Proposed Billion Acre Prescribed Fire Management Plan for the Western United States (synopsis)
(“It seems impossible until it’s been done” Nelson Mandela)
The world is ablaze with ever more increasing catastrophic fire that is devastating ecosystems around the world and costing lives and property. Climate change could be in a small part responsible for the devastation but most of the cause of these increasing catastrophic fires, also called mega-fires, lies squarely on the shoulders of the fire suppression community. The better that the fire suppression community gets at suppressing fires in light fire and catastrophic fire ecosystems, the greater the fuel load, and hence more and more catastrophic fire, demanding even greater fire suppression.
Making things even worse is that light fire ecosystems are being replaced by much more dangerous catastrophic fire ecosystems. The situation is further complicated by more and more people moving into fire prone areas of forest, shrub and grassland. The situation has become so bad that whole cities are now vulnerable to catastrophic fire. Firefighters are trapped in an increasingly negative feedback loop of fire suppression costs skyrocketing, drawing resources away from wildfire mitigation efforts and ecosystem rebuilding. The solution to the problem is to reverse the process of negative feedback and turn it into a positive feedback process.
However many individuals and groups are hindering the solving of the fire problem by using catastrophic fire to promote their own special agendas. For instance we have climate change advocates on the left and logging advocates on the right that do not really seem to be interested in coming together and solving the wildfire and environmental degradation issue. What these people with other agendas are doing is harming the public's ability to solve the problem by diverting attention away from the major cause of catastrophic fire that of skyrocketing fuel loads due to decades of fire mismanagement. If you don't understand the cause how can you fashion a remedy?
This author believes that the solution is a 100 billion dollar prescribed fire plan for the Western United States and a trillion dollar prescribed fire plan globally. It will take billions of dollars to begin the positive feedback process with further billions over time coming from the savings from the reduction of fire suppression costs along with less property damage and loss of life. The initial stage funds need to be spent to fire harden dwellings, defensive space and and to build prescribed fire buffers around cities to stop mega-fires. In mega-fire choke points further prescribed fire buffers would be positioned across the landscape to stop or slow down the catastrophic fires to manageable levels.
It is already being proven that prescribed fire can stop or slow large catastrophic fires. This happened with the Lake Christine fire. “A prescribed burn in 2007 and 2015 may have helped give the upper hand to crews now. "It made a huge difference,” said Matt Butler, Fire Behavior Analyst for the Incident Management Team. The prescribed burns may have been the key to gaining control of the Lake Christine Fire or at least slowing it down.” In addition fire educational programs must be accelerated to counter the damage to the public mind by Smokey the Bear Forest Service anti-fire propaganda foisted upon the public for 120 years.
It is recognized that Smokey did a lot of good to prevent man caused careless ignitions, but the program was also a part of a well-funded anti-fire propaganda operation for decades that began in the early 1900s. Smokey had a change of heart when fire research undermined the anti-fire propaganda and has begun working to repair past damage, however the education program needs to be greatly expanded.
As the plan kicks in and the political and media landscape improves, laws, regulations and codes must be implemented and adjusted to place the liability for catastrophic fire on property owners, public and private, that allow fire hazards to develop this in ways similar to the fire codes on cities. Property owners with fire hazards on their property could also be subjected to increased taxation to help cover costs of fire suppression and prescribed fire mitigation efforts.
For this plan to work in later years prescribed fire costs have to come down to reasonable levels.
Prescribed fire costs could be reduced by the shifting of liability to those who allowed hazards to develop on their properties. Prescribed costs could be reduced by the introduction of fire safe practices by property owners public and private. Further reductions in costs could come by volume. Manufacturers reduce production costs with volume production, so I think the same could be done with prescribed fire volumes of acreage burned per treatment. Further reductions to prescribed fire costs is that it is much easier and less risky to burn a property that is in good ecological shape that burn a hazard property.
In the initial stages of the prescribed fire burn plan David West gives us some statistics that he and his team worked on. Note that his prescribed fire costs are based on heavy fuel loads. “We were working on this equation last fire season, trying to compare the cost of suppression efforts per acre vs. pre- treatment via mastication/logging/burning. The cost per acre to reduce/treat heavy fuel loads is between $500-$2,500/acre using masticators, with wildfire it's anywhere from $10,000-$90,000/acre! That’s right there should be enough incentive to do something and then like you say, once we reach that tipping point we can transition more money to the pre fire efforts, it will be decades before we reach that threshold, so even more reason to get started.”
