and public agencies like the EPA and even Congress. In my opinion, these other players are also participating and supporting the mismanagement of public and private lands and also could be subject to class action lawsuits to cause them to stop creating obstacles to overall fire hazard reduction.
In the case of the mismanagement of light fire ecosystems, this would appear to be a violation of the public trust to competently manage public lands and maintain biodiversity. Clearly we are dealing with an entrenched system or culture with many different players contributing to the problem, so lawsuits should be both narrowly focused and broad spectrum to clear obstacles to adequate management of light fire ecosystems.
There is plenty of finger pointing among all players, but there is plenty of blame to go around causing these outrageous fuel buildups resulting in catastrophic fire in light fire ecosystems. The end result is that as shown by the continued increase of catastrophic fire globally, that the current situation needs a series of powerful shocks to bring about major changes in fire management policies. A series of high profile lawsuits could make all players supporting dysfunction on notice, creating a willingness to support change on all fronts.
A Pro-fire Global Activist Organization?
In doing the research for this book, I have not found a pro-fire global activist organization completely devoted and focused to putting light fire back into light fire ecosystems to stop the ongoing catastrophic fires around the world. What I see is individuals and groups spread out here and there, raising their voices independently in the press on the importance of fire in nature and the need to end these catastrophic fires through activism and political action.
I think what is needed now is an independent organization completely devoted to ending these man caused catastrophic fires. So far the Nature Conservancy’s global efforts in regard to fire are the closest to what I have in mind, but will this be sufficient?
The Nature Conservancy has a broad focus on land preservation as a whole, but on the other hand their efforts are really making a difference as have Tall Timbers' efforts over the years. Tall Timbers has also developed a broad focus toward preservation, so the question really is do we need a global organization whose primary focus is fire management activism? I started up a Facebook page called The Association of Fire Management Activists to begin to address this issue for those who might be interested. [99]
If Dad and Roy had another lifetime you can bet they would have had a very major impact using Tall Timbers in an activist role to continue to pressure the large public land management bureaucracies, and I bet catastrophic fire would be on the decrease not just in the US but around the world as well. I have been impressed by what just one person or several good people can do to change things for the better, but they have to be very dedicated and driven, something you don’t often see with people wanting to protect their paychecks.
We have these academics, bureaucrats and politicians with their private get along entourages feeding on taxpayer funded environmental pork projects where nobody wants to rock the boat or risk losing their funding by telling it like it is. There has to be people like me with nothing to lose to stand up and tell things like it is!!!
My friend Jack Rudloe, whom I have known most of my life and an early marine ecologist and environmental writer, is maybe even one of the founders of marine ecology. (Note as stated in the dedication, I am talking about the incompetent, corrupt academic, bureaucrat and politician. It is not my intention to paint all with the same brush. :-) ) He is completely disgusted by both private developers and environmentalists alike, working hand in hand closely with politicians on self-serving taxpayer funded environmental boondoggles. Of course nobody wants to rock the boat when they are all feeding from the same trough! If only there were more people willing to stand up and fight with their own money and time for the public good.
Such an activist organization could take activist actions that nobody else wants, or is afraid to take on, like a publicity operation mirroring the Smokey the Bear propaganda operation that has done so much damage to public consciousness. I noticed in Crawfordville, Florida that the old Smokey the Bear was still alive and well even in my own neighborhood. On the Crawfordville Highway about 25 miles south of Tallahassee, Florida close on the right heading south for everybody to see as they drive by, is Smokey with a sign saying, “Prevent Forest Fires”. There was plenty of smoke from prescribed fires in the area from the prescribed fire burning of the St. Marks Refuge and Apalachicola National Forest, but there was old Smokey still standing his ground propagandizing the public.
My friend Jack and I got to talking about this problem and Jack came up with the brilliant idea of mirroring Smokey with a cartoon character Danny Duff. The idea behind Danny Duff and his supporting comic characters would to mirror and attempt to counter the very effective US Forest Service Smokey the Bear propaganda operation that has deceived the public into believing that all fire in nature is bad and destructive.
