 You know the best way to make good grass is to burn down the old my friend Hoot Gibson was burning his pasture one time Somebody in town got nervous about the fire and they called fire department. These fellas came out some big red trucks started through his gate and He said hold on there where you guys are going. What do you want to do? He said we're gonna put this fire out He said no This is my fire and it's doing okay you fellas need to put one out You start one of your own Don't national park are keeping a careful watch on a small lightning caused blazes, but at this time no suppression action is being taken Right now Southwestern the winds are gusting from 20 to 40 miles per hour Smokes heavy, but I think the fires crossing the river All fires except for the type of situation in Cafe Meadow Base trees here are torching out. We have an air tanker cruise out of Cafe Meadow. Do you copy our story begins in crisis? It's the summer of 1988 and as always Three million tourists will pass through the serenity that is Yellowstone America's first national park a burst of thunder a streak of lightning and then a flame ignites some brush nature's flashpoint The historic Yellowstone fires of 1988 burned almost a million and a half acres Nearly half the park was on fire 25,000 firefighters fought countless blazes for more than three months the total cost to fight the fires 125 million dollars Trees burst into flames like toothpicks and a torch Crown fires advanced from five to ten miles per day speeds unheard of when it comes to forest fuels The damage was so severe that natural fire programs were shut down all across the country some Hermanately we now know it was an overreaction But this slice of fire history proved to be a turning point in the discussion regarding the positive effects of fire as Well as reintroducing fire back into the landscape The Yellowstone fires were a major event not only for the American public for the global public Forcing them to consider the ways in which fire might be natural which fire even very large Intense fires might have a place and for that it was all to the good But the question was not whether fire belonged in Yellowstone or not the question was what kind of fire and what cost By what means I think the big Misconception the public has is that we can manage fire that it didn't terribly dangerous that we can control fire and that we have enough resources to to take care of fire and That's just not the case fire can be a terribly formidable force that we can't manage so well We looked at the site is Yellowstone devastated by these fires. Well, no I think a case could be made that we burned up in one year What would have been burned up over a century since the park had been protected, but nonetheless it was not an intrinsically damaging thing I think that argument forces us to ask what happened to all those missing fires over the last century Were they fires that nature set and we suppressed or were there fires that people had traditionally set? We no longer do so it forces us to reevaluate the way people are in the system And I think it forces us to rethink what we mean by fire ecology by Removing fire from the landscape a catastrophic fire like Yellowstone is simply unavoidable By allowing fuel loading or excess biomass to reach dangerous levels By failing to remove dead or dying trees and then finally by suppressing periodic low-intensity fires We create forests that resemble powder kegs I Had been part of the fire program for 10 years prior to 88 and so I was fortunate to go out there on site with different crews And we would set up our monitoring plots and and our weather stations, you know and calm weather And I'd leave and I'd go to the different fire the fires began because of an inordinately Dry summer the spring had been very wet We had a lot of fine fuels growing and then we never got the traditional June rains But then as the fire season continued to progress We needed information on how big these fires were and started to make fire behavior projections about what the fires were going to do And and so I had the opportunity to fly around the park had been Experiencing over the previous several hundred years a massive build-up of fuel in the lodge pole pine forest at first Everyone felt it was a blessing because we needed to reduce the fuel load that was here It was it was just common knowledge that we had on horrendously unsafe situation It's not dissimilar to the situation. We face now nationwide. I feel very fortunate to have experienced 1988 I mean on one hand it was very exciting and there was a lot going on You know it was a busy year. I wasn't in position to where like a lot of other The high-ranking officials, you know, there's a lot of public scrutiny and that kind of thing and and I was I was removed from that so I got to you know be a fire ecologist and a fire behavior analyst throughout the whole summer and really experienced things that you know I may I'll probably never experience again in my lifetime. I Think we need only look back to the 88 fires in Yellowstone and to see what's happened on the landscape since We have this great perfusion of young forest returning We have a landscape that is really going to be a gift to future generations who will be able to see this Abundance return to the park in ways that a hundred years of fire suppression had turned portions of that park into a lodgepole desert And now we're going to see a forest that benefits a whole variety of species in addition to a forest that will continue to serve as the Headwaters of clean water for Municipalities far downstream because Yellowstone's effects were not limited to Yellowstone or to the smoke or to off-stream Floods or the rest of it they influenced how people thought about fire What kinds of fires they were willing to tolerate on the landscape? So it forced us to reevaluate our policies many parks and reserves that had natural fire programs shut them down Other countries like Russia and Australia didn't want anything to do with this So it affected how fire appeared on the earth all over the US and all over the world That is fire ecology, but it's being cycled through people through our ideas our images our perceptions or misperceptions of fire Yellowstone 1988 was a