What can we do?[Wildfire management is] kind of faith-based ecology at this point. What if we've just lost control [of fire]? Maybe we'll just respond [to new fires] or, maybe we have better ways to do it. I think there's probably better ways to do it. There're some experiments trying other things but, I have to say, my sense of the fire community in the West is that most have lost faith that they can catch up, or get ahead of it. So there's a big rethink under way, some large-scale experiments, some 20 year experiments, to sort of get the land into shape to where it's more resilient to fire, to where we can handle it, have the fires we want, prevent the ones we don't want. But do we have 20 years for the experiment to run?
We've spent the first 50 years trying to put fire out of the landscape. And we've spent nearly 50 years trying to put it back. It turns out to be much more difficult to return fire than to remove it. It's like returning a lost species; the habitat has got to be there, and the habitat has changed. Not just because of fire suppression—though that's a part of it—but the way we've used the land over those 100 years, the grazing and logging, and then the way we put houses up against borders. The way we've reclassified public lands into, say, wilderness areas; they have a different fire policy than other [public lands]. And there's invasive species, and climate change, whether you want to take that into account—you don't need to. Our options, our range for maneuvering, is a lot tighter.
This one is actually from Aeon:That's part of the argument. It's not whether or not you have fires or whether or not you burn it, it's what kinds of fires, what's kind of fire regime. Saying something has adapted to fire is like saying it's adapted to rainfall. It doesn't mean anything. It's like, well, does the rain come every month or every two months? And if you change that, then you change the system. That ecosystem is no longer adapted to it. That's the argument, that we've changed the character of fires in a way that's outside the evolutionary experience of these species. We could be facing an overturning of whole systems.
We now know that attempting to abolish fire from natural sites for which it is indigenous is a mistake as profound as mindlessly extirpating wolves. Yet letting wildfire ramble amid the global metastases of the Anthropocene is an act of faith-based ecology. If all we want is the wild, we will get it. If we expect a usable mix of ecological goods and services, we will have to add our hand to nature's. We created an ecological insurgency, and only by controlling the countryside can we quell it.
There is no both ways: Wildlands will deliver wildfires. It's our choice (maybe) of what sorts of wildfires those actually are.The classic preservationist solution is to leave the landscape to sort itself out, even if this takes decades and the outcome is unlike anything experienced before. Nature has deep powers of recuperation. But when wildfires off the evolutionary charts are burning areas a hundred times the size of the 2,000 hectares allowed for the smallest legal wilderness, there might not be much resilience left. Our nature reserves, even the largest, will burn with properties probably not seen before and on a scale not previously experienced.