On "prescribed fires."

Factual Questions
1

From Cnn.com comes this story: U.S. Forest Service temporarily bans ‘prescribed fires’.

The tragedy in New Mexico is apparently the result of a long-used strategy previously thought to be effective and safe. When did people first start fires with the sole (or major) intent of forestalling a later, worse fire? Is this a peculiarly American institution or do governments in other places with lots of forests and occasional dry spells do this? How effective has this strategy been? I seem to recall that there have been other instances of “controlled fires” that went out of control, albeit without results this bad.

Are “prescribed fires” a foolish attempt to control Mother Nature or are they a good idea that just needs some finetuning to the execution?

2

I don’t have exact dates handy, but prescribed fires began in the Eastern U.S. some time in, I believe, the 1960’s. (Not including the various local habits of starting brush/field fires to avoid having to clear of winter-kill that various farmers have done for rather longer.)

There was a great deal of resistance to the idea in the West, where a wild fire has always been viewed as a personal enemy. (The lack of water and access roads along with the view of trees as a resource or crop contributed to the idea that fire was simply evil and must be fought at the earliest sign.)

Prescribed fires are, from an ecologist’s perspective, akin to “natural” fires. They burn off underbrush (reducing the probability of crown fires) while they participate in several natural cycles of ecological growth, preventing stagnation and allowing “real” ecology to continue. (This is in contrast to the stagnation that occurs when the entire forest is maintained free of fire and the normal cycles are not allowed to proceed.)

(Accidental man-made fires and arson are still considered evil by everyone.)

There was a 10 - 20 year battle between Easterners (who, with abundant water and roads had always been able to contain the fires they started) and the Westerners who were afraid of losing vast acres of harvestable timber if the fires got out of control.

Eventually, enough Westerners were able to see the benefits of the controlled fires that they have been used in the West for somewhat less than 20 years. The last controversial controlled fire was the Yellowstone fire. It was originally a lightning-strike fire that, by the rules, should have been left alone. When it roared across so much of Yellowstone, (which had been over-managed as fire free for so many years), there were cries by the opponents of controlled burns that the policy was “obviously” stupid, just as they had claimed. Within two years of the Yellowstone fire, it was obvious from an ecological perspective that the fire had been long overdue and had, indeed, improved the ecology of the park.

The problem with the Los Alamos prescribed fire has not been whether the theory works. There is ample evidence that the fire was lit it the face of clear information from the Weather Service that it was not a good idea to burn anything that night.

Whether we will discover that some flunky simply did not pass the word to the appropriate authorities so that the fire was lit in ignorance of the weather report or whether some manager with his brains dangling between his legs decided that he knew better than the Weather Service when to light a fire we will only discover after all the investigations and court cases.

If we stop the prescribed fires, we will create a worse condition in the future.

Canada has used controlled fires for about as long as the U.S., I believe. I am not sure whether any other nation has the same ability to manage their forests. European forests tend to be treated almost as gardens with local people clearing brush simply to bring home the wood that they have few forests comparable to North America. In Asia and Africa they don’t have the resources to control fires–but they often don’t have the resources to fight fires, so they have been using “natural” fires for control by default.

3

I grew up the Great Basin area which has a consistently high fire danger and can recall hearing the debate on a proscribed fires a couple times.

I have always felt that prescribed fires were a much more acceptable method to control forest growth than selective logging. Fires are part of the natural forest lifecycle, while removing lumber isn’t.

This is one tiny explanation I found at the [National Interagency Firecenter - Boise Idaho](http://www.nifc.gov/faq.html#fire’s natural role) website:

Also, on their links page is a Great Basin report that was written after the devasting 1999 fire season. It states:

(It was a pdf file and I couldn’t cut and paste. Any typos are because of me and not teh report’s author.)

We expend so much energy controlling fires that we interupt nature’s ability to live out part of it’s lifecycle. Prescribed burnings are the best alternative since we can’t let fires burn uncontrolled.

Note: However, the Firecenter site states that they will use mechanical means of removal if the foliage is too thick and dangerous to burn.

Prescribe burns, as far as I have heard, are fairly safe as long as rules are followed, proper precautions taken, and everyone involved possesses a bit of common sense.

