‘Government a ge n c i e s o n gove rn m e nt l a n d a r e
sti ll very he s i ta nt to do pre sc ri be d f i r e , a n d we
n e e d to c h a n ge th at. ’
— David Harrelson, Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde
PHOTO: EVAN BARRIENTOS
A H u m an C on n ec tion
Historically speaking, most fires in the Willamette Valley
did not spark from natural causes. Before the pioneers ar-
rived, Native Americans used fire to manage the land, both
to increase their harvests and to be effective stewards of the
land.
Stamper says the tribes, especially in the Kalapuya lan-
guage family, used fires to facilitate acorn production from
oak trees and to enhance important prairie and savanna
plants used for food, medicine and other cultural purposes.
“They recognized that acorn and camas production were de-
pendent on fires.”
The savanna itself was biodiverse and held much more
useful material for crafting and consumption than a forest.
Now much of the historic area that was oak savanna is farm-
land or forest.
David Harrelson is a seasoned firefighter and the cultural
resources department manager for the Confederated Tribes
of the Grand Ronde, which includes 27 different tribes, in-
cluding the Kalapuya. Harrelson is of Kalapuya descent, and
he describes fire not just as a means of producing food, but
as a “lifeway” that goes back thousands of years.
“It was far more pervasive to the entire life way of the
Kalapuya than just one crop or plant,” Harrelson says.
Harrelson says that intentionally prescribed fire was
“what kept the valley a valley — that’s what made the land
an area that early settlers called a Garden of Eden.”
When it comes to indigenous knowledge of fire, Har-
relson says “it was as nuanced as knowing that for a hazel
patch, if you want a hazel plant to produce good weaving
material you burn it every three years, but if you want it to
produce hazelnuts you burn it every 10 years.”
Harrelson points out that indigenous knowledge isn’t
often considered valid by the scientific community due to
a lack of empirical evidence and scientific-sounding terms.
But thousands of years of trial and error means that indig-
enous knowledge should have significant weight.
The Kalapuya knew that burning would protect the land
100 years ago when ecologists decided that suppression was
the only way to protect forests, and they continue to promote
the practices now from the reservation.
Harrelson says the Kalapuya set fires to gather tarweed,
acorns and weaving materials, and that fires would create
better grazing and attract more game. “Fire is the greatest
tool that mankind has ever experienced, so you can use it in
different ways.”
Harrelson describes the difference between “hot fire,”
which is destructive and “sanitized the land,” versus low-
intensity “cold fire,” which the Kalapuya used to manage
the savanna.
“The value of these low intensity fires is that you don’t
sterilize a place but you clear out the old debris,” Harrelson
explains. Though the terms are different, this knowledge de-
scribes the prescribed fires used by those at TNC.
Prescribed fires are usually that kind of low-intensity un-
derstory burn, while wildfires can range in intensity from
that same sort of low-grade fire to the destructive, canopy
torching burns that can wipe out an ecosystem and leave a
blank slate.
Every fire has a unique story, and each burn has a differ-
ent effect on the land based on innumerable conditions.
Ever since the settlers came, Harrelson says, the land-
scape has “become more homogenous. We’ve gone from
a landscape that used to host grizzly bears and packs of
wolves to farmland.”
Harrelson says the Grand Ronde tribe is hoping to use
prescribed fires to restore some land to its previous state.
“In the past five years we’ve acquired roughly 1,000 acres
of land in the Willamette Valley for the purposed of restora-
tion,” he says.
But there’s a lot more land that needs fire to get back to
health. The Willamette Valley is edged with federal and state
forestlands.
Harrelson says the success of Smokey Bear has been a
big challenge for shifting the paradigm around fire. “There’s
something about fire that’s tragic, and tragedy scares people
away from making rational decisions,” he says.
The vision of scorched earth and matchstick trees is dra-
matic and traumatizing to the general public, but not every
fire creates that landscape.
“Government agencies on government land are still very
hesitant to do prescribed fire, and we need to change that,”
Harrelson says. “The scale of prescribed fire use is at 1 to 2
percent of what is needed.”
Steward s of Forest,
Steward s of Fire
Some organizations and activists argue that the Oregon
Department of Forestry (ODF) and the U.S. Forest Service
aren’t doing enough prescribed burns — that they continue
to adhere to the idea that fire is there to be fought, not used
as a tool.
Tim Ingalsbee is executive director of Firefighters United
for Safety, Ethics and Ecology (FUSEE). “We’re promoting
a paradigm shift in firefighting,” he says.
Ingalsbee thinks both the Forest Service and the ODF
should burn more, but he says the agencies are shifting in
their thinking. “We’re on the brink of shifting our philoso-
phy on how we relate to fire, how we manage fire. But on the
other hand our whole society is amped up for war.”
