There’s nothing like a hike through an old growth forest.  Whether oak and maple trees on the east coast or redwoods and sequoias out west, it’s immensely soothing to walk on soft, mossy ground and listen to the sound of the wind through the branches.

You won’t find a lot of four-legged critters there, as the shade precludes the growth of a leafy understory, so there’s not a lot for them to eat.  Native Americans picked up on this right away.  If you’re living off rabbits, deer, elk, and buffalo, you don’t want dense forests; you want open grasslands or, at most, widely scattered trees.  So they set fires to clear the land and set forest succession back to an earlier stage, one composed of shade-intolerant grasses and shrubs.  These fires were planned and desired but largely uncontrolled.

Wildfires are unplanned, unwanted fires that occur in undeveloped locations.  They’re caused by lightning, sparks from vehicles and campfires, human negligence, and even arson.  They’re also inevitable.  Some of America’s wildfires were legendary, and not in a good way.

One of my professors in forestry school told us the story of the Coeur d’Alene (Idaho) Fire of 1910.  Follow that link, as the accounts are hair-raising.  When fires get this large, they create their own weather.  The rising heat acts as a chimney, and the fire sucks in air from ground level that can uproot trees, roots and all.  When they hit the fire, they literally explode.  The smoke from this fire blotted out the sun from Saskatoon, Canada, south to Denver, Colorado and east to Watertown, New York.  It burned enough wood to fill a train 2,400 miles long, enough to have built 800,000 homes.  Twenty million acres were burned in only three days. 

That fire was so horrific that it defined fire management practices from that point forward.  In brief, firefighters began to extinguish wildfires as quickly as possible and performed controlled burns to reduce forest litter, which is unburned fuel.  After logging, it’s not uncommon for foresters to perform these controlled burns to remove branches, tops, and assorted combustible debris.  This also serves to stimulate the growth of grasses and shrubs that attract wildlife.

My forestry professor used to say, “Wildfires are nature’s way of taking out the trash.”  Modern fire management techniques enable foresters to conduct controlled burns to remove this “trash,” this combustible debris in a relatively safe manner.

The heat will also melt the resin on pine cones so they drop their seeds on bare mineral soil.  Some pines and even some hardwoods cannot reproduce unless the ground is cleared first, and in some forest types, you may end up with what are called “dog-hair stands” — so many baby trees that you cannot walk through them.  Picture Christmas trees so thick you have to wade through them as if you were swimming.  You’re more liable to get reproduction like that with pine species after a burn, and in a few decades, you’ve got another beautiful forest!

Generally speaking, however, the public does not like to see fires in the woods, even when they’re controlled and being done for a reason.  The smoke is troublesome, fires seem scary to them, and things don’t look very nice for a few years afterward.  We’re also building more homes and businesses in formerly remote areas, which means that wildfires in those areas must now be suppressed.

But just because we’re suppressing wildfires doesn’t mean that the vegetation has stopped dropping leaves and branches.  That material builds up over time, and once ignited, it may become extremely difficult to extinguish.  This is known as the “fire suppression paradox.”  For every wildfire we extinguish today, we set the stage for a future fire that will be harder to put out.

Reports indicate that the frequency of wildfires has been diminishing while their intensity has increased.  Much of the literature on the subject mentions climate change, of course.  But we’re also seeing the fire suppression paradox coming into play.  Better communications and fire suppression techniques enable us to extinguish wildfires more quickly, which diminishes their frequency.  But the ones that do get away from us tend to burn hotter and longer and cover more area.  As we increase residential and commercial construction in remote areas, we can expect the cost of these wildfires to increase. 

Forest managers and forest fire managers are professionals.  They are well trained and in the business of writing prescriptions for the ecosystems under their care.  Proactive care involving brush removal, judicious logging practices, and periodic controlled burns may help reduce the likelihood of occurrences like the Coeur d’Alene Fire or, more recently, the catastrophic fire in Lahaina.

Maybe we should let the professionals do their jobs.

Image: Jeff Head via Flickr, public domain.