Bur n i n g D e s i r e
‘W hen you b re ak
u p that can opy
a li ttle bi t, wh e n
you c lea r out
th at u n d ersto ry ,
th en you h ave a
mu c h heal th i e r
for es t that can
wi ths ta n d fi re .’
— Traci Weaver, U.S. Forest Service
The Forest Service was founded in 1905 with the duty of steward-
ship: protecting newly designated federal forestland. After the Great
Fire of 1910 — which destroyed 3 million acres across Montana, Wash-
ington and Idaho, taking 87 lives — it became the protocol of the Forest
Service to suppress all fires.
Smokey Bear was the face of the Forest Service’s campaign against
wildfires, and through his genial visage Americans were taught to fear
the phenomenon. We thought fire was a monstrous thing and ignored
the knowledge of indigenous stewards who set the landscape alight to
maintain its health and bounty.
Forests have a deep and abiding need for fire — ecologists now cat-
egorize ecosystems by their fire return intervals, or the average number
of years between naturally occurring fires. In the Willamette Valley,
those return intervals range from every 3-5 years in the low elevation
grasslands, prairies and savannas, to 11-15 years for oak woodlands,
and even to a span of 100 to 1,000 years in very wet rainforests or near
rivers.
The Oregon Department of Forestry estimates that the statewide to-
tal for prescribed burns in 2016, both governmental and private, was
181,800 acres. According to a 2015 report by The Nature Conservan-
cy, Oregon State University and the Forest Service, 4.2 million acres
across Oregon and Washington are in need of disturbance restoration in
the form of fire or thinning.
After more than 100 years of well-intended fire repression, much of
the Willamette Valley — and the rest of Oregon — has been severely
altered from its pre-pioneer days. That means, according Traci Weaver
at the U.S. Forest Service, that there is more fuel build-up in these ar-
eas, which can lead to more severe wildfires.
“When you break up that canopy a little bit, when you clear out that
understory, then you have a much healthier forest that can withstand
fire and not go through full stand replacement,” Weaver says.
Fire also plays a role in balancing the ecosystem, Weaver says. “The
plants and animals of the Northwest basically evolved with fire, so
they’re either fire-adapted or fire resilient.”
Amanda Stamper, a fire manager at The Nature Conservancy (TNC),
agrees. Her organization is steward to thousands of acres of land in Or-
egon and around the world, and prescribes fires in Oregon to rejuvenate
native plants.
Ponderosa pine is an example of a fire-dependent plant found all
across Oregon. Heat in that species triggers flows of resin that close
off holes in its thick, protective bark, which can help the trees fight off
insect infestation.
“Fire is the primary agent that causes that to happen,” Stamper says.
TNC owns a 519-acre plot of land in the West Eugene Wetlands
called the Willow Creek Preserve, and torches sections of it every year.
“We burned about 100 acres last year,” Stamper says. Warning neigh-
bors before they set fires has helped the burns remain a relatively calm
affair, and she says people often ask if they can come out and watch
the spectacle.
That property is blooming with native plants this time of year, and
even more so a year after they set the prairie ablaze. “Those cattails
rejuvenated really nicely, they love fire,” Stamper says, pointing to a
set of plants alongside a pond.
Stamper uses a term to describe how fire interacts with nature: pyro-
diversity. The term means that fire set in a diverse manner on a land-
scape creates a diverse reaction in the ecosystem.
Setting the entire prairie on fire wouldn’t have the same positive
effects as starting small fires in disparate areas throughout the seasons
and years, Stamper says.
Jason Nuckols works with Stamper at TNC. He says a lot of plants
native to the prairie are endemic to the Willamette Valley. “We have
more endemic species here than most other places,” he says. Much of
Willow Creek is made up of prairie, with the occasional oak or Oregon
ash growing taller.
Nuckols says that without fire to hold them back, ash trees move
into the prairie, and if they didn’t burn the land here so often it would
be totally filled in with trees within a few decades. Those trees would
shade out a lot of smaller plants and lower the biodiversity of the area.
Some of the plants growing there are rare, endangered or threatened,
like Kincaid’s lupine. That flower is habitat to the endangered Fender’s
blue butterfly — another species endemic to the Willamette Valley’s
upland prairie.
AGATE DESERT BURN
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June 22, 2017 • eugeneweekly.com
PHOTO: EVAN BARRIENTOS