Fire Season

Dan Hoff

 

            The air has that chill again. Bow season has started, and the outdoors-man’s collective conscience is sharpened by the memories of a time when fire kept us warm at night. The air has a somewhat magical quality at this time of year. It seems as if whispers in the wind itself are driving the changes that are occurring. This seems fitting to my mind as the atmosphere connects us all on a molecular level, and what I breathe today might be in South Africa in a week.

 

            Regardless of the hunting pleasures, climate change insinuations, and desire to gather good friends and drink whiskey around a fire ring in autumn, the best thing the fall brings is the prescribed burn season. Few things besides whitetails find me eagerly out of bed early in the morning, and the allure of running chevrons through a field with a drip torch full of diesel and gasoline is one of them. There is something magical about controlling the appetites of a raging blaze on an autumn afternoon.

 

            My draw towards fire borders on primal. When my former boss contacted me the other day offering the  opportunity to rejoin the Aldo Leopold Foundation burn crew as scheduling allowed, I cracked a smile that made my roommate ask what was wrong with me. While my personal affinity towards all things flammable is deeply rooted in my personal preferences, and past experiences my education as a Wildlife Ecology major hammered home the ecological significance of fire as a disturbance mechanism. It also made me take a hard look at the policies that result in an almost endless supply if jobs for young people willing to tramp around our national forests and wilderness areas each summer trying to control wild-land fires.

 

            Fire needs to be introduced to the western half of the United States in a new light. Its ecological significance has been lost in the cries of ranchers, sprawling suburbs, and uneducated individuals who fear the power and unpredictability of any fire.

           

            The consequences of constantly squelching an important natural process are dire and varied. As a nation we spend an increasing amount of money, time, and lives on fire control, by addressing the symptom not the problem. Headwaters Economics reports that fully half the USFS budget is spent on fire control, around $3 billion annually. It is essential that fire go from a dirty word, to a tool in our toolboxes. In an austerity riddled political arena proactive paradigms that include the use of fire as a management tool can reduce the cost of fire control, freeing budgets to other ends. Prescribed fire can also be used to create buffer zones around the suburban wild-land interface, and protect slow developing ecosystems that are already stressed by anthropogenic actions and climate change. A significant fire event in already stressed sagebrush steppe systems could take 50 years to recover to the point of lek usage by Sage Grouse. The effects of leaving the status quo alone are too serious to ignore.