Dr. Casey Teske: By doing nothing you’re making a choice, right? And that choice is to keep kicking the can down the road. So can you tackle a problem now or are you going to leave it to the people behind you to tackle later because you don’t want to?

Cody Sanford (CS): We are creating this podcast on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne nations. We acknowledge these people and their contributions to this region.

My name is Cody Sanford and this is the Livable Future Podcast. Wildfires are intensifying because of climate change, but policies and proactive community efforts can be the driving factors of mitigating wildfire disasters. In this episode, we delve into the strategies of wildfire ecologists and discuss the role of wildfire ecology in fostering a resilient future.

To begin let’s start with an overview of the US Forest Service and the laws that led to the current conditions that result in intense wildfires. The Forest Service was created in 1905 with the goals of protecting the timber supply chain and ensuring quality water in the United States. From the beginning, the Forest Service viewed fire suppression as essential to the goal of timber supply. However, In 1910, a huge fire, known as the Big Blow-Up, burned over 3 million acres across Idaho’s forest. 

This fire is notable because afterward, the agency gained public and government support for more staffing, resources, and an overall change in the way we manage forests. This was the beginning of complete fire suppression in the United States and remained the policy until modern ecology began to understand the importance of wildfires’ role in ecosystems. This led to large dense forests and often dry forests and unhealthy forests. The ‘Let It Burn’ policy grew in popularity in land management practices in the 1970s and when appropriate the fire is allowed to burn while being monitored by scientists. This is quite the pivot from the complete suppression from the beginning of the agency. Now the management policy is adapting to address the new challenges posed by climate change. This is a quick overview of US fire policy. If you would like to know more, I’ll have these resources on the Liveable Future Podcast website. However, some important resources for this section have been the Forest History Society in the US Forest Service. I would recommend checking their websites for an in-depth history lesson.

Present day the Forest Service estimates that 73,000 wildfires burn an average of 7 million acres a year. A common thread of these fires is that they occur in forests that are dense, dry, and filled with dead timber, and the end result will lead to more intense wildfires. It’s easy to see the intense negative impacts of wildfires of huge destructive wildfires that makes major news and they shouldn’t be dismissed at all but let’s talk about the ecological and societal benefits of wildfires that I believe help give a more holistic perspective on wildfires in general. Wildfires are a part of the ecological succession process. Ecological succession is a process of ecosystem change over time due to things like the arrival of new species, the death of old species, and changes in the environment. 

Wildfires can help to clear out old-growth forests and make way for new growth. Fire is the main cause of this succession in a landscape and some species of plants depend on fire for the spread seed. This new set of fauna has a chance to grow which provides habitat for diverse species of pollinators that have co-evolved to the fire-prone environment of the Western United States. 

The regulating surfaces that wildfires provide are extremely valuable to the ecosystem. The most obvious one is the reduction in extreme wildfires. The more small wildfires the less material is available to burn in the whole ecosystem. Wildfires also provide pest control and even help with water regulation. The fewer trees consuming water means this resource is now available elsewhere in the ecosystem. Research shows that ecosystems with forest clearings have the potential for a deeper snowpack that melts later in spring compared to dense forests. What I think is important to understand is that fire was a tool that Native Americans traditionally used to manage the land and these ecosystems in the western United States evolved naturally with fire. I want to highlight I’m summarizing a peer-reviewed journal titled Wildfires as Ecosystem Services published in ESA Journals and you can find the link in the show notes. 

Now I think it’s time to bring in a fire management analyst, Dr. Casey Teske from the US Fish and Wildlife Services, who is here to help explain fire’s role in the ecosystem. 

Dr. Teske, thanks so much for being on the podcast. Could you go into more detail as to how you manage wildfires?

Dr. Casey Teske (CT): So I call it fire forecasting. Like how we have weather forecasting to tell us what the weather’s going to do. Our role is to try to understand what the fire is going to do in the long term and that’s based on historical data, that’s based on what the current education and geography is where the fire is located. It’s based on a forecast, so what’s the fire going to do in the next few days? 