Danny Duff - If you recall the Straw man in in the Wizard of Oz was deathly afraid of fire, but in this case the Danny Duff character is an unstable, emotional, chaotic, dramatic character who loves catastrophic fire, the hotter and more destructive the better. He is drawn as a variation of the Straw man, but is a bundle of debris, pine straw, leaves and sticks.
Everywhere he goes he is leaking leaves and debris. He is to be an egotistical, rotund, dramatic and funny character lacking brains, but not mean spirited, who from time to time bursts into flames causing
catastrophic wildfire. He is a good friend of Smokey the Bear and can’t stand the Fire Fairy because she keeps the forest clean and neat.
Fire Fairy – The Fire Fairy is virtuous female character who is friends with all the forest and grassland animals especially the endangered Spotted Owl, the Desert Tortoise etc. She flits about lighting light fire in light fire ecosystems with her fire wand, creating diverse plant and animal habitats and ecosystems and protects them by sweeping the forest clean of debris buildup on a regular basis.
It would be nice if we could find an artist to help us create a comic strip along these lines to go viral and expose and poke fun at those who claim to be protecting our public and private forests and grasslands, but who are actually creating the conditions for the destruction of these ecosystems by catastrophic wildfire through accelerating fire suppression.
One enduring cartoon might be with Danny Duff with his arm around Smokey, his best friend, :-) thanking him for putting out all those nuance light fires that the Fire Fairy and her animal friends have been using to sweep the forest clean. How can Danny Duff possibly start catastrophic fires without Smokey’s help to build up forest fuel accumulations to a catastrophic level?
My father, when he organized Tall Timbers, pulled together diverse people from around the world who knew the importance of fire in nature in the Fire Conferences and with the organization itself. Now I think it is time to try to do this same thing and bring pro-fire activists together to create a cohesive front to eliminate once and for all these unnatural catastrophic fires. I think it should also be focused on going beyond stopping man caused catastrophic fire to rebuilding diversity in light fire ecosystems that has been lost since the native peoples around the world were decimated during the European conquests.
Like Tall Timbers, it should be in a large part privately funded, so that in a heated political battle an institution being held accountable cannot attack its funding to make it back off. Tall Timbers in the early years was protected by plantation funding not easily attacked. A new organization could be funded by insurance companies, environmentalist organizations, individuals and private property owners who have the most to lose from continued man caused catastrophic fire. We fight fire with fire in the political arena as well as in ecosystems. This is because wrongdoers fight back to protect their special interests. :-) People that throw up their hands and say, “why can’t people just get along and stop bickering” just don’t have a clue as to what it takes to combat predation from self-serving interests.
Multi-billion Dollar Wildfire Mitigation Program
In the introduction to this book, I discussed briefly Homeland Security’s concern that terrorists could use wildfire as a weapon against the United States and other countries. One wonders what would happen if terrorists were able to make a significant wildfire attack against even one nation in the world using wildfire under extreme weather conditions. Would this wildfire problem be finally and quickly addressed and resolved in the developed countries like the United States and Australia?
Could huge suffering and loss of life force countries to take immediate action to drastically reduce fuel loads in light fire ecosystems for national security reasons? What if suddenly tens of billions of dollars were available to eliminate most of the wildfire danger? How could these funds be most efficiently spent in the western United States and Australia to resolve the wildfire problem along with revitalizing and restoring healthy light fire ecosystems?
My guess that governments would do as they have done before in cases of national emergency, create an agency like the WPA. Such a national agency would oversee and implement wildfire fuel reduction on a massive scale with controlled burning and mechanical means. It would override any special interest, environmental, legal, or other objections to get the job done. Therefore, this is something environmental groups should consider and think about and plan for now, so as to ensure that this debris removal would be as ecological friendly as possible, if this terrorist scenario should unfold.
