Current work in wildlife, rivers, public lands, and climate

“It is abundantly clear to everyone that the current wildfire paradigm in this country is flawed” said Madeleine Carey, southwest conservation manager for WildEarth Guardians. “We need a new national wildfire policy that is scientifically sound, informed by local communities, and efficiently delivers dollars to harden homes and infrastructure. This is an “all hands on deck” moment in history where we need to leverage all the tools, all the experts, all the options, all the people to ensure communities and ecosystems can exist and thrive.”

Guardians not only believes that a new policy must reexamine prescribed burns, but should reallocate the majority of resources to community protection and home hardening. The current primary and often sole focus on forest logging as the only tool to manage wildfire risk and severity fails communities, and ignores what scientists and the insurance industry have known for some time regarding how to protect homes from wildfire. 

“The current approach to wildfire management overlooks and underestimates the support that ecosystems need to adapt to a changing climate,” said Dr. Lisa Markovchick, WildEarth Guardians’ southwest conservation ecologist and advocate. “We need to better integrate knowledge from many disciplines and perspectives, and support ecosystems by funding what we know helps them survive stress and drought. We know that invasive vegetation increases stress on native plants and serves as fine fuels for wildfire. We know that restoring native soil communities can increase moisture retention and support drought and fire resilience. But we have not invested in large-scale restoration of native ecosystems and soil communities. These are just a couple of the many aspects of ecology that we have not leveraged. We are not making use of all the tools we have.”

New Mexico has always played a critical role in setting national wildfire policy, first in 1950 when a bear cub named Smokey became the icon for the era of wildfire suppression, and second in 2000 when Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt stood on the edge of a smoldering Los Alamos Canyon and announced a new national era of hyper-management. And now again, after three escaped prescribed burns, including one in a heavily logged area, New Mexico is the epicenter of the conversation on how to live with fire.

“We call on our delegation to ask the agencies to articulate a new national wildfire policy that recognizes the complexity of forest ecosystems and the immense structural flammability problem that exists across the American West,” said John Horning, executive director of WildEarth Guardians. “New Mexico has always been a leader in setting the national wildfire agenda and this may be our last chance to get it right.”

WildEarth Guardians vision for a new national wildfire policy includes: 

• Refocusing resources where they can protect life and property before fires happen. To reduce loss of homes and lives, we urge elected officials and other decision makers to prioritize the following:
  • Create major tax credit programs that refund the costs of home improvements known to dramatically reduce home flammability.
  • Streamline and resource collaboration between federal fire management resources, FEMA, DHS, and USDA Rural Development to improve community and structural readiness for wildfire.
  • Fully fund the implementation of Community Wildfire Protection Plans, focusing first on evacuation planning and drills and home hardening. Stop putting firefighters in danger to suppress wildfires that are far from communities and homes. 
  • 97% of all fires that threaten homes are human caused. Pass regulations requiring utilities to reduce the ignition risks created by their infrastructure – Corporate negligence is costing the taxpayers billions, and the lives of people and firefighters.
  • Roads and vehicles often lead to forest fires. Empower and fund decision makers to bravely face this fact, like the Coconino National Forest, enacting policies that close forests to vehicles first in severe fire weather, right-size road systems, and prioritize road closures based on local fire danger levels. 
  • Manage development within fire-prone areas, and pass fire-adapted building codes and zoning regulations that reduce structural ignition risk and make structural defense safer for firefighters during operations. 

• Ending the greenwashing of logging and funding the science and policy needed to live with wildfire safely and support ecosystems under climate change. Under the extreme drought and temperatures of today’s world, no amount of logging is going to stop the underlying drivers of large and severe wildfires. We must broaden acceptance of the natural, necessary, and diverse fire regimes in western ecosystems, and support ecosystems to burn naturally by: 
  • Reforming tribal involvement in managing public lands to mandate collaborative and pre-decisional input and leadership from Tribes around cultural burning practices, while guarding against cultural appropriation that cites traditional practices to support an often aggressive, commercially-driven wildfire management industrial complex.
  • Convening a national panel of scientists studying the full range of ecosystem processes including challenges like restoring the capacity of the soil to capture and store moisture, and supporting and amplifying the ability of microclimates within forests to buffer climate, wind, and hydrologic extremes, to develop a many-pronged approach to supporting our natural areas and native species through climate change.

Refocusing funding on restoration innovations that reduce fire hazard and risk by increasing moisture retention in the landscape, supporting microclimates that buffer temperature and hydrologic extremes, and removing ecosystem stresses such as invasive species that can be eliminated. Fund the collection of data on how various management actions affect moisture retention, wind speeds, and other factors that affect fire hazard and severity, and advance the timelines for incorporating this data into fire behavior models that guide decision-making.

USFS photo

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