Of course there is work being done in communities around the country to buffer those communities from wildfire but nothing large scale that I know of that involves government agencies like FEMA. The closest I have come to seeing a larger response is in Perth Australia where a large buffer of prescribed fire is being built around Perth. “More than 20,000ha of prescribed burning is planned for State forest in the Perth Hills area during the next week, as part of plans to create strategic buffers to help protect communities from damaging bushfires.” There are of course many obstacles to instituting the early part of this plan as a fuels and prescribed fire specialist points out who wishes to remain anonymous. “A lot of the road blocks are due to smoke management, NEPA policy, and the time lag involved with getting large groups of stakeholders together to find common ground and avoiding litigation."
I think we can combine the knowledge being gained already to scale up to larger and larger projects as monies become available. Governments and FEMA could be helpful in pulling together the various interests into one comprehensive plan as I have been describing at some point in time. It would also be very helpful if some unbiased agency advanced this plan or a well-funded independent organization was responsible for moving this process forward both nationally and globally. The shepherding of a diversity of often conflicting viewpoints including, foresters, economic interests, environmental interests, regulatory interests, local, state, federal, national security, FEMA etc. could best be done I think by an independent unbiased agency because of widespread distrust between many parties.
I am told that Tall Timbers is well on its way towards pulling parties together nationally and globally in the arena of fire science. It is very possible that this could be expanded to fire management divisions all over the globe applying the fire science that is already well established and growing. This transition from fire suppression to good fire management is going to be a financial gravy train for any organizations getting involved early moving this plan forward as well as private fire management contractors. Tall Timbers or the Nature Conservancy, for instance, could ride this to become a global pro-fire powerhouse. The board of directors of such institutions should be able to see the potential here.
The allocation of funds under the Plan should be prioritized to go where they are most needed on the one hand, but not detract from funding to those states and regions that are more advanced in fire management and ecological restoration. Initially in wildfire prone regions the funding priority should be to rapidly eliminate the catastrophic amounts of fuel in the Nation’s forests and grasslands to be followed by ecological restoration projects. The funds should be distributed in a way that supports and scales up low cost, small and medium scale projects already proven to be effective and organizations that have a proven track record in the areas of good fire management and ecological restoration. Funds should not be going to wasteful and inefficient large scale projects and organizations with poor track records in fire management and ecological restoration until they can prove to be more competent in their land management practices.
Many of the impeding conflicts around land management could be resolved by all parties accepting the Stoddard-Neel method for environmental and economic- friendly ecological land management in light fire ecosystems. In this method forests are kept healthy and vibrant both economically and environmentally by using management practices that simulate natural process. While this method is best suited to light fire ecosystems and can be applied worldwide. Catastrophic fire ecosystem management plans can simulate nature by selective clear-cutting, burning and replanting maintaining the ecologically important fire mosaic as is being implemented in Canada. This Method is just a modern version from thousands of years of native peoples cultural burning.
It is suggested that public and private land management agencies consider that their hiring practices and positioning of employees be adjusted to incorporate some aspects of multi-generational cultural burning and land management. It can take decades to develop an intimate understanding so as to adequately manage the diverse micro-ecological mosaic on a parcel of land. Formal schooling in fire science and other land management techniques are not enough to develop the skills of a good ecological land manager. It may take decades, even generations of mentoring as an apprentice in the art and science of good land management to adequately educate and train a good ecological land manager able to paint good fire science onto the landscape. This concept has already proven to work well on private quail plantations in the Southeastern United States that manage for ecological diversity on their properties.
This paper is just a work in progress to conceptualize the problem and flesh out the concepts a little, leaving it to others to take it from here. I am adding input from others as I go forward. It could be folded into a petition or open letter of some sort with signatures. I am the author of Fire in Nature and have worked with prescribed fire all my almost 70 years of life having been brought up and mentored by the earliest ecologists and fire ecologists.
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