Urban planners and public land management bureaucracies should also be thinking about how such a program would be implemented efficiently and with consideration for healthy fire ecosystems. The last thing our mismanaged national forests and grasslands need is even more misguided and ecologically unfriendly actions taken by humans.
As wildfire mitigation proceeds, civil liberty issues will surely arise especially among private property owners in the urban-forest interface. Landowners could be forced in short order to build wildfire defensive zones with or without help from governments, around homes and property, prior to very large scale controlled burning on public and private lands.
Public and private land managers need to be thinking and planning as to how to use prescribed fire on a massive scale involving tens of millions even hundreds of millions of acres. How can prescribed fire training be rapidly ramped up and the few well trained experts in controlled burning and fire ecology best be utilized in this kind of Manhattan Project. How are we going to mitigate extensive wildfire destruction by not well trained and incompetent fire managers?
What if your agency suddenly had to figure out how to control burn a million acres of your public forest or grassland in one fire season? Would you be prepared with a plan in place to coordinate with Homeland Security? Maybe you even now could get some funding for some initial planning from Homeland Security.
I think right now with the Nature Conservancy taking the lead in very limited experiments in fuel reduction, they should get funding to do some Homeland Security large scale planning. The same should be considered for other NGOs like Tall Timbers. Homeland Security should be thinking about funding long range planning for government agencies and NGOs alike.
I have written this book not only to educate and inform the public, but also as an activist weapon against those responsible for the yearly destruction of millions of acres of light fire ecosystems. Like my father, I am not into this for money, I am it for both humanity and the environment, so I intend to make the book free to read on the Internet to reach the largest number of the general public and environmental activists possible. (link) I will try to reach those who really want to make a difference by fighting for what is right and the common good, rather than for their own self-enrichment.
I have lived all my life very frugally so my life has been my own and I can concentrate on the common good and self-development rather than concentrate on materialistic pursuits that are killing off both nature and humanity! Leaders need to lead by example in order to have moral authority. Hypocritical environmentalists, just like hypocritical everybody else, have to make the switch to downsizing their personal lifestyle and reproduction. We all need to concentrate on the personal self-development and the common good, else humanity and nature’s suffering will only increase catastrophically, and it won’t just be by catastrophic wildfire! Few people really want to focus on the elephant in the room that is really driving global environmental destruction, that of over-population and
over-consumption.
In doing the research for this book, I have not found a pro-fire global activist organization completely devoted and focused to putting light fire back into light fire ecosystems to stop the ongoing catastrophic fires around the world. What I see is individuals and groups spread out here and there, raising their voices independently in the press on the importance of fire in nature and the need to end these catastrophic fires through activism and political action.
I think what is needed now is an independent organization completely devoted to ending these man caused catastrophic fires. So far the Nature Conservancy’s global efforts in regard to fire are the closest to what I have in mind, but will this be sufficient?
The Nature Conservancy has a broad focus on land preservation as a whole, but on the other hand their efforts are really making a difference as have Tall Timbers' efforts over the years. Tall Timbers has also developed a broad focus toward preservation, so the question really is do we need a global organization whose primary focus is fire management activism? I started up a Facebook page called The Association of Fire Management Activists to begin to address this issue for those who might be interested. [99]
If Dad and Roy had another lifetime you can bet they would have had a very major impact using Tall Timbers in an activist role to continue to pressure the large public land management bureaucracies, and I bet catastrophic fire would be on the decrease not just in the US but around the world as well. I have been impressed by what just one person or several good people can do to change things for the better, but they have to be very dedicated and driven, something you don’t often see with people wanting to protect their paychecks.
We have these academics, bureaucrats and politicians with their private get along entourages feeding on taxpayer funded environmental pork projects where nobody wants to rock the boat or risk losing their funding by telling it like it is. There has to be people like me with nothing to lose to stand up and tell things like it is!!!
