The Challenges of Wildfire

Why wildfire management is so difficult to reform

This blog post was co-authored with Dave Owen, at UC Law SF.  The draft article this blog post series is based is here.

This is the second in a series of blog posts on our proposal to reform wildfire law in the United States.  The first post is here.

Why is fire such a hard problem to solve?  Understanding the answers to that question helped us develop proposals to improve fire policy in the United States.

First, fire is dynamic. Fire behavior is hard to predict, which makes fire risk harder to be precise about. Researchers generally agree that the most effective solution to the wildfire problem is to restore some fire to the landscape – but that creates inherent risks, as managed fires may escape. The variability in fire behavior makes understanding fire and its impacts harder to do. And the interactions of fire with so many other resources – habitat, air quality, and more – mean that management to address fire risks can have unpredictable impacts on other important resources.

Second, fire varies widely across space and time and has consequences at many scales. Fire itself crosses jurisdictional borders and property lines. Fire risk is similarly contagious and multiscalar: poor land management on one property can increase risks for another property. The effects of fire, such as air quality, can travel thousands of miles. Solutions also are spatially and temporally multiscalar. Managing fire risks requires scaling up individual projects across millions of acres of lands, more or less in perpetuity. Moreover, all this is urgent. Fire risks only increase over time with climate change and fuel accumulation. For all these reasons, policy solutions need to be scalable across time and space and require interjurisdictional cooperation. But at the same time, the solutions to fire are very context dependent. What works for dry conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada will not work in the chapparal of California. In the Rockies, lodgepole pine forests have different fire regimes than forests of ponderosa pine spruce and fir. And the need to attend to contextual details is in deep tension with the need to rapidly scale up solutions across the landscape.

Third, fire policy is conflictual because it involves deep value conflicts. Fire policy involves many non-market goods, such as air quality, and limited direct economic benefits. Both fires and fire management are costly, and thus there will necessarily be a distributional question subject to conflict. Fire policy implicates values, such as whether humans should be active managers of forests and other landscapes, or hands-off, and whether those forests should be managed primarily for human benefit or other goals. The value conflicts are exacerbated by two facts of history: The future of fire in the United States will not look like the past, when blue skies were the norm; the future will involve much more fire and much more smoke, and that will not be comfortable to most people. And there is a deep lack of trust among the various actors in fire policy, partly because of decades of the bitter fights over forest management in the United States.

From these challenges we take a range of principles that are essential to any successful policy.  It must take seriously the interaction among the many different policies at issue in fire – land use, forests, air quality, habitat, and more. It must be able to scale up so that it can meet the urgency of management and change at the pace required. It must be contextual, able to develop effective policy for very different ecological circumstances. It must be able to build trust – without more trust, political and legal opposition will undermine the ability to scale up. It must take seriously the uncertainty and probabilistic risks of fire. And it must allow room for a range of solutions at the state and local level, to address the range of values and social and economic contexts.

Forests, land-use law., national forests, wildfire