Call to Action, from page 2 will be needed for fire suppression. But let me be clear: We have shifted resources away from forest maintenance for almost three decades. It’s now time to rectify this. As stated in a 2020 editorial in the Chico, California, Enterprise-Record —Chico is a few miles from Paradise, which was mostly destroyed by the 2018 Camp Fire—“We have to change, or we’ll burn. And all the firefighters in the world won’t be able to save us.” Not surprisingly, this statement has proven to be quite prophetic for 2021. So, what do we do? It’s time to quit talking. The Call to Action outlines a plan. What started out as a more narrowly defined document in 2018 has been transformed into a comprehensive strategy through the contributions of 35 other contributors [and counting], who are the best in the world in landscape-scale conservation. With well over a thousand years of collective experience, these people know their stuff. We need to listen. Unfortunately, due to the culture of government bureaucracies, the Forest Service has been mostly silent. We need this to change. Perhaps under the agency’s new chief, Randy Moore, the Call to Action will gain more momentum. It had better. We cannot continue to accept what has happened over the last decade any longer. I understand that our country is facing some uncompromising demands for atten-tion and resources—the Covid-19 pandem-ic, healthcare costs, the homeless pandem-ic, and international unrest. But somehow, we must place America’s natural resources as a priority. The recent wildfires are de-stroying lives and communities and ren-dering landscapes unproductive. The great forests of our country are at risk. A culture, and indeed, a way of life are vanishing. This is a national emergency . Yet this does not have to be this way. Please speak up. Michael T. Rains became a private consultant after retiring in 2016, after a 48-year career with the US Forest Service, where he served as deputy chief and director of major field units in science and technology transfer. Rains be-gan his professional career as a wildland fire-fighter in California in the mid-1960s. He is coauthor, with former Forest Service fire and aviation director Tom Harbour, of “Restor-ing Fire as a Landscape Conservation Tool: Nontraditional Thoughts for a Traditional Organization,” in 193 Million Acres: Toward a Healthier and More Resilient US Forest Service , published by The Soceity of American Foresters in 2018. From the Editor’s Desk Responding to an Age of Megafires: This Is the Issue of Our Professional Careers By Steve Wilent It was painful to watch the Caldor Fire rip across the El Dorado National Forest in California, even from here in Oregon. The blaze started in a place familiar to me: I worked in the area for the Forest Service for several years in the 1980s. It remains to be seen what survived and what didn’t: the trees my crewmates and I planted, the trees planted after much smaller previous fires, the guard station I called home for part of a summer, the archaeological and histori-cal sites we protected, the grand old trees that were spared the chainsaw during the too-heavy cutting in the 1970s and 1980s. I am thankful that my friends who still live in the area did not lose their homes or their lives, as others did, and grateful that ded-icated firefighters and the weather slowed and eventually stopped the fire before it de-stroyed any more homes in the Lake Tahoe Basin. The Caldor Fire wasn’t the largest fire of this summer. At this writing in late Sep-tember, it had burned more than 219,000 acres—huge, compared to most fires in the last century or so, but dwarfed by the Dixie Fire, also in California, which had burned more than 960,000 acres as of September 19, 2021. That’s 1,500 square miles, more than 30 times the size of San Francisco, or almost five times the size of New York City. The 2021 Bootleg Fire in Oregon burned nearly 414,000 acres, or 647 square miles, 18 Average Size of Wildfires in the US, 1983 – 2020 200 180 160 140 120 Acres 100 80 60 40 20 0 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 Data: National Interagency Fire Center 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 The average size of wildfires in the US is on an upward trend. more than four-and-a-half times the size of Portland, or an area large enough to en-compass Oklahoma City and a few of its suburbs. Large fires have always burned in the western US, but numerous records have been set in several states in recent years, only to be broken again. The Dixie Fire is the second-largest single fire in California since at least 1932, according to the Cali-fornia Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, Cal Fire. The largest was the 2020 August Complex, which burned well over one million acres across six counties. The Dixie Fire may yet surpass the August Complex. Climate change, the vagaries of weather, and a lack of sufficient forest and fuels management across all ownerships are the biggest, but not the only, factors. Where do we go from here? Michael Rains, a longtime US Forest Service officer, now retired, has put together a thoughtful Call to Action—see his essay, “An American National Emergency: Lack of Forest Maintenance Resulting in Destruc-tive Wildfires,” on page 2 in this edition of NRM Today . Note the use of “maintenance” rather than words such as “management” or “restoration.” I think Rains is right: This is a national emergency, and the status quo of forest management and wildfire suppres-sion is no longer acceptable. This is the issue of our professional ca-continues on page 20 reers. October 2021 ® NRM Today
Natural Resources Management Today October 2021: Page 18