My friend Jack Rudloe, whom I have known most of my life and an early marine ecologist and environmental writer, is maybe even one of the founders of marine ecology. (Note as stated in the dedication, I am talking about the incompetent, corrupt academic, bureaucrat and politician. It is not my intention to paint all with the same brush. :-) ) He is completely disgusted by both private developers and environmentalists alike, working hand in hand closely with politicians on self-serving taxpayer funded environmental boondoggles. Of course nobody wants to rock the boat when they are all feeding from the same trough! If only there were more people willing to stand up and fight with their own money and time for the public good.
Such an activist organization could take activist actions that nobody else wants, or is afraid to take on, like a publicity operation mirroring the Smokey the Bear propaganda operation that has done so much damage to public consciousness. I noticed in Crawfordville, Florida that the old Smokey the Bear was still alive and well even in my own neighborhood. On the Crawfordville Highway about 25 miles south of Tallahassee, Florida close on the right heading south for everybody to see as they drive by, is Smokey with a sign saying, “Prevent Forest Fires”. There was plenty of smoke from prescribed fires in the area from the prescribed fire burning of the St. Marks Refuge and Apalachicola National Forest, but there was old Smokey still standing his ground propagandizing the public.
My friend Jack and I got to talking about this problem and Jack came up with the brilliant idea of mirroring Smokey with a cartoon character Danny Duff. The idea behind Danny Duff and his supporting comic characters would to mirror and attempt to counter the very effective US Forest Service Smokey the Bear propaganda operation that has deceived the public into believing that all fire in nature is bad and destructive.
Danny Duff - If you recall the Straw man in in the Wizard of Oz was deathly afraid of fire, but in this case the Danny Duff character is an unstable, emotional, chaotic, dramatic character who loves catastrophic fire, the hotter and more destructive the better. He is drawn as a variation of the Straw man, but is a bundle of debris, pine straw, leaves and sticks.
Everywhere he goes he is leaking leaves and debris. He is to be an egotistical, rotund, dramatic and funny character lacking brains, but not mean spirited, who from time to time bursts into flames causing
catastrophic wildfire. He is a good friend of Smokey the Bear and can’t stand the Fire Fairy because she keeps the forest clean and neat.
Fire Fairy – The Fire Fairy is virtuous female character who is friends with all the forest and grassland animals especially the endangered Spotted Owl, the Desert Tortoise etc. She flits about lighting light fire in light fire ecosystems with her fire wand, creating diverse plant and animal habitats and ecosystems and protects them by sweeping the forest clean of debris buildup on a regular basis.
It would be nice if we could find an artist to help us create a comic strip along these lines to go viral and expose and poke fun at those who claim to be protecting our public and private forests and grasslands, but who are actually creating the conditions for the destruction of these ecosystems by catastrophic wildfire through accelerating fire suppression.
One enduring cartoon might be with Danny Duff with his arm around Smokey, his best friend, :-) thanking him for putting out all those nuance light fires that the Fire Fairy and her animal friends have been using to sweep the forest clean. How can Danny Duff possibly start catastrophic fires without Smokey’s help to build up forest fuel accumulations to a catastrophic level?
My father, when he organized Tall Timbers, pulled together diverse people from around the world who knew the importance of fire in nature in the Fire Conferences and with the organization itself. Now I think it is time to try to do this same thing and bring pro-fire activists together to create a cohesive front to eliminate once and for all these unnatural catastrophic fires. I think it should also be focused on going beyond stopping man caused catastrophic fire to rebuilding diversity in light fire ecosystems that has been lost since the native peoples around the world were decimated during the European conquests.