high-profile example of a much larger ecological problem Many began to question the message of smoky bear and did we as a nation over emphasize the idea of fire suppression? Today Ed will become a killer and here's his weapon Good old Ed Morgan a mighty careful man in his own home He can't imagine how anyone could have been so careless Ed Morgan every man Anyone who handles fire in any form is a potential killer Anyone can start a fire and never even know it Please be very careful with fire. Please only you can prevent forest fires Today there is this this political push if you will To micromanage the way that we deal with fire when in fact fire is this all pervasive force Everything about the West the beauty the fertility of the valleys the abundance of the wildlife It all comes back to the fact that fire has been a key agent on our public lands I think from the very beginning of our country that we sort of Misunderstood the role of fire in nature and we've seen fire tear through great cities like New York and Boston and Chicago And we've always thought that fire is bad Uncontrolled fire is bad and we look to the forest the same way And I think the human reaction is to extinguish the fire to put it out to get rid of it But fire doesn't behave like floods or like lava flows. It's a process It's not necessarily a thing or an item that moves around on the earth. We've lost our human affinity for fire We've forgotten how important fire is I think a lot of the misconceptions with fire come because it's no longer a part of our everyday Experience we live in cities. There are good reasons to fear open flames in cities There are good reasons to get rid of it to build fireproof structures and so forth But if your only experience of fire is seeing it and those kinds of damaging Catastrophic ways then the tendency will be to project that personal or social experience out onto the landscape in general The nature's economy has to run just like ours and they don't it's different everywhere that humans went we brought European notions of fire suppression with us and steadily over 150 years We snuffed out fire and we refused to allow it to be the agent that it had been for countless millennia I think that the catastrophic fires that we've had in the sense at least from a public perception of catastrophic a lot of acres of Burning a lot of footage through the mass media giving this impression that fire was essentially destroying consuming the West and Because we've practiced fire suppression for well over a hundred years. We've created conditions Which make those fire events seem that much worse the cost of fire suppression or more broadly our attempt at fire exclusion has been enormous And it's taken lots of forms. It's been economic. It's been ecological It can even be measured in terms of loss of human life and property Author Richard Manning Writing in the New York Times says The forests of the northern Rockies have been severely damaged Because of a century of firefighting the greatest threat to our forests has been our own efficiency The West ought to burn and we ought to have the political will to burn it if we don't The trees will die the fuels will accumulate the drought will come and the West will burn anyway only hotter Well on the surface one effort is trying to extinguish the fire the other effort is trying to start the fires I think the question is What's the most appropriate method for that particular piece of land at that particular time? Maybe to let a fire burn without extinguishing it It may be to extinguish it if it's threatening structures and and other resources like the watershed or Particularly with the air quality or it may be if there's not a fire and hasn't been for a while Maybe it's time there was a fire. That's the part where we use prescribed fire to insulate certain resources For example structures and communities by burning the forest burning all the fuels out So there's less of a chance that a devastating fire could start and and spread and do further damage Well fire shakes and bakes fire is part of the creative destruction in nature's economy It breaks open stuff nutrients and chemicals that are locked up in dead wood or repeat Be liberated by fire fire. It's smoke and stimulate flowering and production It rearranges the structure of an ecosystem. It selects against some organisms selects in favor of others We've looked at reintroducing fire back into some of those ecosystems and that has been a very effective tool It's a costly. It's a risky business that you have to kind of weigh all of the the facts and the figures And the potential of what that fire will ultimately do but generally it's good We do have good prescribed fire programs in every state in the United States It's been effective and fire has a real place in land management For the most part controlled or prescribed burning has been utilized on a small scale Using natural barriers such as rivers lakes rock formations and open fields as added Guarantees that the blaze will remain controlled So there are conflicts a lot of people are very opposed to using fire because they're afraid of fire But in the big picture fire can be used in a lot of places and it can be effective Fire suppression has been effective in a lot of places and the blending of the two is just the way that it has to be in the future Wildfire on the planet is older than human history itself. We didn't invent fire It was already out there for more than 400 million years Fire will outlive us. It will outlive our buildings our words It will even outlive styrofoam In fact when the planet bids farewell, it will probably do so in a blaze of solar fire Earth is a fire planet I mean from day one and fire will always be a part of every ecosystem at some point in time and what we've done is we've Entered those ecosystems and we have taken fire out of a lot of them when fire does get into those ecosystems It's not natural. It's extremely intense extremely costly to deal with fire is pretty well fundamental to life On the planet now the chemistry of combustion is very elemental all it does is take apart what photosynthesis puts together when that happens in a Cell we call it respiration when it happens out in the open We call it fire fire is not an alien visitation on the