The Nature Conservancy, whose purchases and protection of special ecosystems worldwide has become legendary, conducted its first prescribed burn on North Dakota prairielands in the 1970s. It was done to improve wildlife habitat and help endangered plant species recover on sensitive lands. Today TNC’s burning program has expanded to include some 175 different grassland and forest settings, as resource managers carefully study the ecological effects of fire.
A newsletter titled Rx Fire Notes, with catchy headlines like “Are You Reducing Your Duff?” goes out to TNC’s fire specialists worldwide, as the organization burns nearly 46,000 acres of wildlands annually.
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The concept of human-ignited prescribed fire may sound glitzy or high-tech, but it isn’t nearly as new as you might suppose. Indeed, we are a nation of people who start fires for specific useful purposes. Our “prescriptions” for various kinds of blazes have been as varied as the characters who kindled them:
Back in 1879, on what is today’s Tongass National Forest in Southeast Alaska, naturalist John Muir set a monstrous forest fire “thirty or forty feet high” to dry his clothes on a rainy night. “It was wonderful – the illuminated rain and clouds…the trees glowing against the jet background” he effused in his Travels in Alaska.
Apache Indians in the Southwest often used fire to send up smoke signals, burn out forests controlled by their enemies, and improve hunting habitat. And they used smoke to imaginatively corral game over thousands of years, as did other American natives.
So-called “controlled fire” was used in New Jersey as early as 1928 to reduce fires along railroad rights-of-way, while pioneers of the Allegheny mountains burned huge expanses of their homeland to thin undergrowth for hunting purposes, according to fire historian Stephen Pyne.
As a military-like force of Forest Service fire suppressors gained expertise and momentum following an awesome fire blowup in the northern Rockies in 1910, White Man combined his macho ruggedness with military tactics and high technology to control wildfire – to a point.
And now comes “prescribed fire.” It seems a bit odd that today we marvel over our newfound ability to reintroduce fire into our forests – something many generations of our predecessors knew all about.
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Over the past several decades, as we have come to better understand and predict fire in the forest, the new science supporting prescribed burning has acquired its own specialized vernacular:
Big rip: A prescribed fire that takes off aggressively on its own. A term used mostly by firefighters.
Escaped fire: A planned fire that gets out of control.
Defuelling: Intentionally reducing the “fuel load” in a forest by prescribed burning or by mechanical thinning.
Drip torch: A can of liquid fuel with a long spout, burning lightly at the end. Used to ignite prescribed burns.
FMO: Fire-management officer, often in charge of both prescribed and wildfire operations.
Fuel downloading: A term describing the reduction of fuels – trees, slash, brush – in a forest.
Let-burn: A no-no term these days. This policy of letting fires burn in some cases was going fine until the million-acre Yellowstone National Park blowup in 1988, when lightning fires allowed to burn went out of control big-time.
Out of prescription: A fire burning outside its planned conditions.
Prescribed burning: Fires intentionally or naturally set, and allowed to burn under specific conditions of humidity, temperature, wind speed, and fuel moisture, and within a planned geographic area. Each fire has its own “prescription,” which theoretically guarantees control.
Prescribed natural fire: Fire, usually set by lightning, that’s allowed to burn “within prescription” in a given area, then watched closely. It poses little threat to life or properly. Such fires are often located in the outbacks of national parks and, more recently, on national forest Wildernesses.
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