Chasing Fire

 Harnessing the power of fire to help our forests transition into a brave new world. 

BY ETHAN AUMACK

Wildfire is an animating force. It can destroy, and it can renew. In can enrage and inspire. It can fragment and unify. Humans have long used it as a tool to reshape natural landscapes. Over the last century, we have used it to reshape political ones. It was powerful enough that Teddy Roosevelt wielded the threat of wildfire—the Great Fire of 1910 to be exact—to solidify the nation’s acceptance of the then new national forest system. To this day, wildfire is used to argue for everything from increased logging on public lands to stricter global warming action.

Wildfire is a powerful physical force to be reckoned with, and it occupies a powerful place in our nation’s history, its political systems, and its psyche.

On a much more personal level, wildfire drew me toward conservation advocacy as a life path, fundamentally shaped my perspectives around conservation and social change, and served as a crucible within which I’ve developed lifelong working relationships and friendships.

Fire took hold of me during my peripatetic post-college years. I wanted to test my book smarts in the real world and found my way to Santa Cruz Island, off the coast of California, to do so. There, working with a small team of biologists and a much larger team of volunteers, I helped prepare the island to see fire for the first time in decades.

Above: Dogtown Lake, Kaibab National Forest. Photo by: U.S. Forest Service, Southwestern Region, Kaibab National Forest.

After months of scratching fire control lines from ridgetop to ocean, carefully measuring the location and number of rare plant species, and setting up monitoring plots from one end of the burn area to the other, we lit the fire. It burned for days, scorching, singing, and skipping down to the ocean. After spending the next few months crisscrossing the burn area to study the fire’s effects, I was sold. Once reintroduced, fire—which had been part of the island’s natural functioning for centuries—could begin to restore health and vitality to a fragile ecosystem hit hard by a century of abuse.

Ready to help restorative fire play out across western public lands, I returned home to northern Arizona and began work at the Grand Canyon Trust. I spent my first day on the job, appropriately, tending to a prescribed burn on the outskirts of Flagstaff. Over the coming months, I began to understand the consequence and complexity of the wildfire and restoration challenge in the greater Grand Canyon region.

I knew that family and friends didn’t want any more towering infernos like the Horseshoe and Hochderffer fires that terrified Flagstaff residents during the summer of 1996, and they wanted something done about those fires.

That something—thinning the forests and returning low-intensity fire to them—didn’t turn out to be easy. It required a radical reversal for industry, which had to retool to thin small trees instead of large ones. It required environmental groups to shift from shutting down unsustainable logging to helping restart a different, restorative kind of work. It required the Forest Service to move from a command-and-control style of land management to a collaborative one. And, it required something different than the zero-sum politicking and finger-pointing that had become staples of each and every fire season.

Above: The Four Forest Restoration Initiative (4FRI) will restore 2.4 million acres of northern Arizona’s Kaibab, Coconino, Apache-Sitgreaves and Tonto national forests over the next 20 years. The largest forest restoration project in the nation, 4FRI will shield Arizona communities from wildfire, protect critical wildlife habitat, and make our forests more resilient in the face of climate change.

Each of these represented a fundamental cultural shift, each a strand in a Gordian knot that I—and many others—have spent the last 15 years working to untangle. I got into conservation as a career because I wanted to do good for the land. Working to get fire back into fire-adapted ecosystems has been an incredibly rewarding opportunity to do so. The fraught world of fire and forest politics forced me to challenge existing paradigms and worldviews—both mine and others’.

But it also gave me one more thing that I hadn’t quite bargained for: a soul-wrenching empathy for those who have had nothing to do with forests or fire or restoration politics, but whose families and livelihoods have still been affected, often dramatically.

I have come to know, and develop close friendships with, some of the scores of individuals and families who were forced out of their homes during the 468,000-acre Rodeo-Chediski fire of 2002 that ultimately destroyed 400 homes. Following the 538,000-acre Wallow Fire of 2011, I stood in front of an auditorium packed with angry and scared families, and apologized for our collective failure to move forward fast enough with restoration that could have prevented that fire. I’ve watched close friends stake their families’ life savings on restoration-supporting start-ups—and lose them. I have also developed fast friendships with colleagues of all political persuasions who are committing their lives to see landscape-scale forest restoration through to success.

Looking back over the last nearly twenty years, the angst I have experienced amongst those who desperately want to see their communities and forests made whole, the joy I have shared as we progress toward that point, and the friendships I have developed in the process, have been rich beyond belief. All have been fire-forged.

I belong to a community of scientists, advocates, and land managers that has set its gaze directly on the future of fire in northern Arizona.

Everything we do is intended to ensure that fires—prescribed and wild—operate better than they do now.

As we look out into the future though, the specter of global warming looms large. Maintaining the status quo is simply not acceptable.

Above: Mogollon Rim Ranger District, Coconino National Forest. Photo by: Brady Smith, USFS, Southwestern Region, Coconino National Forest.

Part of my job is to ask whether my work—our work—will matter in the face of the most important environmental challenge of our era. Though I’ve come back to this question many a time (it often wakes me up in a cold sweat at 3 a.m.), I always come back to the same answer: an emphatic yes. Here’s why:

As the plateau warms over the coming decades, some parts of it will shift gradually, allowing some degree of recalibration, some degree of adaptation. Not so with the plateau’s fire-adapted forests. Under warming conditions, and without small tree thinning and prescribed burning, choked, dry forests will burn at scales of hundreds of thousands of acres. Habitat, homes, and lives will be lost. Massive amounts of carbon will also be released into the atmosphere, exacerbating the global warming challenge.

If, on the other hand, we are able to harness the power of fire as a restorative agent, these forests—our forests—will have a fighting chance to shift gradually, with warming temperatures, to their new normal, with less damage along the way.

Global warming, in fact, dramatically amplifies the need for fire management and forest restoration.

Managing fire is one of the most important efforts we can take to simultaneously slow the Colorado Plateau’s contribution to warming, and allow the region to gradually adapt to it as it occurs.

Twenty years ago, I first came to know fire on an island, in an environment almost entirely foreign to me. Over the last two decades, I have come to know fire in a much more familiar way as it has affected my home, my family and friends, and our communities. I continue to feel a sense of awe and respect for the power of fire as well as a residual fear that fire will undo much of what I have achieved thus far in my career. Overriding all, however, is my excitement that fire, given sufficient respect and handled with proper care, will allow our forests and their species to gradually transition into a brave new world. They surely deserve that opportunity.

 Conservation Director Ethan Aumack has worked on forest restoration issues at the Trust since 1999.

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