Like Tall Timbers, it should be in a large part privately funded, so that in a heated political battle an institution being held accountable cannot attack its funding to make it back off. Tall Timbers in the early years was protected by plantation funding not easily attacked. A new organization could be funded by insurance companies, environmentalist organizations, individuals and private property owners who have the most to lose from continued man caused catastrophic fire. We fight fire with fire in the political arena as well as in ecosystems. This is because wrongdoers fight back to protect their special interests. :-) People that throw up their hands and say, “why can’t people just get along and stop bickering” just don’t have a clue as to what it takes to combat predation from self-serving interests.
Multi-billion Dollar Wildfire Mitigation Program
In the introduction to this book, I discussed briefly Homeland Security’s concern that terrorists could use wildfire as a weapon against the United States and other countries. One wonders what would happen if terrorists were able to make a significant wildfire attack against even one nation in the world using wildfire under extreme weather conditions. Would this wildfire problem be finally and quickly addressed and resolved in the developed countries like the United States and Australia?
Could huge suffering and loss of life force countries to take immediate action to drastically reduce fuel loads in light fire ecosystems for national security reasons? What if suddenly tens of billions of dollars were available to eliminate most of the wildfire danger? How could these funds be most efficiently spent in the western United States and Australia to resolve the wildfire problem along with revitalizing and restoring healthy light fire ecosystems?
My guess that governments would do as they have done before in cases of national emergency, create an agency like the WPA. Such a national agency would oversee and implement wildfire fuel reduction on a massive scale with controlled burning and mechanical means. It would override any special interest, environmental, legal, or other objections to get the job done. Therefore, this is something environmental groups should consider and think about and plan for now, so as to ensure that this debris removal would be as ecological friendly as possible, if this terrorist scenario should unfold.
Urban planners and public land management bureaucracies should also be thinking about how such a program would be implemented efficiently and with consideration for healthy fire ecosystems. The last thing our mismanaged national forests and grasslands need is even more misguided and ecologically unfriendly actions taken by humans.
As wildfire mitigation proceeds, civil liberty issues will surely arise especially among private property owners in the urban-forest interface. Landowners could be forced in short order to build wildfire defensive zones with or without help from governments, around homes and property, prior to very large scale controlled burning on public and private lands.
Public and private land managers need to be thinking and planning as to how to use prescribed fire on a massive scale involving tens of millions even hundreds of millions of acres. How can prescribed fire training be rapidly ramped up and the few well trained experts in controlled burning and fire ecology best be utilized in this kind of Manhattan Project. How are we going to mitigate extensive wildfire destruction by not well trained and incompetent fire managers?
What if your agency suddenly had to figure out how to control burn a million acres of your public forest or grassland in one fire season? Would you be prepared with a plan in place to coordinate with Homeland Security? Maybe you even now could get some funding for some initial planning from Homeland Security.
I think right now with the Nature Conservancy taking the lead in very limited experiments in fuel reduction, they should get funding to do some Homeland Security large scale planning. The same should be considered for other NGOs like Tall Timbers. Homeland Security should be thinking about funding long range planning for government agencies and NGOs alike.
I have written this book not only to educate and inform the public, but also as an activist weapon against those responsible for the yearly destruction of millions of acres of light fire ecosystems. Like my father, I am not into this for money, I am it for both humanity and the environment, so I intend to make the book free to read on the Internet to reach the largest number of the general public and environmental activists possible. (link) I will try to reach those who really want to make a difference by fighting for what is right and the common good, rather than for their own self-enrichment.
I have lived all my life very frugally so my life has been my own and I can concentrate on the common good and self-development rather than concentrate on materialistic pursuits that are killing off both nature and humanity! Leaders need to lead by example in order to have moral authority. Hypocritical environmentalists, just like hypocritical everybody else, have to make the switch to downsizing their personal lifestyle and reproduction. We all need to concentrate on the personal self-development and the common good, else humanity and nature’s suffering will only increase catastrophically, and it won’t just be by catastrophic wildfire! Few people really want to focus on the elephant in the room that is really driving global environmental destruction, that of over-population and
over-consumption.