Short Wave - For Successful Wildfire Prevention, Look To The Southeast

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

Another destructive fire season has Western states searching for ways to prevent it. As climate correspondent Lauren Sommer reports, some answers might lie in the Southeastern U.S. The region leads the country in setting controlled fires — burns to clear vegetation that becomes the fuel for extreme fires. Read more of Lauren's reporting on wildfire prevention.(https://www.npr.org/2021/08/31/1029821831/to-stop-extreme-wildfires-california-is-learning-from-florida)And check out our previous episode on cultural burns here. (https://www.npr.org/2021/07/21/1018886770/managing-wildfire-through-cultural-burns)Email the show at [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody. Shortwave producer, Rebecca Ramirez here with NPR climate correspondent, Lauren Summer. Hey, Lauren. Hey, there. So, Lauren, you're here because within climate coverage, you're our go-to fireperson. And to say there are a lot of fires happening in the U.S. right now, especially across the West, is an understatement. Yeah. There are dozens of fires. active fires across 10 states in the U.S. right now, more than 2.5 million acres have burned, and tens of thousands of people have been evacuated. Just last week, the U.S. Forest Service closed all the national forests in California to help prevent more fires from starting. These fires are really extreme. They burn hot, they move fast, and the firefighting forces are just

overextended. And without enough firefighting personnel, federal officials have had to stop using a key tool to help prevent future fires. Prescribed burns. Prescribed burns. Those are the fire set on purpose to help clear out the vegetation that can fuel really big fires. Yeah. And here in the West, we haven't been doing it as much as we should. There's been this massive buildup of vegetation. And that, of course, is what fuels these very destructive fires. But there's one part of the country that's managed to get fire back on the land, these low-intensity controlled burns. It's not the West, it's the South. Oh, okay. Yeah, from 1998 to 2018, 70% of all controlled burning in the country was in the southeast, you know, like in your home state of Florida. Just another reason to love Florida.

Am I right? Ah. Huh? That's okay. Wrong audience. Wrong audience. Moving on. Today on the show, what Florida and the rest of the Southeast are getting right about prescribed burns. And the lessons Western states are starting to take away to help prevent catastrophic fires in the future. You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. Okay, Lauren, you've been talking with some of my townspeople out in Tallahassee, Florida to catch a glimpse of effective fire prevention policies in action. What does that look like? Yeah, back in May I talked to Morgan Varner.

He's the director of fire research for tall timbers, which is a research station and land conservancy out in Tallahassee. I know it. And he walked me through a prescribed burn that was happening. We're burning in a shortleaf pine woodland. It burned about two years ago. So the flames are spreading along the forest floor, you know, burning the brush and grass. But they don't reach up into the treetops and kill the tree. The hazard is very low. The risk is very low. Yeah, you know, growing up in the area, these planned fires were very normal to me, especially because my friend's dad actually worked at tall timbers doing prescribed burns. So. Oh, wow. Yeah. So I had no idea that a lot of the country doesn't do this. Yeah. I mean, if you just look at the acres that have been burned, the southeast is way ahead. The southeast burns about almost three quarters of all the prescribed burning in the U.S. annually.

Florida is far and away the number one state. But here's the thing. Morgan says forests and woodlands in the west and south have a lot in common. In both areas, fires used to happen regularly. Before colonization, they were burned really frequently through lightning and the really high density of Native American populations. Native American tribes used to use fire regularly to cultivate the land for food and for game until white settlers came along. And if you want to hear more about cultural burning, definitely check out the episode we did with Lauren earlier. It'll be in our episode notes.

Ooh, thanks for the shout out. Yeah, of course. So, you know, cultural burning is ended. You know, tribes are moved off their land. They're stopped from burning. And then came an era of fire suppression policies that began in the early 1900. So you had federal agencies like the Forest Service that had mandates to extinguish all fires. And there was smoky bear, right, that taught General.

that fire was the enemy. Only you. Oh, right. I remember these ads well. So I guess my question, Lauren, is how the South got out of the mindset of fire suppression, especially given these national campaigns. Yeah, kind of by the 1960s and beyond, land managers were realizing that many landscapes had become choked with brush and grasses and small trees. And in the Southeast, the majority of the land is.

privately owned. And some residents had continued controlled burning, and they wanted to see the practice grow. So in 1990, Florida passed a law to encourage prescribed burned. It set up a certification training program for burn managers, which are also called burn bosses. Incredible name. Yeah. And as long as the weather conditions are good, getting a burn permit is pretty quick. So it's a single permit, a single call. And, you know, in California or some other places, The approval for a fire starts not minutes, but months ahead of time. Oh, so just lots more hoops to jump through. Yeah.