planet It's something which has been around for a very long time fire has been the life-giving force It was perhaps the seminal agent in humankind in being able to move out and disperse across the landscape This is who we are we are the fire creature This is our ecological niche other animals knock over trees dig holes in the ground and eat grass and hunt and do all of this Stuff, but we're the creature that manipulates fire. The question is are we doing it in sane ways? Are we doing it in ways that advance our interests and advance the other interests on whose behalf we manage fire Since the Yellowstone fires of 1988 We've we've been obsessed in particular with the problem of houses and wildlands Intermixing and this problem is really dominated national attention during a fire fire management effort a lot of resources are directed to protecting structures as opposed to Attacking or directing energies towards trying to control the fire and as a result that the fire management effort becomes Defensive rather than offensive and it means the fire just tends to tends to grow bigger and bigger We just have to acknowledge that people want to build in these natural areas. It's a fact It's happening everywhere. We can't ignore it the people that have lived here for a long time or have you know come generation after generation They're aware of the wildfire problem But what happens is the newer people might move from an urban area like New York City or Philadelphia They may move into this area and they definitely don't realize that wildfires occur and that they potentially can threaten that So what we need to do is just say you cannot take the urban lifestyle and translate it into a natural woody area It just doesn't work. You've got to make some adjustments in planning and in lifestyle and daily activities The wildland urban interface what is it? It's the actual physical coming together of the population with the land where wildfires and natural and ongoing occurrence It's this complex relationship that more often than not Results in the loss of property and human life and when wildfire burns to catastrophic proportions It can systematically alter ecosystems creating very real threats like affecting the drinking water for large metropolitan areas the wildland urban interface specifically was identified in in 1965 when a UC Berkeley professor coined the term wildland urban interface at that point in time Fire agencies in California recognize the problem and and we've been directing programs at that that issue ever since then The wildland urban interface is a very perplexing problem people love the greater Yellowstone ecosystem It provides them with good jobs and beautiful scenery Great places to raise their kids who would not want to move here However, a lot of the people that are moving into the greater Yellowstone ecosystem and in other parts of the West Where they're moving into these wildland areas? Don't particularly think about the fact they may be moving into a vegetation type that is fire prone now We have more houses. It's almost as though we're revisiting the whole settlement process over again It's like the end of the 19th century with an ex-urban migration again We've learned that the problem was not simply suppressing fires You always need to control fires. You don't want bad fires. The problem was that we quit lighting fires We took fire out of the landscape in ways that proved to be self-destructive The cost of putting it back together again is going to be immense It's like we would need a whole super fund huge amounts of the public lands are now filled with the combustion Equivalent of toxic waste and how we're going to clean that up on a large scale and a useful scale No one has a clear idea. Well fire is one of those natural events that we have certain controls over Just as Michael Crichton said in one of his books Scientists do things because they can and don't ask if they should and I think we tend to look at fire as well We can extinguish this the question is should we extinguish it? It means we start using our heads and Deciding what kinds of fires are appropriate where there's presently an enormous Mildistribution of fire too much of the wrong kind not enough of the right kind that Responsibility is ours. There's some fire that we we have to understand that there's not enough resources There's not enough money. There's not enough equipment. There's not enough firefighters To even begin to make a dent in what the fire is going to do. We have to learn to build We have to learn to live we have to learn to modify our lifestyles to fit the earth We can't always modify the earth to fit our lifestyles This is one of the most fundamental things we do as a species. This is part of our identity We are the keeper of the flame and we've reduced it to simply trying to put it out There must be some way out of here Say the Joker to the theme There's too much confusion I Can't get no relief I went to an area called the Great Burn Stretch of wilderness swept by the 1910 fires of Idaho and Montana To this day it remains a country of open ridges meadows still fire resistant 84 years later You know, there's a way to fight fire and it's with fire Richard Manning writing in the New York Times Resilient may be the word that best defines nature an Astonishing system able to withstand almost any strain without permanent injury Organisms have to accommodate fire. It's simply out there. They have to make sense of it And in general they do it in two ways one is by protecting themselves from fire They have thick bark or thick tissues that protect the flowering parts or they can flee or go into burrows They have some way to avoid the negative effects of fire, but there's also a sort of promotive quality to adaptations That is many organisms can thrive in the ash their competitors are driven off perhaps Some will begin to flower in some cases some conifers have sealed cones with waxes and and very strong heating such as fire Can release that seal release the seed the plant communities who are most directly affected by fire are very resilient and have Mechanisms with which to deal with fire and that could be the way they put out seed or the way the seeds are stored in the Seabank or the use of rhizomes and roots and tubers