Fire fighting to fire management
Most of my life I have questioned basic assumptions about myself, others and nature. If we examine our beliefs and underlying assumptions closely, we can see that how we perceive ourselves can be inherently very destructive or very beneficial. The reason this is so is because we tend to act out our lives guided by our basic beliefs and assumptions that in turn are being driven by our individual and collective memories, history and culture. In the case of dealing with fire if we consider or perceive ourselves as wildland fire fighters rather than wildland fire managers we mentally place ourselves in opposition to a significant part of nature.
This conceptual mistake is having very serious tragic repercussions all around the world for both man and nature. We must therefore transition from a culture of misguided fire suppression to one of good fire management and work with nature not against nature as did the native peoples before us. This requires adjustments in how we think of ourselves and our history, the words we use and how we react to tragic events we ourselves are unconsciously creating. There is nothing really new here as the ancient Greek tragedies point out over and over again. Pain and suffering are the tragic default drivers of human and natural evolution in that if we do not make good decisions we will suffer more and more until we do learn to make the right decisions.
In order to understand the global transition now taking place from firefighting to fire management we need to study fire history. Many of the early European foresters that migrated to North America in the 1800s had witnessed or were aware of the widespread destruction of the forests of Europe. The destruction of the forests in Europe was due to the rise of cities and civilization and a rapidly growing population due to advances in agriculture over thousands of years. I use the term advances in agriculture because even prior to farming the native peoples of Europe as elsewhere around the globe were using cultural burning to promote a rather advanced form of what we now call permaculture.
The native peoples by using different kinds of fire and manipulating the intensity of the fire in forests in grasslands created and enhanced landscapes of berries, fruits, nuts, vegetables etc. for food and grasses trees and brush for such things a housing and basket weaving. When modern farming began about 10,000 years ago the native peoples cleared the land with stone tools and slash and burn agriculture. To begin with this was not too much of a problem for the forests and grasslands as the food plots were small and mimicked natural process that opened up the forest canopy in places similar to lightning and disease outbreaks. The forest could naturally regenerate using these small acreages when the soil became depleted and the farmers moved to virgin soil and slashed and burned with the ash providing new nutrients for the crops for several years.
However, due to these advances in agricultural techniques the population began to increase dramatically with people beginning to live in villages and cities that required larger amounts of forest to be cleared for not only agriculture but firewood and timber for housing. It was at this point that people in the cities and villages began to separate themselves from the awareness of natural processes and the importance of working with nature. Man began to think of himself as fighting and dominating nature and natural processes and began the widespread destruction of native old growth park like forests that had been carefully tended by their ancestors who had been practicing permaculture for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
With the advent of the industrial revolution and another huge jump in population the forests were pretty much wiped out for firewood, timber and the agricultural needs to feed such a large population. The forested floodplains with the best soils were converted to farming while the forests in the hills and mountains were converted into grazing for livestock. It was at this point that those who became the European foresters in of North America seeing all this slash and burn wiping out the forests came to see that fire was a bad thing and needed to be suppressed. There was also a human racist and arrogance factor involved also that blinded these citified European foresters from understanding and learning from the native peoples and their cultural burning techniques, and were considered as primitive savages from which little could be learned.
In the New World the early settlers out of necessity had learned from the Indians cultural burning techniques to some degree. These cultural burning techniques turned out to be very handy in the South Eastern United States to keep the forest grasslands of the native peoples open for livestock. In the 1800s the whole Eastern US was heavily logged of the old growth forests including the Southeast. While there was considerable regeneration of the part of the forest that did not go into agriculture in places like Florida frequent and more intense fires were necessary to keep down the brush and palmetto for grass grazing. With the large pines gone to carry the fire things were beginning to grow up big time. In other areas of the East due to agriculture and timber cutting the forests were changing from light fire ecosystems to little fire ecosystems composed of less flammable vegetation types.
