After forest fires burned 793,000 acres of Yellowstone National Park during a particularly dry summer marked by high winds in 1988, Tim Ingalsbee recalled how the whole nation seemed to expect crews to put out any woodland blaze after witnessing the catastrophe in the iconic park.
Ingalsbee, who worked as a wildland firefighter in Oregon and Washington in the 1990s, said his perspective and those he worked with began to change.
While then working at North Cascades National Park, Ingalsbee said fire managers worried that aggressive, mechanized response to fires such as cutting down stands of scorched trees and using bulldozers to carve firebreaks would end up causing more damage to forests.
“The forest ecosystem was adapted to fires, not aggressive, militaristic firefighting,” Ingalsbee, co-founder and executive director of Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology, a Eugene-based group that seeks to shift prevailing fire and forest management policies.
For decades, public land managers have focused on swiftly suppressing wildfires, an approach that’s been accompanied with calls to reduce the amount of fuels that can ignite in forests. But with Oregon seeing drier and hotter summers brought on by climate change and bigger forest fires, conservationists like Ingalsbee point to evidence for rethinking the current course of action. They’re starting to get traction.
Most recently, Oregon’s Bootleg Fire became so large over the summer that its smoke reached the East Coast. That came after last year’s historic Labor Day fires in Oregon that burnt over a million acres and destroyed 4,000 homes.
Timber interests have argued that federally managed forests have become ripe for cataclysmic blazes after fuel has piled up. Their answer has been increased thinning of forests or logging. The approach has varying degrees of traction with Gov. Kate Brown and other state leaders.
“Excessive buildup of fuels from decades of lack of management have left federal forests overstocked with diseased, insect-ridden and standing dead timber,” four industry groups said in an opinion piece published in The Oregonian last year. “This cocktail of dangerous conditions leads to catastrophic wildfire when lightning strikes, which further explodes under wind conditions like those experienced over Labor Day.”
Conservation groups point to evidence that private and industrially logged land hasn’t been more resilient during recent forest fires. They argue that resources should be used to protect communities and homes instead of suppressing fires miles away that are a part of the forest’s ecosystem. While the Oregon Legislature’s most recent fire preparedness bill includes money for entrenched strategies, it’s also a step in a new direction.
Oregon’s Bootleg Fire became one of the country’s largest over the summer, burning more than 400,000 acres near Klamath Falls after it started on July 6. Now mostly contained, the blaze became so large it created its own weather and moved so fast that firefighters had to retreat, according to media accounts.
Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist at the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, along with California-based nonprofit Los Padres ForestWatch completed an analysis of the fire that he says is revealing about the effectiveness of forest management practices.
“We are seeing a fast moving fire that blew right through areas that were logged, had prescribed burns, grazed — all the so-called active management tools,” he said.
The analysis is based on historical satellite and aerial images, as well as data covering grazing and state and federal logging. DellaSala, who is based in Talent, Ore., said the analysis shows the fire moved faster through areas that had been thinned or grazed.
The analysis found that on average the wildfire moved 3.4 miles per day through public and private forest lands that had been logged over the past two decades. That’s compared to an average of 2.1 miles for unmanaged wilderness and roadless areas. The analysis attributed the slower spread in dense forests to the amount of moisture retained in trees and their cooler, shadier microclimates.
During the fire’s first six days, it burned through nearly 25,000 acres of national forest that had been treated as part of fuel reduction projects, the analysis found. The fire also burnt through tens of thousands of acres of “intensively managed” private forest land to the west and northwest of Gearhart Mountain, according to the analysis.
Julie Woodward, senior manager of forestry education at the Oregon Forest Resources Institute, said it’s too early to tell what the fire burned. But Woodward said wildfire mitigation efforts on land along the fire’s western edge allowed firefighters to hold a line. She said that managed land gave crews better access to the fire and prevented it from spreading to the town of Chiloquin. Fires in wilderness areas are less accessible and harder to contain, she said.
Woodward, whose group is publicly funded and has close ties to the timber industry, pointed to the fire’s incident report describing how drought conditions “made all fuels available for active burning conditions,” particularly a heavy concentration of standing dead trees, downed logs and beetle-killed lodgepole.
But conservation groups point to past examples of fires burning managed land.