that are left in the ground, you know to resprout following a fire Nature in a way is not very beautiful in the sense of it's not a postcard out there And a lot of the species that we care about can't live in those postcard kind of situations They need it roughed up around the edges to a certain extent and if we manage all land for one condition We're going to manage only for one set of plants and animals things have occurred that we didn't expect things like changing ecosystems from very open forest to now Forests that are very dense with trees and not very diverse and that are extremely prone to fire the historic and Conventional view that wildfires were bad for forest began to change in earnest during the 1940s with the work of ecologist John Curtis at the University of Wisconsin increasingly studies found that controlled burns could help regenerate the elements of an ecosystem in The large pulpine ecosystems of the park here fire returns to the area on a very long interval Two to four hundred years But when it does it is very intense and it results in the complete elimination or burns completely burns the whole stand and causes Stand re-initiation to occur all over again on the other hand researchers in the ponderosa pine ecosystem For example lower elevation fires tend to come much more frequently 20 to 40 years or so and when the fires do occur they they tend to be of a much lower intensity They'll burn on the forest floor and not consume the crowns But it results in in this frequent low intensity that tends to clean out the understory and prevent the accumulation of a lot of heavier larger fuels Fire does not nuke an area and sterilize it there are very small instances in particular cases where that may happen But for the most part fire happens because of things around it fire synthesizes its surroundings So it can't in a sense transcend those surrounding it is a part of this whole exchange that's going on One of the misunderstandings that people have about wildfires are that they're bad or they're good that we put these Emotional connotations to wildfire wildfire just is all these negative connotations that go into what the media says and from a human Point of view that is true But what's interesting is the media which you know their goal is to be objective puts these negative connotations onto wildfires as they report Devastating and catastrophic are those words that you would use to define fires. Well No, I these words like catastrophic and devastation and they are their emotional words You know that we use to to to describe what we perceive as the effects of the fire fire is part of the Natural conditions of our world. It is important that we understand That role it is important that we make every effort that we can through that understanding to utilize fire in The way that our mother earth Utilizes fire to help cleanse the land to Eliminate the catastrophic wildfire conditions that we have across many Thousands of acres here in this country Wildfire is a tool that we're going to have to learn how to use and use well the study of anything depends on a study of history and our relationship with fire is no exception a Relationship that has been intricate and at times intimate, but like all relationships Always interdependent we as a species have had a monopoly over fire for all of our existence We've always manipulated it. No other creature has had that capacity. I'm sure we'll never allow any other creature to possess It would destroy our world very quickly We had power over fire first because we could manipulate it pick it up move it around then because we could start it But being able to start it still means you're at nature's mercy It's only if nature presents fuel the next stage is that we begin creating fuel We begin growing it slashing it letting creatures churn it up and that still has limits more recently We've industrialized we've gone for our fuel into the geologic past essentially Unbounded amounts of fossil biomass and that's what we're burning now the interaction of all those different kinds of fire Practices gives us a very complicated mosaic and how they interact Compete and complement each other is something we don't really understand but have to sort out before we're going to get control over With fire in tow man colonize the planet Anthropogenic fire that is man's fire Spread steadily across the landscape the flame passed from generation to generation Ultimately man's early quest for fire was a quest for power. In fact 12,000 years ago Paleo Indians moved on to the North American continent across the Bering Bridge and with fire as a powerful tool They aggressively forged a new continent shaping a very diverse ecosystem a myth lingers that Native Americans were environmentally benign but in actuality Native Americans Displayed a keen sense of fire knowledge Native Americans like like virtually all people have used fire to make their world more habitable The interesting question is how in growing up on the reservation and Visiting and learning from the tribal elders that were there They taught me that There's importance in all things of mother nature Native American use of fire in all parts of the country in the past was very effective from the standpoint of Clearing land for improving vegetation bringing in wildlife improving herds buffalo I mean the list goes on and on researchers and historians tell us that Native Americans use fire for a number of different purposes It may be to burn a range and improve forage for the horses or to attract Wildlife to to game ranges, you know, we're we're we're concentrated wildlife could be harvested to feed the tribe There's such a great respect in the Native American world of all things of mother nature that in learning about them in singing about them and Gaining that respect that we gain the understanding that we need in order to work with mother earth and help her Stay healthy. Many of the regimes the plant regimes Ponderosa pine is fire-dependent the current policies of suppression and the aggressive nature of our suppression Activities over the recent years. We've actually in my opinion have damaged the normal ecosystem There's a lot of species that evolved that require fire and once we've eliminated fire from the system We basically