This forest is about to go up in flames.
Don’t worry; it’s intentional.
We’re here in Roslyn, Washington, at a prescribed burn, and it’s actually supposed to make
the forest more resistant to fires.
Because these woods have been really unhealthy.
Think of a prescribed burn as a vaccination against really, really bad fires.
And just like giving out shots, you need people who know what they’re doing.
This is like the main tool of prescribed fire.
You get a little bit of an arm workout.
Yes
Today, prescribed burning is showing up more and more in state forest management policies.
Why?
Because wildfires are way worse than they used to be.
A century of poor forest management and fire suppression has created a lot of fuel to burn.
All that underbrush acts like kindling.
Climate change leads to hotter temperatures and longer dry periods, which create perfect
conditions for a wildfire to start.
Put all that together, and you have the makings of a disaster.
Today’s wildfires can even take out big, old growth trees that have historically been
able to stand up to wildfire.
Take this piece of a Ponderosa pine that’s been around for over two centuries.
This cross-section of a tree trunk is about to teach us a bunch of history, so show some
respect and pay attention.
Before European settlers arrived, Native American tribes in the western U.S. were already forest
management experts.
Many native peoples recognized that fire is a part of certain ecosystems — in fact,
many trees in the west, like Ponderosa pines and giant Sequoias, are made healthier by regular,
human-managed fire.
The Yakama Nation used prescribed burning to keep the forests healthy and to cultivate
different resources they depended on, like berry plants.
But when colonists showed up, it didn’t occur to them that the forests
were so impressive — and the timber so strong — because they’d been taken care of by humans.
I mean, there were very colorful responses ...
in some instances it is: “they're just burning things up!”
They would also notice these abundant berry fields, and they wouldn't always make the connection.
In 1910, there was a massive wildfire that spread across Montana, Idaho, and Washington.
As a result, the federal government was like: “We’ve got to take better care of these forests!
Time for a forest service!”
Up until that point, there had been some debate over prescribed burning.
But the new agency imposed a hard-and-fast fire suppression policy.
No burning, no exceptions.
Traditional burning was outlawed, and tribal members were punished for practicing it.
And it turns out, that was not the best way to keep forests healthy.
It was also really culturally oppressive.
“Preventing fire was another way of directly reducing native influence within their ancestral territories.”
And forests that had been managed by humans for hundreds of years were suddenly growing
wild and unchecked.
So that’s basically how we end up here: in a period of time that’s warmer than ever
before in recorded history, with a whole lot of very unruly forests.
Around the 1970s, some ecologists started to point out that suppressing fire in forests
was actually making wildfire damage worse.
And that way of thinking has gotten more and more traction.
2014, we had a record wildfire year.
In 2015, we broke that record.
I think people were, what are all the tools in the toolbox?
How do we protect ourselves?
How do we make our forests more healthy?
In 2017, the state of Washington made prescribed burns central to its 20-year fire management plan.
We obviously are inheriting a problem that’s been over 50 years in the making.
It’s going to take a while to get on top of it.
But we are going to make a significant difference in restoring the health of our forests, and
it will include prescribed fire.
Which brings us full circle: working with fire instead of suppressing it — a practice
that’s still alive in many tribal cultures today.
What we’re really looking at is a group of people who were able to survive for thousands
of years based on their relationship and management of resources.
I don’t feel like you’re going to have a very efficient project in today’s world
ignoring a thousands-year old dataset.