4

IIRC, the lodgepole pine requires fire to propagate. Its seeds are coated with a wax that requires a fire to melt off. In parts of the West, no new lodgepole pines were growing because fires had been so successfully suppressed.

5

tomndeb nailed it pretty well. I was a wildlife biologist for the Forest Service for one year, and actually went through the wildland fire training and helped out on a couple of small fires.

Ecologically speaking, periodic fire is not only good for many ecosystems, but it is essential. As mentioned above, there are quite a few plant species that can only reproduce once they have been subjected to fire of a certain duration and intensity.

Several animal species as well can only thrive if fire is a part of the ecosystem.

For about 100 years out west, fire was almost always suppressed as much as possible. This created dangerous conditions that shifted the entire ecosystem into an unnatural state. One example is the grassland ecosystem of the Southwest. These grasslands have been invaded by juniper trees which should be kept out by fire. A prescribed burn can help rectify this situation.

I wrote a Biological Assessment for a prescribed fire planned for the Coronado National Forest. One of the important points concening the threatened Mexican Spotted Owl is that years of fire suppression has morphed their habitat into a tinderbox. A lightening strike that should have a natural ‘cleansing’ effect on the habitat instead becomes a conflagration, much more devastating to the species than it should have been.

However, some people, once you start talking about starting a prescribed fire, start protesting that the mean old Forest Service is Hellbent on burning up all the poor little owls (or deer, or rabbits, etc…). Thankfully, most of the environmental groups, with which I usually have severe issues, have come down on the right side of this one.

Of course, what happened in New Mexico, with what could only be called deliberate malpractice, only hurts the efforts of future prescribed fires that the West and Southwest desperately need.

6

The trick is when starting controlled burns, try to avoid doing it in the middle of a windstorm.

7

I seem to remember that a lack of fire, prescribed or natural, was a contributing factor for the fires in Central Florida a few years ago.

8

I truly feel for people who lose their homes to “Natural Disaster”, but it seems that those who build on eroding cliffs and in forests are begging for trouble.
We get a lot of both types here in California. You build on a cliff for the spectacular view, then expect the govt. to alter nature to protect your investment. Same with building in a forest. Fires, as stated above, are a natural part of forest ecology. But homeowners expect the forrest service to alter the forest, so their homes won’t burn. And they insist on wooden shingles yet!
Us humans are a strange lot.
Peace,
mangeorge

9

As everyone else has said, fire is an essential part of the ecosystem in the west. I cant talk for the great basin area, but I know in the chapparal, and dry forests of California, they are an essential to helping many species germinate. For instance, the seeds of ceanothus (a common california plant), need heat to help the seeds germinate. I remember when I was working at my school’s Watershed Institute, we had to microwave the seeds for 10 minutes in water to get them to germinate. Some wild flower seeds need to be treated with smoke to germinate.Some even need ashy soil to germinate and grow.

Many plants take advantage of the fires to help get rid of non productive old wood, and grow fresh new sprouts (from structures called lignotubers which have vegetative buds, and are underground).In my treks through the Ft. Ord wilderness, i never recalled seeing anything but mature ceanothus and chamise, in unburned areas. These areas hadn’t burned in many many years (the scrub was thick and full). When i visited a recently burned area, I could see some new growth on the bases of the black sage bushes.

Locally, Monterey Pines (P. radiata, which makes up the pine forests in Monterey) utilize the heat of fires to help open their cones. They can eventually open, but i’ve seen some old pine cones that were only partially opened. Obviously with more heat the entire cone would open up.

Prescribed fires actually are helpful (when they set them in the right conditions). They get rid of smaller trees and the duff that piles up on forest floors and turns it into nutrient rich ash (small trees that make forest thick, also help forests fires to turn into crown fires, which can kill mature trees).

Selective cutting of trees can help clear out the trees and thin the forests out, but unless they sweep up the duff, it acumulates and leads to intense firestorms (i’ve heard that ideally, a forest that hasn’t been prevented from burning should have small fires that rush along the ground, burning off the duff, but leaving the mature trees unharmed).

10

From the original link that manhattan provided, I was relieved to see that the ban is an investigative one and not a reactionary “We won’t do this any more!”

11

Well, i’m glad Babbitt understands their importance.

12

The main problem in the Great Basin is the exotic annual grasses, namely cheat grass, that are destroying the ecology of the area. According to my Nevada history class in Junior High, cheat grass was introduced by cattlemen because it grows fast and thick. Unfortunately, it has very low nutritional content and a cow cannot survive on a diet of strictly cheat grass (which is why it was dubbed “cheat”).

There are various problems with cheat grass. It can survive in even the worst of drought conditions, so you can’t expect it to die out naturally. It has an extremely short life cycle, grows during spring and by early summer it’s dried out. However, it takes forever to decompose, so you can get several years build up of cheat grass. It grows thick (looks like a minature wheat field) which crowds out other types of plant life. It also has an extremele shallow root system, so even if the BLM were to bulldoze areas that have been completely taken over by cheat grass, it could still survive in clumps of overturned earth.

The only solution the BLM has at the moment is to use the fires to their advantage. As soon as an area is burned, they rush in and seed with native floral. Without fire, they’d have little hope of ever rebalancing the basin ecology.

However, I have never heard of a prescribed burn being used in the area of the basin where I grew up. I suspect the conditions are always to dangerous to even try. Or that natural fires are prevalent enough that intentional burns are unnecessary.

13

Out in California, our main problem is with European annual grasses which were introduced (probably unknowingly) by the Spanish when they brought cattle to california. There are three types, Wild oats (tallish seed heads), foxtails (look like a very bristly small wheat, but with sharp stickery seeds, and ripgut brome (called that because the seeds are so tough they supposedly can puncture the stomachs of cattle when eaten. They’ve totally changed the face of California’s environment in just about two hundred years or so.

The native grasses here are all perrenial grasses. They stay green even during summer (while all the annual grasses are brown, the clumps i have in my yard are still green). California used to actually look green during summer. But, with the annual grasses, the hills turn golden. Like the cheat grass in the Great Basin, these annual grasses crowd out the native grasses (if you look hard you can find clumps).

These annual grasses also make for fire hazards. They always die back each year and turn brown. If we’ve had a good rainy season, they grow thick and lush, and then when they die we have a high amount of fuel for fires to burn through. Perennial clump grasses for the most part remain low, unless flowering (they have very thin feathery seed heads). I was told that if we had the perrenial clump grasses instead of the annuals covering the hillside, fires would be smaller and not burn as intense (they’d burn off the dead leaves, and allow fresh new ones to appear unchoked). We’d also see very little erosion, as the annual grasses have root systems three feet or more deep, and the annuals only a few inches.

The annual grasses are good for the cows (though, they too are not good for the ecosystem either), but they have pushed out the clump grasses into areas where there isn’t as much competition.

14

I think the first prescribed fires so to speak started with the Aboriginees (did I spell that wrong?) in Austrailia. They found setting fires yearly to burn the brush made the land more fertile providing them with an increase in food.

15

The word is spelt “aborigines”.

Prescribed fires are used frequently to minimise fuel loads that build up in Australian bushland. A side benefit has been the discovery that many native plants rely upon smoke (as opposed to heat or flame) to open seed pods to allow propogation (I hope I spelt that correctly).

16

I think everyone’s hit this one on the head. My only comment is about “prescribed” fires in Asia. In several parts of East Asia, controlled fires have been used for centuries, but not as a means to promote the ecology. Instead, they still use “slash and burn” farming techniques. The real problem there is that, especially in Indonesia, “slash and burn” is now being used on a massive scale on plantations by commercial farmers. The resulting smoke is truly unbelievable - Singapore and Kuala Lampur (sp?) have been blanketed by smoke (causing innumerable health problems and some deaths) for weeks at a time the past two years. If you take a look at the map and see the distance the smoke travels, it is awe- and fear-inspiring.

They also do the same in Amazonia

V.

17

Prescribed fire was practiced by Native Americans before the settlement of North American by Europeans. In the Southeastern U.S., fire maintained the natural pine ecocsystems, especially longleaf. Fires made travel through the forest much easier, improved hunting access, and promoted the growth of annual plants which provided food for wildlife such as rats, rabbits, deer, turkey, etc.

The benefits of fire in managing longleaf and loblolly pine stands were recognized early–Yale University School of Forestry Bulletin No. 49, Management of Loblolly Pine in the Pine-Hardwood REgion in Arkansas and in Louisiana West of the Mississippi River by Herman H. Chapman recommended burning prior to seed fall, and afterwards during the life of the stand after the seedlings had reached sufficient size to be able to withstand fire. The publishing date was 1942.

The destructive wildfires of the early part of the 1900s in the Southeast were prevalent for many reasons–standing timber was taxed yearly, so there was an important incentive for small farmers to clear all their acres. HOt fires in the spring would kill the young seedlings and promote growth of grasses for cattle. They could also be used to clear the fields of debris before planting. Propaganda by the USFS against burning–long after the benefits of prescribed fire were known–made prescribed fire a very hard sell for many years. See Schiff, Ashley L., Fire and water; scientific heresy in the Forest Service. Published: Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1962 for a compelling look at how the USFS used floods and wild fires as propaganda tools to increase their presence and power.
Now, we in the forestry profession are starting to see a backlash against fire supression. Since fire it natural, some professionals think it should automatically be reinstated EVERYWHERE–which is a little silly considering the dangers of wildfire are still present. People increasingly want to live in rural areas and the new opportunities for working at home online make this possible for many more people. Prescribed fire has its place. Wildfires are still dangerous. We need to practice both aggressive burning programs and aggressive wildfire prevention and suppression, depending on situation and circumstance.
Last week there was a massive chain-reaction car-truck pileup on one of the major interstates along the gulf coast. Several people died and there were many injuries. The cause: fog combined with smoke from a prescribed burning operation. The hazards of burning make it imperative for practioners to be trained and to USE THE AVAILABLE WEATHER INFORMATION. It sounds like the Park Service did not practice basic, common sense in burning around Los Alamos.
See the Society of American Foresters web site for more information of prescribed fire in forests:
http://www.safnet.org/policy/statements.htm

18

Several posters have noted the use of slash-and-burn techniques (the old Angle or Saxon word was swithen) in a number of places at various times.

I would distinguish between slash-and-burn and a prescribed fire. (And I freely acknowledge that I made no such distinction, earlier.) A prescribed fire is one that is specifically set to imitate a small-scale natural burn, (the sort of fire that might burn and die naturally after a lightning strike when the accompanying rain and humidity smothered the fire). Slash-and-burn is an agricultural technique for which the purpose is the destruction/removal of a section of forest to permit crops to be planted there.
In some cases, the results might be similar. However, a prescribed burn would generally leave most of the mature forest scorched but standing. In slash-and-burn, the point would be to remove the forest. (If someone points out that slash-and-burn actually promotes South American plantain or Indonesian rubber or some similar crop, I will have to back off on my point for that specific location, but the principle remains that the primary objective of slash-and-burn (along with the usual result) differs from that of prescribed burning. That is why, in my original post, I linked prescribed burns to “natural” fires.

I was interested to learn from smilingjaws’s post that prescribed fires had been used in the Southeast U.S. much earlier than I had been aware. I probably watched the final resurrection of the practice that was achieved in the 1960’s. That was when the debate between the Western and Eastern foresters heated up in the scientific and ecological presses.

19

Just to reinforce Tom’s post, I want to point out that the “slash” in “slash and burn” refers to the practice of killing the large trees in the area some weeks before setting the fire. Any technique which preserved rubber plants or some such would not be slash and burn by definition.

Discover Magizine did an article in 1996 on how Native Americans in California used controled burns for millenia to encourage the growth of acorns, a primary food source. It raises the interesting question of what is a “natural” habitat–the one created and maintained for 4000 years by humans, or the one that grows up if humans do not act at all?

Unfortunatly the Discover archive does not give individual URLS for each article, but the article is called “Keepers of the Oaks”, was written by Glen Martin, and published in August 1996. If you go to “www.discover.com” and click on the link to the archive it should be easy to find.

20

I know this thread is a bit old but just read this in the Op-Ed section of the Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A42213-2000May20.html