have made it so those species can't persist So a loss of fire from Native American burning as well as control of fires through lightning strike ignitions Has pushed a number of species to the edge of nearly disappearing I'll never forget a dear friend of medicine man actually court lotta Walking around my place and looking around and very naturally without judgment Saying yeah, this needs to burn. It's ready. It's ripe, you know with no sort of oh my god We got to do something just it was part of the natural process as they believe there really is no good or bad in nature There's just what's true. What's real? The prototypical European countryside image was one where everything had its assigned spot Fire belonged in the hearth or with the blacksmith Open and free flame existed far beyond fenced-in borders Theoretically fire didn't belong at all the geography of fire that we have today as a result of Europe's expansion And it's understanding of fire or its misunderstanding of fire and fire was always distrusted by Intellectuals by officials by people living in cities, but it was absolutely fundamental to people who actually lived on the land And so there's a huge quarrel within Europe between those who would like to abolish it as dangerous Who see it as a sign of social unrest and destruction and those who actually need it and that? Quarrel is then projected as Europe expands out to other lands and instead of dealing with their own peasants They're dealing with all kinds of indigenous peoples for whom fire may be even more Extravagant than it ever was in Europe and so the collision is enormous imagine the British in India or southern Africa For example, some of the most pyrophobic Intellectuals on the planet dealing with some of the most pyrophilic Peoples and the collision is huge much of European expansion is a kind of sustained firefight Who's going to control the land that will be fought very largely over who controls fire fire suppression fire? Abolition becomes a way of controlling those native landscapes and the peoples The other part that's important is the more mythological component and that says that fire is power And it's very clear not only in European but in mythologies around the world that human beings are not of much Significance before they acquire fire. We don't we don't have strength. We don't have smell We don't have talons. We're not fast We're sort of among the real weak links in the great chain of being but then when we get fire We become powerful and suddenly the whole order of things begins reversing But the sense is is very real and powerful that fire is a source of human power human identity And hence is in some ways sacred must be sacred people gather around the fire That's what defines the group the tribe the family much of the history of the problem that we have today Stems from the early settlement of the nation. So we brought in livestock in two big numbers We harvested timber in two larger quantities. We mined areas that we shouldn't have been mining We've damned rivers that we shouldn't have damned. We were highly focused on Development and getting the country settled Ironically, it was the birth of Yellowstone that changed the model the establishment of the first National Park in 1872 meant that the United States government Needed to manage public land and create public policy on the welfare of that land, but a conflict arose Nature dictates that forest burn and this burning of the forest was seen as a threat We have extensive wildland fires in the United States because we have extensive wildlands so the act of Interfering with the settlement process setting aside large areas to be maintained in a quasi wildland state Created the necessity for a new set of fire practices and ultimately a new policy Actually begins with the Yellowstone National Park the federal involvement in 1886 the cavalry took over the park very largely to fight fires and that became the model So by reserving these lands you create a unique habitat for fire We had no precedent for this because people had always been a part of it now You've excluded people from living off the land. What kinds of fire practices are appropriate? Basically what it meant was that you either convert those lands to something less combustible or you do the burning yourself Hurry 1900s of the policy of to extinguish the fire by 10 a.m The day after is reported that very aggressive suppression policy just further built up the the fuels And at the same time we've had a population that's moved into these areas and started to populate these areas where fire occurred naturally The key institution here is the US Forest Service which looked initially to Europe for models thought that fire exclusion would be Appropriate believed it was possible found out over a long term. It was not 1910 is often referred to as the year of the fires Called a holocaust by many the great fires of 1910 burned through nearly five million acres of land 79 firefighters died These wildfires had their own scorched earth policy Fallout literally darkened the skies over New England and dropped black soot on the ice of Greenland The Forest Service was only five years old as it faced its first and so far Greatest test as the American West wore it out of control In fact the great fires of 1910 Helped to define the way fires were fought throughout the 20th century from land management to the actual tools used by firefighters The fires of 1910 were a seminal moment in American fire history They targeted particularly what we might call the frontier fire scene all these settlers and still Native American setting fires Using it in traditional ways trying to control that by the 1930s They've done what they can in the accessible areas. The question is how far can you push it to the back country and with the great Depression the political possibilities of that a tremendous liberation of federal investment. They begin to push it everywhere That the only thing we have to fear is fear itself World War II the onset of the Cold War gives rise to another sort of concern particularly dealing with very large Catastrophic fires the belief that the next war will involve rural America This would be a fire war heavy sort of fire ordinance has been created culminating in the