And Lauren, I'm really interested in what you just said about as long as conditions are good. Isn't part of the reason controlled burns are easier in the South just because it, you know, rains a lot more there? Yeah, I mean, it's a very different climate than the West. With more rain, it is a bit simpler to do burning in the Southeast because you don't have that super dry vegetation. Yeah, yeah. But most of the burning in the South takes place in the spring, which is also a good time in Western seats because that's when it's cooler and wetter. So the difference isn't as big as you might think. Lauren, an actually big difference is this thing about who owns the land, right? You said earlier that a lot of the land out West is publicly owned versus the southeast, which is mostly privately owned. Right. And I think it would be harder to get a bunch of private landowners to all agree to bring.

Right? Yeah, I mean, it would seem that way. But, you know, as you talked about and Morgan told me, the key thing in the Southeast is that burning has become part of the social fabric. You know, landowners there encourage each other to do it. There's a little bit of one-upsmanship or one-up womenship where they will talk about sort of like, have you even burned your property lately? You know, that sort of thing. You know, that actually sounds exactly right to me, especially in Tallahassee, caring for your land is taken very. Very seriously. I mean, that's the model, you know, just given everything that's happening in the West, that Western states are actually starting to copy. We have this generational gap in fire knowledge in the Western U.S. that we're trying to rebuild now. But Florida and the Southeast still have it. So that's Lanya Quinn Davidson.

She's a fire advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension. So far this year, Florida has done control burns on 45 times more. land than California. Wow. 45. Yeah. But unlike Florida, in California, layness has private landowners get little support, you know, even though they are managing and taking care of the lands around our towns and communities. They're critical in this, in this larger vision of California living with fire. Why is that? Why is there less support for private landowners out in California? Well, Langness has one big problem in California is liability. It's rare for a prescribed burn to get out of control and destroy homes, but it has happened.

And in the southeast, burn bosses are protected from liability lawsuits unless they're grossly negligent. When I go out and burn, I have no liability protection. I'm assuming full responsibility for those projects. And most of the time, we're doing those projects for public benefit. That is changing, though. California state legislators are considering a bill right now that would provide some liability protection. Oregon and New Mexico passed similar laws this year. And that policy in California should also help the Native American tribes who really want to restore their cultural practice of burning.

And they're really leading on this effort. And all three of those states are also setting up certification programs to get more burn bosses on the ground. That's how we're going to rebuild a fire culture in California is letting people actually touch it and have a hands-on connection with it. And to know that it doesn't all have to be bad. You know, fire is really scary in some cases, but in a lot of cases, it's beautiful and there's an art to it. And we need that. And on the federal level, several Democratic senators are hoping to help states with some more funding from the National Prescribed Fire Act of 2021, which would provide $300 million for federal agency burns. This is all really exciting to hear.

I mean, it seems like there's a lot of energy around changing the culture at West. But if we do see prescribed fire used a lot more often, how much of a difference can it actually make? Yeah, I mean, it's not going to solve this on its own, right? There's no simple answer here. We're talking about tens of millions of acres that need addressing in the West. So most experts say it's just going to be a mix. You know, if you're in a really remote area, it's hard to do prescribed fire. So they may need to let more naturally cause fires burn, you know, if they don't threaten. communities. And then there's a need to focus this work around towns and cities to help protect them. Homeowners need to clear vegetation in their yards or replace their wood roof and make their homes more fire resistant. You know, none of those things alone is going to stop the fires that have been consuming entire towns. But the hope is that all together, they can slow fires down enough that firefighting can make more of a difference. Lauren, thank you so much for coming on our show and sharing

your reporting, it really is an important public service. Oh, thanks. Today's episode was produced by me, Rebecca Ramirez, edited by Viet Le and fact-checked by Burley-McCoy. I'm Rebecca Ramirez. I'm Lauren Summer. Thank you so much for listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR.