The Eagle Creek fire rages in the Columbia Gorge (photo courtesy Tristan Fortsch, BA '13, BA '13/KATU News)
This summer, Oregon burned.
And burned. And burned.
In all, more than half a million acres of Oregon burned in wildfires that stretched the length of the state, from the 50,000-acre Eagle Creek fire in the Columbia Gorge, allegedly started when teenagers set off firecrackers on a hiking trail, to the 190,000-acre Chetco Bar fire near Brookings, which was ignited by a lightning strike.
More than 1,900 separate fires raged throughout Oregon in 2017, reducing the square mileage equivalent of Rhode Island to cinders and charred tree stumps while costing upward of $340 million to fight. Nationwide, federal land management agencies routinely spend in excess of $1 billion each year fighting fires, while property damage regularly exceeds $600 million.
And this may be the new normal.
As the Earth warms, the winter snow melts earlier and wildfire season lasts longer—compared with 1970, wildfire season nationwide is now more than two months longer and fires take an average of 30 more days to get under control. During the 1980s, America’s western states experienced approximately 140 wildfires larger than 1,000 acres in size; during the first decade of the 2000s, that number leaped to approximately 250.
The increase is not solely due to climate change, however. Fire is as much a part of nature as rain, and naturally occurring fires allow for new growth while returning rich nutrients to the soil. But in the Pacific Northwest, where logging and outdoor pursuits are important industries—Oregon is the USA’s number one producer of softwood lumber (think: fir and pine trees), and hiking trails crisscross the state—millions of dollars each year ride on the forests, well, not burning.
However, the combustible combination of the Earth’s rising temperature and humans controlling when and where fires burn means that huge stretches of the Pacific Northwest are now scenic tinderboxes, picturesque landscapes that are primed to ignite with a single spark.
“Over 100 years ago, really at the turn of the last century, the US got into a really big debate, which actually lasted for a couple decades, about whether letting forests burn would lead to a timber famine,” said Cassandra Moseley, political scientist and senior associate vice president for research at the UO. “In the West in particular, at the end of the day, the people who said we should not let forests burn really won out.”
"What contributed to the size of these fires in the Pacific Northwest are a hundred years of fire suppression, and the rising global temperature with increasingly frequent and severe droughts in the American West," added Augustine Beard, a senior Udall Scholar in the Robert D. Clark Honors College who is researching the history of how people interact with the environment and the discourse surrounding this relationship. Beard said that the media narrative following the Eagle Creek fire individualized culpability for the fires—blaming the teenagers who allegedly sparked the fire, while ignoring the political and ecological context. He explained that this is a broader trend in how we have historically talked about fires and climate change. "In essence, the gorge was a matchbox. The fact that the immediate impulse was to blame these individuals really highlights some of the failures in the way we talk about climate change and the way we talk about fires."
This summer, smoke from the state’s fires poured into the Willamette Valley, choking the air and turning the sky brown for weeks. On the Lane Regional Air Protection Agency’s air quality index, where anything above 301 is considered “hazardous,” Eugene spent multiple days in the 400s.
Beneath the layer of smoke that left residents’ eyes watering and lungs burning, researchers at the University of Oregon continued their quest to find solutions: If this indeed is “the new normal,” how do we prepare for, and recover from, wildfires?
Researchers at the UO are addressing the issue from multiple angles, including looking at how federal contracts for firefighting are awarded, legal and cultural issues that prevent fires from being left to burn naturally, and the ways in which communities can prepare for, and recover from, potentially devastating fires.
“It's one thing for the federal agencies to fight fire, but that's not actually probably going to be enough to really protect communities,” Moseley said. “Communities need to be engaged in protecting communities.
The first step could be as simple as the way houses and lots are built. “If you live in a house with a wooden roof with a wood pile sitting right next to it and trees right up against it, firefighters cannot do anything,” Moseley said. “They cannot protect your house. And, there is considerable risk they will be killed if they try.”
But a billion-dollar issue isn’t going to be solved by simply moving your wood pile farther away from your house. What are a town’s evacuation routes? Who will support the elderly, and those without the resources to quickly escape an oncoming fire? How clear of trees should an area around a town be? What should the specific roles of volunteer and professional firefighters be—should they be fighting the fire or protecting structures, and do they have the resources they need to do either or both?
Questions such as these are being studied by UO researchers, who are also looking at how the very makeup of a community helps it cope with a fire. Common, scalable elements help, as there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution that could inform policy—what may work for Portland may not necessarily work for Prineville, but what common threads in societies that successfully deal with fires can be used to help both?
But what of the fires themselves? What can be done to control something that, as Moseley termed it, doesn’t understand boundaries?
Well, what about fighting fire with fire?
“Many fire ecologists and fire managers believe that one key thing we need to do is put fire back on the landscape,” Moseley said. “How are you going to do that? You’re going to do that through prescribed fire; you light a fire on purpose and in the right season. There’s a growing consensus that we need to have more prescribed fire. But actually lighting that fire is easier said than done.” A partnership between Moseley, the UO School of Law, and Colorado State University is working to understand the policy barriers to prescribed fire.
“Fires will happen sooner or later, and when it’s later they’re often more intense, versus having a more regulated fire regime,” said Scott Bridgham, director of the UO’s Institute of Ecology and Evolution, who, with Professor Bart Johnson, head of the Department of Landscape Architecture, has developed models to help predict future wildfire behavior in the Willamette Valley.
But while the researchers are largely in agreement about what needs to be done, that doesn’t necessarily mean decisionmakers view things the same way. For new policy to be written and approved, many different people and agencies have to be in agreement—including federal land management agencies and the Oregon Department of Forestry, which have different goals and timelines when it comes to fighting wildfires—and it all needs to be done in a manner that doesn’t threaten the lives or property of the state’s four million residents.
“When the fires are burning and they’re threatening communities, the pressure is extreme on the people fighting those fires,” Moseley said. “They’re making decisions in a very difficult and complex environment. You have all of these actors working at different scales with different political and organizational pressures on them. In that environment, it’s not possible to just go to the top and say, ‘We’re going to make some policy and then it’s somehow going to trickle down through this system.’ That’s not how it works. You have to get everybody aligned at different levels, but it feels slow and uneven, and finding the right levers is really, really difficult.”
“This is the West now,” said Beard. “This is the Pacific Northwest. It’s not just the land of rain—it’s going to be the land of smoke, and that’s what it’s going to be known for. We’d better get used to it, and start doing what we can to minimize how bad things get in the future.”
- Damian Foley
Assistant director of marketing and communications