atomic bomb fire imagery Dominates the scene and this continues so an all-out sort of program a kind of Cold War on fire But gradually this begins faltering and by 1970 Recognition that fire has an ecological role the costs and self destructive qualities of fire suppression give rise to an interest in fire In wilderness somehow restoring natural fire and this culminates I think in the Yellowstone fires of 88 and the complexity of that and Since then we've really been in another particular fire problem, which has to do with Houses and wildlands intermixing We begin to realize fire has ecological and economic costs Fatalities are a part of the story. Is this what our relationship to fire should be use fire as a fire fight Is this how we're going to some all of our complex human? Connections with fire and so there's an attempt to redefine the story to reintroduce fire in some form I think we need to shift the paradigm and begin to look at the Wildland private land interface for example in the same way We're beginning to look at flood plains in the past We allowed people to build next to areas prone to catastrophic flooding And I think we've learned that that's a very dangerous thing to do and ultimately a very expensive Thing to do a couple places that we've we've worked real well to help reintroduce fire has been in Florida where fire historically occurred really extensively maintain these open pine systems by Reapplying fire in there. We've helped reduce one fire loads But also restore the ecology especially for a lot of rare and threatened endangered species Yes, we have wildfires. We put them out. We try to keep them small especially areas like New Jersey We're even a small fire could quickly threaten people's lives of their property So we have to suppress wildfires, but then we also have the situation where if we do suppress the fires We do have the fuel build-up So we need to use the prescribed fire to reduce that fuel build-up any time you deviate from nature any time you Deviate from the balance that's taken millenia to develop somewhere somehow sometime you pay a price When man seized control of fire there was an intrinsic bargain at work in that exchange We took the flame, but it lacked an instruction manual on how to use it properly We took the power. Can we accept and assume the responsibility? I Definitely thought coming out here that fire was it was a bad thing I came completely closed-minded to the fact that fire was something that needs to happen in especially in the Western ecosystem That fire was here before this land was settled and fire is going to be here after everyone is dead and gone Growing up in Cincinnati I really didn't have much wildfire until recently if there was a big fire down in Red River Gorge It's pretty close to my home And I would never have guessed that fire could have came that close and now that it has It's become more aware to me And I think a lot of homeowners don't realize that wildfire even though you do live in an area that doesn't have it very often Maybe once every 100 years it can happen right near your home It's better to try to live with fire Instead of trying to control fire because we can't control fire if it doesn't burn Like it's supposed to naturally then it's going to be the devastating fire that take over homes communities and towns The trees just start growing so thick the dead underbrush just builds up Creates lots of fuels for the fires. It burns so hot so fast burns in crown fires Which are the tops of trees and just burns so out of control that there's not much we can do to stop it When you start, you know building houses out in these areas, you know that fire may have been suppressed for the last You know 100 years 150 years It's gonna burn. It's not really a disaster, you know, like they're saying It's only a disaster. You know when you put people into the situation So the fires are very necessary to keep the Keep the vegetation under control and keep the trees from being too close together and keeps the forest from being too thick Keep the fires from burning too hot when they do come because they're going to come through If fire were invented today captured today, it would never make it past the regulatory agencies It's much too dangerous the side effects are horrendous public health threats It gives me in a sense some hope that all the other things that we've unleashed from the atomic bomb to other kinds of horrors We do have precedent for being able to cope and deal with large powers that we've assumed in that example Perhaps a hopeful example if a confused one is fire So really what we need to do is learn To learn what the natural cycles of nature are and get out of their way when we have to And support them and to think and put that into our planning before in one of the Lovelyest parts of Malibu. There's a hillside that's covered with all these houses the last fire I remember driving and there wasn't a house left standing just hundreds of chimneys I drove by the other day with my daughter and every single house is back there And they haven't taken out the eucalyptus trees In many cases they've built with stucco and wood frame again. We have to learn from previous mistakes We have to learn from nature And we have to learn from each other How to help each other come through the disasters that life throws in your face all the time What has been the cost of a century of fire suppression? The answer can be found right at the core of our current forest health crisis A crisis that would likely not exist without fire exclusion Because of wildfire suppression and because people have grown up with this idea that Wildfire is inherently bad. The federal government comes in and puts out all forest fires People have felt more comfortable moving into these wilderness wildland areas And surround themselves with big beautiful trees And they realized that well if a forest fire is beckoning on my back door The the federal government will probably come in and put that fire out for me The last two years just on the north fork here We've spent a little over nine and a half million dollars To protect just a couple lodges and about a half a dozen cabins A lot of that is spent on structure protection Bringing in engines bringing in crews to create defensible space