However in Florida this was not so much the case and with the decrease of cattle production and less fire the land began to grow up with resulting huge catastrophic fires in the first half of the 1900s that rivaled what we have today in the Western United States. At this point the folks in the South began to get smart and the Forest Service rank in file in Florida began to rebel against Forest Service fire suppression policy and covertly began to use controlled burning. In other parts of the South East farmers and plantation owners realized that the land needed to be burned for game and wildlife and even good timber production.
In the West however the heavy logging of old growth forests combined with the near extermination of the native cultural fire managers resulted in huge buildup of fuels causing large catastrophic fires that destroyed lives and property. The European foresters now in place became firefighters trying to suppress fire and save the forests, people and property from catastrophic wildfire. They out of ignorance, racism against native peoples and lack of understanding of natural processes started a very destructive cycle of greater and greater suppression leading to even more fuel and larger and larger fires to the mega-fires of today.
By the 1950s in the West there were a few enlightened foresters and ecologists that began to understand that fire was an essential part of nature and to keep out light fires out of the forests and grasslands was not only doing great ecological damage but was inviting ever more catastrophic fire. It was at this point that ecologists and fire ecologists having already understood this problem in the East began to pay attention to the wildfires of the West. My father considered the first full time fire ecologist got involved organizing Tall Timbers Research station and began to hold fire conferences bringing in maverick speakers from all over the world including the West. Dad put Tall Timbers and the conferences on the map by making the early proceedings free at substantial expense. The Western US Forest Service fire suppression policy makers were so against this effort to use fire science and good fire management that they even would not let some of the early FS speakers come speak on their own time and Tall Timbers expense. The battle to put fire back in nature became very heated in the 50s and 60s and I as a boy and a young man was right in the middle of the fray.
In the 1970s things began to change for the better in the West but the change has been slow. My father said part of this was that he had outlived some of his opponents in the Forest Service with a new generation without the anti-fire bias began to take over. Sadly old age and poor judgment caught up with him and as the founders of Tall Timbers died out the organization was infiltrated and raided by a local land trust of plantation owners and business people who focused Tall Timbers away from global pro-fire efforts. In my opinion with the ouster of my father and later Leon Neel the two remaining founders these business people killed the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s possible the present Tall Timbers board has begun to realize past mistakes and will continue where the early founders left off and refocus globally into a pro-fire powerhouse. The Fire Science Consortium is a step in the right direction, but it was always the intent of Tall Timbers founders that fire science be practically applied with the ultimate goal being getting fire back into nature.
I hope that in this short paper I have been able to make the point that we have to adjust our thinking, words, actions and even the culture of fire suppression if we are going to get a handle on reversing catastrophic wildfire of our own making. In fact we have to go beyond just wildfire mitigation efforts to that of ecological restoration and to do that we have got to get back in touch with nature as had the native peoples before us. It’s true that modern conditions are different now with cities and homes growing into our wild lands, but even the native peoples were careful not to burn up their homes and villages while involved in cultural burning. We have to make adjustments in how we control burn our forests and grasslands to match current modern situations, but the underlying factors relating to fire and nature really have not changed that much over tens of thousands of years.
In my remaining years I am trying to do some follow up work along the lines the founders of Tall Timbers would have desired. I wrote Fire in Nature: A Fire Activist’s Guide as a book my father would have written if old age had not caught up with him. I made the fire book free on the Internet learning from what my Dad did by making the early fire conference proceedings free. Following up on this free book I have created with suggestions a synopsis of a One Billion Acre Fire Management Plan for the Western United States that can easily be expanded to other national plans even a global plan. This is an attempt to drive a grass roots plan to the highest levels of government planning. This is a Plan that can unite both those on the left and the right trying to solve the wildfire problem in the West and elsewhere.
Because I have few resources for this altruistic effort I am still mostly constrained to organizing over the social networks. As it has been said, “necessity is the mother of invention.” The social networks are a very cheap way of organizing and sharing good quality information and I see more and more fire management and firefighting people getting involved all the time. I can see that because of the incredible devastation from recent wildfires the media and the public are reaching out more and more to firefighters and fire management people for advice. All this is happening as firefighters, fire management and fire science people are educating each other in social media groups like Facebook where I am mostly focused at present. I do some work on Twitter and Link-in. I administer a couple groups one is the Association of Fire Management Activists and the other is Rebuilding Nature. I am presently networking with several large firefighting groups that have quite a few of fire management people in them.
This conceptual mistake is having very serious tragic repercussions all around the world for both man and nature. We must therefore transition from a culture of misguided fire suppression to one of good fire management and work with nature not against nature as did the native peoples before us. This requires adjustments in how we think of ourselves and our history, the words we use and how we react to tragic events we ourselves are unconsciously creating. There is nothing really new here as the ancient Greek tragedies point out over and over again. Pain and suffering are the tragic default drivers of human and natural evolution in that if we do not make good decisions we will suffer more and more until we do learn to make the right decisions.
In order to understand the global transition now taking place from firefighting to fire management we need to study fire history. Many of the early European foresters that migrated to North America in the 1800s had witnessed or were aware of the widespread destruction of the forests of Europe. The destruction of the forests in Europe was due to the rise of cities and civilization and a rapidly growing population due to advances in agriculture over thousands of years. I use the term advances in agriculture because even prior to farming the native peoples of Europe as elsewhere around the globe were using cultural burning to promote a rather advanced form of what we now call permaculture.
The native peoples by using different kinds of fire and manipulating the intensity of the fire in forests in grasslands created and enhanced landscapes of berries, fruits, nuts, vegetables etc. for food and grasses trees and brush for such things a housing and basket weaving. When modern farming began about 10,000 years ago the native peoples cleared the land with stone tools and slash and burn agriculture. To begin with this was not too much of a problem for the forests and grasslands as the food plots were small and mimicked natural process that opened up the forest canopy in places similar to lightning and disease outbreaks. The forest could naturally regenerate using these small acreages when the soil became depleted and the farmers moved to virgin soil and slashed and burned with the ash providing new nutrients for the crops for several years.
However, due to these advances in agricultural techniques the population began to increase dramatically with people beginning to live in villages and cities that required larger amounts of forest to be cleared for not only agriculture but firewood and timber for housing. It was at this point that people in the cities and villages began to separate themselves from the awareness of natural processes and the importance of working with nature. Man began to think of himself as fighting and dominating nature and natural processes and began the widespread destruction of native old growth park like forests that had been carefully tended by their ancestors who had been practicing permaculture for tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years.
With the advent of the industrial revolution and another huge jump in population the forests were pretty much wiped out for firewood, timber and the agricultural needs to feed such a large population. The forested floodplains with the best soils were converted to farming while the forests in the hills and mountains were converted into grazing for livestock. It was at this point that those who became the European foresters in of North America seeing all this slash and burn wiping out the forests came to see that fire was a bad thing and needed to be suppressed. There was also a human racist and arrogance factor involved also that blinded these citified European foresters from understanding and learning from the native peoples and their cultural burning techniques, and were considered as primitive savages from which little could be learned.
In the New World the early settlers out of necessity had learned from the Indians cultural burning techniques to some degree. These cultural burning techniques turned out to be very handy in the South Eastern United States to keep the forest grasslands of the native peoples open for livestock. In the 1800s the whole Eastern US was heavily logged of the old growth forests including the Southeast. While there was considerable regeneration of the part of the forest that did not go into agriculture in places like Florida frequent and more intense fires were necessary to keep down the brush and palmetto for grass grazing. With the large pines gone to carry the fire things were beginning to grow up big time. In other areas of the East due to agriculture and timber cutting the forests were changing from light fire ecosystems to little fire ecosystems composed of less flammable vegetation types.
However in Florida this was not so much the case and with the decrease of cattle production and less fire the land began to grow up with resulting huge catastrophic fires in the first half of the 1900s that rivaled what we have today in the Western United States. At this point the folks in the South began to get smart and the Forest Service rank in file in Florida began to rebel against Forest Service fire suppression policy and covertly began to use controlled burning. In other parts of the South East farmers and plantation owners realized that the land needed to be burned for game and wildlife and even good timber production.
In the West however the heavy logging of old growth forests combined with the near extermination of the native cultural fire managers resulted in huge buildup of fuels causing large catastrophic fires that destroyed lives and property. The European foresters now in place became firefighters trying to suppress fire and save the forests, people and property from catastrophic wildfire. They out of ignorance, racism against native peoples and lack of understanding of natural processes started a very destructive cycle of greater and greater suppression leading to even more fuel and larger and larger fires to the mega-fires of today.
By the 1950s in the West there were a few enlightened foresters and ecologists that began to understand that fire was an essential part of nature and to keep out light fires out of the forests and grasslands was not only doing great ecological damage but was inviting ever more catastrophic fire. It was at this point that ecologists and fire ecologists having already understood this problem in the East began to pay attention to the wildfires of the West. My father considered the first full time fire ecologist got involved organizing Tall Timbers Research station and began to hold fire conferences bringing in maverick speakers from all over the world including the West. Dad put Tall Timbers and the conferences on the map by making the early proceedings free at substantial expense. The Western US Forest Service fire suppression policy makers were so against this effort to use fire science and good fire management that they even would not let some of the early FS speakers come speak on their own time and Tall Timbers expense. The battle to put fire back in nature became very heated in the 50s and 60s and I as a boy and a young man was right in the middle of the fray.
In the 1970s things began to change for the better in the West but the change has been slow. My father said part of this was that he had outlived some of his opponents in the Forest Service with a new generation without the anti-fire bias began to take over. Sadly old age and poor judgment caught up with him and as the founders of Tall Timbers died out the organization was infiltrated and raided by a local land trust of plantation owners and business people who focused Tall Timbers away from global pro-fire efforts. In my opinion with the ouster of my father and later Leon Neel the two remaining founders these business people killed the goose that laid the golden egg. It’s possible the present Tall Timbers board has begun to realize past mistakes and will continue where the early founders left off and refocus globally into a pro-fire powerhouse. The Fire Science Consortium is a step in the right direction, but it was always the intent of Tall Timbers founders that fire science be practically applied with the ultimate goal being getting fire back into nature.
I hope that in this short paper I have been able to make the point that we have to adjust our thinking, words, actions and even the culture of fire suppression if we are going to get a handle on reversing catastrophic wildfire of our own making. In fact we have to go beyond just wildfire mitigation efforts to that of ecological restoration and to do that we have got to get back in touch with nature as had the native peoples before us. It’s true that modern conditions are different now with cities and homes growing into our wild lands, but even the native peoples were careful not to burn up their homes and villages while involved in cultural burning. We have to make adjustments in how we control burn our forests and grasslands to match current modern situations, but the underlying factors relating to fire and nature really have not changed that much over tens of thousands of years.
In my remaining years I am trying to do some follow up work along the lines the founders of Tall Timbers would have desired. I wrote Fire in Nature: A Fire Activist’s Guide as a book my father would have written if old age had not caught up with him. I made the fire book free on the Internet learning from what my Dad did by making the early fire conference proceedings free. Following up on this free book I have created with suggestions a synopsis of a One Billion Acre Fire Management Plan for the Western United States that can easily be expanded to other national plans even a global plan. This is an attempt to drive a grass roots plan to the highest levels of government planning. This is a Plan that can unite both those on the left and the right trying to solve the wildfire problem in the West and elsewhere.
Because I have few resources for this altruistic effort I am still mostly constrained to organizing over the social networks. As it has been said, “necessity is the mother of invention.” The social networks are a very cheap way of organizing and sharing good quality information and I see more and more fire management and firefighting people getting involved all the time. I can see that because of the incredible devastation from recent wildfires the media and the public are reaching out more and more to firefighters and fire management people for advice. All this is happening as firefighters, fire management and fire science people are educating each other in social media groups like Facebook where I am mostly focused at present. I do some work on Twitter and Link-in. I administer a couple groups one is the Association of Fire Management Activists and the other is Rebuilding Nature. I am presently networking with several large firefighting groups that have quite a few of fire management people in them.