Oregon State University forestry professor Chris Dunn and Harold Zald of Humboldt State University published a 2018 paper finding young, industrial plantation forests burned more severely during the Douglas Complex fire that occurred five years earlier.
An analysis by Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology of last year’s Labor Day fires found that plantation forests in Holiday Farm Fire along the McKenzie River burned more intensely than nearby federally managed lands.
“Climate change is causing fires to grow so big and so fast that what they are burning through is the legacy of industrial forestry,” said Ingalsbee.
Woodward said it’s hard to draw conclusions about the Labor Day fires because of unusually dry conditions and strong winds from the east. She said that forest management practices can’t control the amount of heat or oxygen a fire receives.
The analysis found that on average the wildfire moved 3.4 miles per day through public and private forest lands that had been logged over the past two decades. That’s compared to an average of 2.1 miles for unmanaged wilderness and roadless areas.
“The one part that we can change or have an impact on is the fuel,” she said. “Changing the amount of fuel changes the intensity.”
Sara Duncan, spokeswoman for the Oregon Forest and Industries Council, said in an email that “it’s nearly impossible to draw any general conclusions about forest management based on one fire or even one fire season.”
She did point to a 2020 study on the Carlton Complex, a group of fires that burned a quarter million acres in Washington in 2014. According to the study, fuel-reduction treatments used to prevent wildfires can be overwhelmed by strong winds that drive extreme fires.
The study, which included University of Washington researcher Susan Prichard as its lead author, found that treated areas on slopes that sheltered them from the wind had lower fire severity than those on windward slopes.
Duncan said the federal land management approach has left forests particularly vulnerable. She said the Bootleg Fire started on and is primarily burning on federal lands.
There has been a decline in timber harvested from national forests and U.S. Bureau of Land Management land since the 1990s, according to a 2019 report from the Congressional Research Service. Timber groups have pointed to declining harvests as a contributor to forest fires. But there have still been efforts to reduce fire risk.
A 2017 paper by Tania Schoennagel, a University of Colorado ecologist and its lead author, found that nearly 7 million hectares of federal lands were treated to reduce fuel loads between 2001 and 2015. But despite the treatments, the paper found “the annual area burned has continued to set records.”
“Regionally, the area treated has little relationship to trends in the area burned, which is influenced primarily by patterns of drought and warming,” reads the paper. “Forested areas considerably exceed the area treated, so it is relatively rare that treatments encounter wildfire.”
The paper found that 1% of U.S. Forest Service treated areas experienced wildfire each year. With treatments lasting about 10 to 20 years, most “have little influence on wildfire,” it said.
Ingalsbee said the public has been lulled into thinking fires can be suppressed. Instead, fires are a normal part of Oregon’s ecosystem that have a rejuvenating effect on the landscape long recognized by indigenous cultures, he said.
“The question should be, ‘how do we plan for fire-resilient communities?’” said Brenna Bell, policy coordinator and staff attorney at environmental group Bark.
She and other conservationists said resources should be directed away from trying to put out fires, particularly in remote forests, and put toward protecting homes and communities.
Researchers at the United States Geological Survey in 2019 found that in California wind was a bigger factor in homes catching fire than fuel or defensible space during wildfires. They found that “hardened homes” that had closed eave structures and multiple-pane windows that protected them from embers were less likely to catch fire.
Last session, Oregon lawmakers passed Senate Bill 762, a $220 million fire prevention package. While the legislation authorized more logging and allocated money to fire suppression, it also created building codes to make homes more fire resistant and gave the state fire marshal the ability to enforce “defensible space” standards. It also created Wildfire Workforce Corps, putting youth to work reducing material that could ignite houses in high-risk areas.
The legislation isn’t the first shift toward firefighting. In 1935, the U.S. Forest Service mandated that a fire be suppressed by 10 a.m. the day after it was reported, a policy that was replicated by other land managers. By the 1970s, the Forest Service began allowing some naturally caused fires to burn. But the Yellowstone fire of 1988 and other high-profile blazes prompted another change in course.
While Ingalsbee welcomed the change in Oregon’s most-recent bill, he still doesn’t expect any bigger shift to come from policy makers anytime soon.
“Nobody wants to look soft on fire,” he said.