around them We've not done a good job in doing that prior to now So we're having to take people that normally we'd have fighting the fire Dollars and resources they're coming in when the fire is breathing down the neck of those cabins We're in there cutting trees down to get better access around the lodges Ahead of the fire wildfires being suppressed at the wildland urban interface Cost more to fight than wildfires being suppressed in any other situation Since the early 70s Almost 30,000 homes destroyed by a wildland fire That seems insignificant when you look at the united states and you think of how many homes that we have But that's a lot of houses and structures When you look at individual families and and the costs associated with that For local and state and federal governments the price tag of that period of time has been close to 25 billion dollars For suppressing those fires and the insurance industry on top of that in terms of the costs for rebuilding these homes It's been in excess of 10 billion dollars. It's not just the west. It's not just the east. It's florida. It's new jersey It's new york. It's california from 1965 to 1975 The price tag for fire suppression increased tenfold Since the 1980s large wildfires in dead and dying western forests Have greatly accelerated the rate of forest mortality threatening people property and natural resources Fuel loading is so high that future fire intensity could cause severe ecological damage Living with fire in the urban interface is providing a significant problem for wildland firefighters We put firefighters lives at risk whenever we need to protect people's homes Usually we're putting firefighters in situations They normally would not be put in because we're trying to protect people's homes I think we lost sight of what's really important. They would put firefighters in jeopardy Of of losing their lives for just a just a simple wildland fire It doesn't need to be this way the public is at risk every time we have a fire in the wildland area And we see that that's only going to escalate Public has a role and a responsibility to understand where they live to understand the dangers and the ramifications of how they're going to act When a fire is in their subdivision or within their city or within their community And not a lot of people understand that in october 1993 laguna beach california burned Fueled by the sometimes infamous santa anna winds An arsonist fire blazed across the hills that rise jagged from the pacific Complete neighborhoods were destroyed The entire city was evacuated as fire swept across the hills toward urvine One firefighter referred to it as a runaway train When all was said and done and fire was no longer a part of the laguna landscape 232 families lost their homes Historically wildfires have occurred in forest and grasslands But now they're happening in neighborhoods and the risk only grows larger as the interface expands But there is good news Progress is being made. I think there's some encouraging Signs that we're learning to live more Compatibly with fire and understand the combustion process Particularly when it involves structures and homes in the interface communities are beginning to understand more of that Process and understand the mitigation measures that they can do to alleviate the fire or prevent the destruction of homes Well, there's certainly a perception in the west that we can do whatever we want We can live wherever we want that we don't have to have limits on our own behavior But we get people building in these fire prone areas pretty soon We see increased demands for fire protection and fire suppression But I think the returning frequency of large fires Is showing us that we have to demonstrate Self-restraint on our own actions. So for a lot of reasons it doesn't make sense to allow continued or at least uncontrolled Development in the wildland Private land interface proper planning and zoning in the wildland urban interface in areas like this Is only necessary and unless we Embrace the idea of restrictions on our own behavior Fire will teach us the lesson again and again that we're wrong The great imbalance of fire within nature has reached epic proportions Putting communities and lives in constant danger When does this imbalance become our collective responsibility? 99% of the public feel that fire is someone else's responsibility and they have no responsibility Mr. Or Mrs. Homeowner you have a responsibility You built where you built your home and you have to take some of the responsibility for dealing with wildland fire A lot of people feel that moving from cities to the wildland urban interface that they have The same type of fire protection that they had in the city that they will be able to dial 911 And there'll be a firetruck roll into their yard and deal with a fire that's even in their structure or in the Wildlands around the structure and that's not the case in 90 percent of the areas around the united states So there's this perceived Impression that people have that they're covered By a local fire department and they're not Realistically when you're dealing with fire in a community, it really is everyone's responsibility We just can't alone the state forest fire service with the local fire companies go out and say hey We're going to address this wildfire problem. We're going to take care of it We do need the local residents they need to buy in they need to be aware But they also have to be proactive to be a part of it. We have kind of lulled ourselves into a Fall sense of security. We sort of take it for granted that the fire department will be there. Well the fire department Can't always be there. You have to be responsible for yourself. I know personally I lost my house in a brush fire and I thought I did everything by the book I honestly thought that my house was unburnable Turns out I was very wrong and the fire department at that time was so stretched out so thin They couldn't get to my house. So it was an incumbent upon me to protect my house and as a result I lost my house No community is safe from wildfire Plain and simple fire happens A case study is in order Since 1986 wildland fire agencies along with the national fire protection association Have been aggressively promoting a very