Ingalsbee adds that unplanned wildfire may have a place
in the toolbox of land management. “With careful planning
we can steer fire into places we know need a burn, take care
of some of the dead stuff on the ground, stimulate regenera-
tion. That’s where the future is.”
Traci Weaver with the Forest Service says that such use
of wildfire is already in practice. She points out a recent un-
derstory burn that started in the Malheur National Forest.
Firefighters in that case built fire lines in a large box around
the area and “punched a hole in that canopy,” she says. “That
was an area that they had hoped to do a prescribed fire on.”
Weaver says it’s necessary to use wildfires in this way
because “by just using prescribed fire we’ll never catch up
to the backlog on fires that need burning to return to health.”
But using wildfire to give much-needed burns to forest
can be unpredictable. ODF’s Nick Yonker says, “Wildfire
can be quite variable, but generally speaking since wildfire
occurs in the summer and is uncontrolled, it can be any-
where from a ground fire to totally decimating the trees and
decimating thousands of acres of trees.”
Yonker adds, “I’ve seen places where you’re seeing basi-
cally matchsticks for thousands of acres.” Fires of that kind
are tragic, he says.
Invasive species can move into the sanitized land and it
can take years, even decades, for the forest to recover. Pre-
scribed burning in forests can prevent this kind of utter de-
struction, he says, while keeping disease and pests at bay
that could have similarly disastrous effects on a forest.
But Yonker says there are limitations to stewardship
through prescribed burning. Between human health hazards
with smoke, financial costs with fuel, labor and travel, and
even weather considerations, it can be difficult to find the
perfect time to set the forest alight. “The federal folks do
more of that because they’re more remote,” he adds.
Much of ODF’s 16 million acres of land is closer to hu-
man settlements, making burns more dangerous to private
property and smoke an obnoxious political obstacle.
“They’re wanting to burn a lot more under controlled
conditions than they’re getting to burn right now,” he says.
If ODF could burn at the rate that some hope they will, he
says, “We would probably take 40-50 years before we could
get back to the conditions we had before the pioneers.” But
they’re still not burning at that higher rate.
Sen. Ron Wyden weighed in on the issue of resource
constraints in a June 15 hearing before the Senate Energy
and Natural Resources Committee, arguing for an increased
budget for the Forest Service.
“This is a broken, common-sense-defying system of
fighting fire, where you borrow from prevention to put the
fires out and the problem just gets worse. This is not some
abstract thing,” Wyden says. “The costs of inaction are ex-
traordinary. The bottom line is the Congress cannot let an-
other fire year go by, with lives and communities at stake,
without fixing wildfire budgeting for good.”
Intense fire seasons can limit the ability to prescribe
burns due to limited fire fighting resources, Stamper says.
Prescribed fires require their own resources, and back-up
fire crews need to be available in case the blaze gets out of
control.
As for the intensity we can expect this season, she says,
“It’s hard to say. Everything depends on ignitions. We’ve
had years that are incredibly dry and very dangerous in
terms of risk but we didn’t have a lot of ignitions.”
This winter was cold and wet, meaning that grasses have
grown significantly and contributed to the fuel bed, Stamper
says. At the same time, heavier fuels are wetter, and may not
ignite easily.
She adds that ignitions may be higher this year because
“lightning does tend to occur more frequently when we have
a heavy snow pack.”
Researchers at OSU, the Forest Service and TNC expect
a below-average fire season west of the Cascades, with an
average to above-average fire season in much of the eastern
side of the state.
The Forest Service manages 17,410,861 acres in Oregon.
Last year, 54,727 acres were burned across Oregon and
Washington in prescribed burns (about 0.1 percent of the 4.2
million acres in need of intervention), while 48,379 acres
burned in wildfires across the two states.
Jason Nuckols at TNC says, “There’s very few regions in
Oregon that don’t need fire.”
The situation may look bleak but, Stamper says, “There’s
a lot of work going on behind the scenes that I think will lead
to a different future in fire management.” TNC works with
the Forest Service on risk assessments to decide whether to
let wildfires burn or not.
“We’re in a phase of transition,” she says. “I think that we
all need to work together, and I don’t think it’s fair to blame
any one land management agency. It’s everyone’s problem,
and the more that we own it together and work together, the
more we’ll become fire adapted in our communities and our
culture.”
The future of forest stewardship lies in the political re-
branding of fire itself. Agencies and experts are working
through that paradigm shift now: fire is a tool, not an enemy.
The public will need to come to a similar realization.
eugeneweekly.com • June 22, 2017
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