All this information is compiled and what we do is we put more of maps, basically, for the operational people, so the people who are actually putting out fires, whether it’s with the digging hand lines or putting it out with the water, or the aircraft drop and returning it on or whatever. So we try to see where the fire is likely to go and how it’s going to behave when it gets there. Then we take the environmental conditions and then we can use that information to be tactical and strategic about what we’re going to do.

You know our biggest concerns are to keep people safe. We can replace the tree but we can replace the life. So we want to keep the public and the firefighters safe. Because if we know a fire is going to be very aggressive and great and it’s traveling to a location we might not put people in front of that. If perhaps we know where the fire will move in three days, maybe in the next two days we can try to make the lines or prepare the housings or the infrastructure so that they don’t burn. So we use the information that people like me give to make operational and tactical decisions. So that’s what that rule is, and then we really look into the long term to try to understand the fire in the season. So is this fire in June and is this a normal circumstance for June? Is this kind of stuff happening in November or August? Then, we try to compare it to other places where wildfires burned. So we look at all this kind of scientific data and then use the best scientific models available to us, which are getting better all of the time, so maybe it wasn’t perfect ten years ago, it’s never gonna be perfect, but we’re always improving. So we think that these tools can help people make better decisions on fire management. 

CS: Dr. Teske, as a fire ecologist, how do you view our society’s current relationship with the forests? 

CT: We love the forests and we love it because it’s beautiful. There’s trees, there’s grass, there’s shrubs. It’s all different kinds of forests have different characteristics. And what we’re seeing is that some forests have not had natural processes in them or man-made processes that might be natural processes. So, we might have put out fires and some vegetation grows thicker than we may have normally grown our two fires. We can go in and treat those areas at times, but if we don’t do that, then some of these thick conditions basically have the forest potentially to be helping and unhealthy forests. They know their immunity to things like spares like bugs or fire or root rot or different is less than that. So things that I am seeing in different parts of the country are maybe a bug kill. We have a lot of bug-kill in the Rocky Mountains. In this thing, the Great Basin, which is Nevada, something like the Old Utah, we have a lot of invasive species. So fires came through and took out the native species that have been replaced by things like cheatgrass which changes how fire safety works in these systems. So there’s a lot of different conditions that take a forest or grassland or shrubgrass, not what it used to be and not helping that would be considered with flags. And then you coupled out with things like climate change or urban growth on avid forests and in places where there are that make things tricky. 

CS: Yeah, one of those conditions you mentioned was cheatgrass, and that’s something that I’m seeing everywhere. I want to ask, is there anything that you know that we can do? I know I just try to brush it off my clothes, and make sure I don’t carry it with me, but what do you recommend? 

CT: Yeah, that’s a tricky question. I know there’s research into biological controls for it from funders or amoebas or whatever. They can maybe control that, but they don’t really it out-competes the natives, you know, the cycle of cheap grasses on a different time on the back of grasses, and so it’s sprouting earlier, it’s coming up earlier, it’s taking advantage of this bare ground in a way that the native grasses and the grass plants are not. So it’s a tough one to out-compete for sure, and the best you can do is, like you said, you know, if you’re out there just make sure that you’re washing new rigs, and you’re and take the seeds out of there so they can go from place to place. They’re not carrying them around, checking the clothes. But yeah, it’s a big problem. 

CS: Yeah, the cheatgrass, it’s moving so quickly through our ecosystems. I do want to shift gears. Dr. Teske, I’ve heard you mentioned the term fuel treatment a few times. Can you go into more detail as to what that is? 

CT: My layman’s terms of fuel treatment are you basically give the vegetation a hair back, right? The vegetation is always growing and the more vegetation and vegetation is synonymous with fuels that it’s available to burn. So dry grass, dry brush, dry needles, the more vegetation you use, the more that it’s potentially available to burn. So if you can treat those fuels by removing them or thinning them or you know, making the changing from tea grass to native or whatever it is, then you can impact those fires and how they behave. So by removing fuels, you’re giving a fuel treatment, you’re hatching, you know, you’re reducing what’s available to her and that’s what it was treated in. 