successful concept called fire wise A program that acknowledges fire's essential role in the ecosystem We recognized that there were problems and and looked for Some concept that would get the message across to the public and a very grass roots Type of a concept that didn't seem like it was the federal government pushing a process into communities Firewise is basically just a concept an idea That homes can be built designed and maintained to withstand a wildland fire Without the intervention of the fire department a lot of work went into making it a process That anybody could use and everybody felt like they owned it And I think that's one of the successes of the fire wise program right now Is that you go around the country and everyone's using fire wise and everyone thinks it's their idea and it's their process And that's exactly what we want if a community were fire wise prescribed burning would be a lot easier That one element of worry and planning taken taken out of the picture Somewhat they could begin to do more prescribed fires around communities that would be more strategic The wild land urban interface is a complex landscape From both an environmental and political standpoint for this patchwork quilt to work Partnerships must find the sometimes elusive balance between man and nature The everybody needs to recognize You know what the problem at hand is going to be and work together to to ameliorate that or to mitigate that And somehow and it has to come in with the landscaping and the materials used and that sort of thing The most important thing that we've done with fire is really one educated landowners as well as agencies and really worked with the scientific community To understand fire and its role in the system And I think the other thing that we've really done is tried to work collaboratively with private landowners to Get a greater understanding of fire one of the things is that we have to listen to each other better So that those folks have to listen to the scientists and the economists and and others and we we need to find Solutions that are more common than they are diverse people are going to move into these natural areas But that's not necessarily prohibitive. There are things we can do We've got to do some big planning. For instance, if you look at the communities of the future Let's say we'll put a park here. We'll give grazing rights here We'll do a control burn here Therefore if that predictable wildfire that our computer models tell us is going to come down It comes down that hill if it arrives at one of those areas where we've made these modifications It will lay down to the point that we can stop it here Therefore here is a place to put that subdivision. We're on this landscape fire is part of this landscape We have to learn to design those communities and live in those communities That are prone to fire in a much safer sane way to do it creating defensible space Is a major factor in the fire wise formula and fuel modification is a major component Thinning removing and cleaning the surface surrounding a structure Allows fire to drop to the ground where firefighters can effectively deal with the fight As we've seen fire needs fuel and oxygen to burn By removing the fuel and creating defensible space Homes and lives stand a much better chance of survival But the interface needs to be very Sensitive to the fire concerns in that these roofs need to be made of non flammable materials rather than shake and shingle roofs Landscaping around these areas needs to be done in a way that's sensitive to fires Just the the cluster and clutter around the house needs to be needs to be kept back so that If indeed structures need to be defended they can that can happen more readily and more successfully We still have people moving out west building homes in forested areas and Not wanting to Come in and build defensible space around those homes. There's still a real lack of understanding As to what fire can do one of the big issues would be just the maintenance of defensible Space around their homes where they realize if their home were to be threatened by a wildfire That they can do something ahead of time proactively to protect their home Because there's no guarantee that a fire engine will be able to be at every house that's threatened by a fire Yes, the fire department's there to help you to help save your house But really You are the first line of defense against any fire. You've got to cut the brush back You've got to you've got to think ahead. You got to think like a fire You've got to know where the fire is going to attack you and address it If you don't well, you're going to lose your property and you could very easily lose your life The simple truth is that wildland fires happen The cycle continues because the cycle is nature Traditional attitudes are sometimes tough to change Many people maintain combustible homes in hazardous areas Thinking that fire won't happen to me Some people will even rebuild two and three times after a fire without learning nature's harsh lesson Thinking that fire like lightning never strikes the same place twice History teaches us this just isn't the case I think the danger with the public understanding or misunderstanding are with fire fundamentalisms That is that fire has to be all good or it has to be all there But either fire is so intrinsically dangerous And hazardous that we can have nothing to do with it and we ought to exclude it From nature as we would try to exclude it from our house Or that fire is is natural and therefore it is good and we ought to let fire Rome wherever it should The reality is that fire Synthesizes its surroundings It behaves according to its surroundings. We have to think in terms of fire's context We can't simply isolate fire and behave in a kind of absolutist way towards it It's not enough just to beat up on suppression It's not enough to say smokey bear was wrong because he was also right We need we need all of it. We need to find a larger story to embrace all those elements of fire The cycle of fire is an unbroken phenomenon A phenomenon that tracks as well as defines human history It has been a story and will continue to be a story of finding balance Of where and how we live Remember earth is a fire planet And so it goes