Wildland Fire Use Fires Are Worse Than Useless

In the 1970’s an inkling of the catastrophic fire problem surfaced in the collective grey matter of government types engaged in managing vast tracts of the public domain. By putting their combined brains together in one big pile, they figured out that fuel was at least one of the reasons wildfires burn.

But the group-think stymied at that point, and the agencies came up with a stupid (but what they thought was a great) idea: burn the fuel in place. They thought that if they set a fuel-laden forest on fire deliberately, the fire would burn the fuels, but not the green trees. And so they invented “Prescribed Natural Fire”.

The agencies hazarded their plan on the Mother Nature Myth. They assumed, naturally, that Mother Nature would start the fires with lightning, and guide the flames to burn the small trees but not the big ones, much like Santa Claus guides his reindeer.

The fact that intelligent fires had never occurred in nature (because Mother Nature is a myth, and fire is a chemical reaction and not a magic flying reindeer) did not deter the agencies. They would write “prescriptions” that would implore and beseech Mother Nature, and by dint of their Official High Priest designations, droning public supplications, and the symbolic sacrifice of traincar loads of paper and red tape, Mother Nature would follow the agencies’ prescriptions.

All the land management agencies had used plain old “prescribed fire”, for decades, the difference being people set the one kind and Mother Nature set the other. Prescribed fire is catchall term that includes burning forests properly prepared to receive fire, burning forests improperly prepared, and burning forests without any preparation at all.

Human-set prescribed fire has been used in Southern pine plantations for more than a hundred years. Controlled fire can be very successful in site prep and weeding plantations in the relatively flat and humid South. Most prescribed fire acres today occur there. It is not our practice to lump tree farms in with forests, but the National Wildland Fire Statistics do that. It confounds the data, in our opinion. Tree farms, i.e. commercial tree plantations, are not forests, whether publicly or privately owned.

Some Western prescribed fires were successful, depending on how success is defined. But human-set prescribed fire took a punch in the head when in 2000 the National Park Service set Bandelier National Monument on fire, without preparing the fuels, and the fire escaped, and burned up half of Los Alamos, including the Lab, and cost $661 million, at least.

A lot of people were unhappy about that. Thereafter the agencies became loathe to set any more prescribed fires. Money talks, and in the Los Alamos case, money screamed bloody murder, and no one in the Federal employ wanted to accept responsibility.

Prescribed Natural Fire had met its Waterloo twelve years earlier in 1988, when a PNF incinerated Yellowstone National Park. That was another case where forests burned catastrophically, money screamed, and responsibility was dodged by the agencies.

What to do? In 2001 the agencies went back to PNF, but they gave it a new name: Wildland Fire Use Fires. We don’t know how they came up with this moniker. We have referred to them as Wildland Use Fires in prior posts, because it is a better name, and more people can relate to the concept, and see it for what it is, which is useless or worse.

The idea behind the WUF or WFUF is that Mother Nature does her thing, without the prescriptions, supplications, and sacrificial paper. In fact, as little paperwork is done as possible on WFUF’s, mainly in order to obscure the paper trail.

Another feature is that Mother Nature picks the time and place, not lowly humans. Mother Nature writes Her own prescriptions. Another way to put this is WFUF’s are entirely accidental, and no human can be blamed (or so the agencies’ thinking goes).

The Warm Fire (here and here) was a WFUF. So is the Tin Pan Fire (here and here), now up to 9,200 acres. WFUF’s are not cheap. The Warm Fire cost over $7,000,000. The numbers are not in yet on the Tin Pan Fire, but it will undoubtedly cost many millions. WFUF’s can cost from $1,000 per acre up to ten times that much.

But it’s worth it, right? Not really. Mother Nature doesn’t do a good job. She fails to achieve the agencies’ land management goals.

In a policy statement issued after the fire entitled Warm Fire Background Information (see here) the Kaibab National Forest stated:

The Warm Fire was managed as a wildland fire use fire and initially provided great ecological benefits to promote the health of the forest. Some of the resource objectives of wildland fire use fires include:

1• Recycling nutrients into the soil
2• Enhancing habitat for wildlife
3• Reducing accumulations of woody material on the forest floor
4• Increasing the amount of perennial grasses, forbs and browse plants for the benefit of wildlife and livestock
5• Maintaining grassland ecosystems by controlling the encroachment of trees
6• Reducing the potential for high-intensity fires
7• Protecting threatened and endangered animal and plant habitat from the negative effects of high-intensity fires
8• Creating conditions such as more open stands and reduced fuels
9• Allowing fires to actively function as an ecological process across the landscape

Let us look closely at each of these.

1. Recycling is nice. Everybody should recycle. But the Kaibab forest does not have nutrient-poor soils. Very few trees exhibit nutrient deficiencies (most exhibit moisture stress, however). The conversion of biomass to ash puts trace amounts of calcium, phosphorus, and potassium back into the soil, but the soil has an abundance of those elements, already. Recycling the nutrients in the Kaibab N.F. is a euphemism for burning the forest down for no rational reason.

2. The Warm Fire did not enhance wildlife habitat; it destroyed it. Dig deep into this argument, and the USFS will tell you they mean “snag creation” for “cavity nesters”. But there was already an abundance of snags in the Kaibab Forest, a super-abundance. Besides, most so-called cavity nesters nest in a variety of niches, not just snag holes. For the most part, so-called cavity nester populations are controlled by predatory-prey relations anyway, not the wealth or dearth of cavities. Moreover, there are hundreds of species of wildlife that nest, feed, mate, and generally spend their entire lives in living trees with green crowns. Kinglets, nuthatches, squirrels, etc. all need living trees, and those wildlife species are eliminated for decades following catastrophic forest fires.

3. The Warm Fire did not reduce woody fuel accumulations; it increased them. Very little large woody debris burned, and the newly dead trees will only add to the total. Fine fuels, like pine needles, were partially reduced, especially green pine needles attached to living pine trees, which are now needle-free and dead.

4. Converting forests to grasslands for the benefit of livestock is not a worthy goal. Where in the blazes they got the idea that such was their mission is unknown to us, but their stated mission sucks. Please do not convert America’s priceless, heritage forests to cow pastures, Kaibab functionaries. Wrong approach, dudes.

5. If by grassland ecosystems they mean native prairies, well alright. Burn that. Burn it every year like the Indians did for thousands of years. We approve. But over on the edge of the prairie, where the forest starts, please do not burn that part unless and until you have prepared the forest to receive the fire. Otherwise you will cause a catastrophe. The Warm Fire, by the way, was not a grass fire, it was a forest fire. Doubters may check Google Earth, and see the vegetation type for your selves.

6. The Kaibab N.F. did not reduce the potential for a high-intensity fire; they realized the potential. The Warm Fire was high-intensity, and despite the deliberate spin in the fire’s name, burned very hot, hot enough to kill tens of thousands of acres of trees. It is absurd to claim they prevented something that they deliberately caused. Oh yeah, Mother Nature caused it. Mother Nature chose the time and place. No, not really. The leadership of the Kaibab N.F. could have controlled the fire at any time, until it blew up and they had to call for help. They should not be allowed to evade or escape responsibility. They created a catastrophe; they did not prevent one.

7. Nothing about the Warm Fire protected threatened and endangered species habitat. Instead it destroyed it. Kaibab squirrels do not eat dead trees, or spouting brush, or grass. They eat pine seeds, which are only produced by living pine trees over 25-years-old (or so). Again, the catastrophe was not prevented; it was induced by the USFS.

8. The Warm Fire created conditions, but not open stands and reduced fuels. Instead it created total mortality non-stands with huge new fuel loadings. Where once was forest, now is scorched earth, blackened snags, and deep piles of charred debris. Brush will sprout, and thickets of pine and fir will come up in places, but these are nothing like open forest stands, and are doomed to incinerate again in 20 years (or so) anyway.

9. The Kaibab once held some of the most magnificent open, park-like ponderosa pine stands in the world. They did not arise by accidental fire, at accidental times, started in accidental places. Anthropogenic fire shaped the ancient Kaibab Forest. This is such an important lesson for the Kaibab N.F. to grasp. The Kaibab Forest is not wild now and has not been wild for thousands of years. It has been a tended forest. Please try to grok that, Kaibab N.F. functionaries. Mother Nature’s accidental fire incinerating brush and doghair thickets is not the historical forest development pathway, and is not the ecological process desired on the Kaibab Plateau.

The propaganda for Wildland Fire Use Fires is pathetic and demonstrably absurd. No independent scientific investigation has ever, not once, confirmed that WFUF’s accomplish what they are hyped to do.

The USFS is out of control, and hell-bent on burning American forests to the ground. It is hard to believe, and frightening, but that is what is happening in America today.