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Washingtonians are leaning into the centuries old tool of controlled burns to manage landscapes and prevent out of control wildfires.

As the days get hotter and warmer, many Washingtonians are gearing up for the wildfires that will ignite across the region this year, causing smoky skies, evacuations and potentially devastating loss. But land managers across the state have been preparing for those summer flames since the fall with prescribed burns, a practice with deep history in the Indigenous communities of the west.This video was produced in collaboration with NOVA and is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

Washingtonians are leaning into the centuries old tool of controlled burns to manage landscapes and prevent out of control wildfires.

As the days get hotter and warmer, many Washingtonians are gearing up for the wildfires that will ignite across the region this year, causing smoky skies, evacuations and potentially devastating loss. But land managers across the state have been preparing for those summer flames since the fall with prescribed burns, a practice with deep history in the Indigenous communities of the west.

Washingtonians are leaning into the centuries old tool of controlled burns to manage lands

Fighting fire with fire

Nature

GREG MILLS: As wildfires grow more intense, can the Pacific Northwest fight fire with fire?For some, it's not a new idea.RAY ENTZ: So fire history for the Kalispel tribe is one that's, you know, sort of embeddeddeeply in our traditional cultural knowledge. It's the one tool the tribe used from timeimmemorial to manage its landscape.MILLS: Fire is a fundamental part of the Western ecosystem. It allows some plants to germinateand create the right soil chemistry for others to take root. By sending regular controlled fires, theKalispel were able to maintain an ideal landscape for growing and collecting the tribes firstfoods, but that changed with the arrival of white settlers to the region.DENNIS BECKER: For the longest time, the goal was really to try to keep fire out of ourlandscapes. Remember, only you can prevent forest fires, try to protect those forests and protectthose communities and the people that work in those forests. What's happened in those thosethose landscapes have become overgrown with mature forest with mature vegetation that justkeeps more and more dense.MILLS: The buildup of plant material in the forest acts as a fuel that supercharges fires, makingthem burn much bigger and hotter. This can cause root and soil damage, or lead to fire reachingthe upper levels of the forest destroying large trees, neither of which happened in controlled fires.JARRED-MICHAEL ERICKSON: If we could get more acres burned, we can definitely have,hopefully less catastrophic fires, less impacts for our environment,PATTI PLAYFAIR: One of the things that fire would naturally do in here is come through at alow intensity, and burn off all of these needles and a lot of the pine cones and these branches, andalso take out a lot of the small diameter trees that have come up in the understory.MILLS: This, in turn would keep a subsequent unintentional fire from getting out of control. Butburning the forest in the right way is a delicate process,KARA KARBOSKI: Sort of like a prescription that a doctor would write for you right and sayslike, what's the medicine that we need for this landscape? What's the right parameters that willallow us to burn?MILLS: Parameters like humidity and wind direction are carefully considered. And then once theright conditions are met for a burn, they set a small test burnKARBOSKI: We watch it and see if it's doing what we want to do after that point. We can sayno, it's actually not. We, even with these parameters, it's not enough. And we say we're not goingto meet what we're trying to do here and we put it out.MILLS: Even still, the use of fire is not without risks. For example, in 20-22 of prescribed burnin New Mexico spun out of control,JEFF BEREND: They let it kind of right time of year, there's a little bit less snowfall during thatyear, and then once April came is pretty dry, not as much snowpack. And that fire popped itshead and, and ended up burning through 400,000 acres destroyed, 900 plus homes structures.MILLS: Escapes like this rarely happen. But when they do, it's a major setback for proponents ofcontrol burning. Still, many believe it is the best way to manage the forest to prevent even morewildfires.ENTZ: It's going to be increasingly important as we move into a climate that's, you know, not asforgiving as, as our previous climate was and, and not knowing exactly what's going to happen. Ithink we can see the things that sign in the forest and the vegetative community that tell us thatfire resiliency is going to be one important feature.BECKER: Fire has been here forever and tried to get rid of it. We tried to minimize it. Thatdidn't work. Now we're understanding that we have to bring this back into our way of managingthings.

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Fighting fire with fire

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Support Provided By

Explore More

Can We Cool the Planet?

Chasing Carbon Zero

Weathering the Future