CS: Yeah, and I want to ask, what are your thoughts on the people who are against these fuel treatments, whether they think it’s too expensive or they’re against prescribed fires? Do you have any words on the matter? 

CT: You know, by doing nothing you’re making a choice, right? And that choice is to kick the can number. So can you tackle a problem now or are you going to leave it to the people behind you to tackle later because you don’t want to deal with it? So treating the vegetation with fire or thinning or grazing, whatever your means is, in an appropriate way. I think it’s important, especially if you could do it on intelligence whether that are not crazy. Those kinds of treating activities on our terms and state of our nature’s terms could potentially, you could be strategic about it. 

CS: Dr. Teske, I’m going to read a quote I hear environmentalists say, then I’d like your opinion. 2020 was one of the most severe years for wildfires in the last 50 years. In the next 50 years, 2020 will be at the low end of years with severe wildfires. What are your thoughts? 

CT: Well, I think that quote is true. I’ve seen it  even in my career. We’re changing. You know, the weather’s changing. Our fire season starts earlier. It stays longer. We used to just be a summer job, and now it’s hard to get on as a student because you need to go back to school and they need you for a long period of time. 

In 2000, that was a big, big wildfire season in North Montana and North Idaho. And people said, “I’ve never seen anything like it,” and I’m hearing, “I’ve never seen anything like this,” pretty much every single fire season these days. 

And so I feel like that quote is correct, that this is going to be getting these big fire seasons. Lots of active fires at the same time. Our weather’s changed, our seasons have changed, and our fuels have changed. And so, you know, that’s the big, melting pot of conditions to make things potentially worse. Definitely, not every year is going to be a big fire year. We’ll have wet years. We’ll have drought years, where nothing can grow so even if we have lightning nothing is there to start a fire. So, you know, all these conditions and how they interplay with each other, will dictate that. I do think that what we’re seeing now is here. We’re going to see more of this in the future. And this could be the start of it. It could be a blip. It could be, you know, the low end of it. I’m not, I can’t predict how far I’m out. But it’s definitely not out of normal anymore. 

CS: Yeah. And so I want to ask is there any policy decision or resource or anything else that you as a fire ecologist need to help this situation? 

CT: I think science and policy and management are intertwined in this infinite loop and which one comes first and which one forms the other. It’s definitely, you know, they’re continuously changing, right? So you find out something new with the science and try to implement that on the management side, and maybe it becomes a policy as well. And so, I think funding the science is important so that we understand what’s happening. I think that our natural resources, the benefit to the public is huge. But I think that we’re not seeing in the same way as some other important things out there. That the natural resources are a part of the public’s experience. So how do we do that? Well, we find science, we do science, we promote those messages, we integrate them into policy and management and the more it is just a continuous cycle. So the resources we need are data sets, computing solutions, and really creative solutions. 

You know, what are some, challenges that we are starting to see that we have to think about. Well, we need some creative minds thinking of those things. So those are some ways that we can help think about those things and then to implement it in the next. So how do you establish what you’ve found in those scientific work or how do you establish what the policy is mandating? That’s the tip of managers. And I think if you can get scientists and managers talking together and working together and understanding each other’s needs. That could really help because there’s a lot of land managers who are really familiar with the land, but they may or may not be as comfortable with the scientific side of things, but if you have a scientist that might not be comfortable with the land management side of things, if you can pair those groups up and help them to understand each other’s problems, I think you have a pretty powerful combination. So more collaboration, more communication. I will always advocate for science. 

CS: Me too. Dr. Teske, thank you for being a guest on this episode of the Liveable Future Podcast, and I would like to thank you, the listener, for staying tuned. I know the audio wasn’t perfect this episode. 

If you have any questions, or comments, or would like more information from us, you can find us on social media and the whole transcript is available to read at livablefuturepodcast.com. Please remember to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and thanks for listening.