Vicki Christiansen has observed that her “personal passion is connecting people with their natural resources.” She’s built on those connections to develop shared solutions in her roles as State Forester in Washington and Arizona and as one of the architects of the National Cohesive Wildland Fire Strategy. Now, as Deputy Director of Fire and Aviation in the US Forest Service, she’s continuing to build connections and solutions. Here, in a talk she delivered to a US and Australian audience (via live broadcast), Christiansen shares how she and we have come to where we are and she offers a forecast toward where we need to go next. – Ed.
For the video of this talk and others, visit https://vimeo.com/165290173.
by Vicki Christiansen
A gnarly complex problem
I am going to touch a little bit on this concept of a complex fire system and talk about what we’re all talking about: gnarly challenges and how the trend is increasing. And I’ve chosen the word gnarly—sorry to the conference organizers—but gnarly is difficult, dangerous or significant. Wicked sometimes denotes evil or morally askew. So, gnarly is the word of choice for me, and I am sure we will have some fun times debating our words. A little bit about maneuvering in this complex system and it’s going to be through my lens. I will share with you a little bit about my leadership journey in this complex system. The national cohesive wildland fire strategy—our collective call to action and gaining traction with that call to action with some place-based examples. A little bit about what’s ahead from a national perspective and conclude with some words that it really is going to take all of us.
But let me give you a couple of caveats: I am not going to tell you anything you don’t already know, today. So don’t figure on o’ wise one, just because I hail from The Beltway—that’s probably converse—but I am going to give you a little bit about my experience through my lens. Also, I am not a technical expert—many of you are, so forgive my limited acumen about the technical parts, and I won’t have technical answers—but that is even more reason to say that’s why it really takes all of us.
And you will see me use some terms—fire responder and fire fighter—and I will go in and out of using those terms. In general they mean same thing, but it signals a shift in how we are trying to talk about fire in this nation. It’s not always a fight—thus a more neutral term—fire responder.
We all know that historically, wildland fire fundamentally shaped the American landscape and it continues to do so today, but in a highly modified environment. Forest brush and range fires were common in pre-settlement times and Native Americans realized the importance that fire played in revitalizing and invigorating landscapes. But today, there is over a billion acres of burnable—a billion burnable acres—of vegetated landscape in our nation and most of that vegetation is naturally adapted to periodic wildland fire. So, as our nation has changed, so has our ability to live with wildland fire.
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In talking about living with wildland fire, this notion of a wildland fire system represents a full suite of environmental, social, political, and financial factors that drive outcomes in the wildland fire environment. This is a very, very simple representation of a complex system. System dynamics, you know, is really gaining steam in the social science world and this is by no means the systems dynamic map that most of you are accustomed to, but it’s a simplified way that we are starting to talk about it even within our fire responder community and with some of our partners.
If an appropriate definition of complexity involves many diverse, autonomous, but interrelated and interdependent parts, linked through interconnections, then the wildland fire system as defined here, with pieces connected to civil society, fire responders, communities and landscapes, is clearly complex. This notion of a wildland fires system helps us acknowledge this greater complexity of our operating environment, and our need to pay attention to the sources of the challenges and not just treat the symptoms. It also acknowledges that there are forces at play that we have little or no influence over; and it directs our attention to the things that we do; and invites participation of a broader set of stakeholders in addressing our current unacceptable outcomes.
The scale of our fire challenge
So, those gnarly challenges: Over the last few decades, our fire season has grown by two and a half months longer and we’ve seen frequency, size, and severity of wildfires increase. Primary drivers are climate change, drought, hazardous fuel build-ups, and increasing development in the wildland urban interface (WUI). More than 44% of the contiguous United States is in moderate to exceptional drought conditions, which presents extreme challenges in managing wildfires and these conditions are not likely to improve, even with normal precipitation for the next few years.
Not surprisingly, the total acres burned have been increasing, but not all acres burned are bad. Nevertheless, this seems to be the number that the media and congress focus on most.
2015 was a very significant fire year in this nation. We had an all hands on deck response in every state and Puerto Rico along with the military and international support that provided people and equipment to help manage more than 68,000 wildfires that burned over 10 million acres—that’s an area twice the size of the state of New Jersey. This fire season was the most expensive we have ever experienced for the Forest Service. All of these numbers up here are nationwide except the 1.7 billion dollars, that’s Forest Service only—to suppress fires. And at the peak of our response in this nation, we collectively mobilized over 27,000 fire fighters through our integrated, interagency response efforts.
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So, this heat map of structures is what has been burned by wildfires over a 13-year period. We’re continually challenged by the increasing development in the WUI because 40% of all homes in this nation are located there. Nearly 65 million acres of WUI are adjacent to or near our national forest and grasslands alone—65 million acres out of 193 million acre estate. An estimated 120 million people in over 46 million homes are at varying levels of risk due to wildfire and the costs are greater than suppression costs alone. United States taxpayers are losing $20-100 billion or more a year in wildfire related damages to infrastructure, public health, and natural resources.
So, you’ve probably heard about this little dilemma: fire costs are straining our agency. In 1995, fire made up 16% of the Forest Service’s annual appropriated budget. This year, more than 50% of our annual budget was dedicated to wildfire. Along with this shift in resources, there has been a corresponding shift in staff, with a 39% reduction in all non-fire personnel. So, those are the folks not out restoring the forest and keeping our roads and other infrastructure up to standard because the Pac-man of fire is eating away at the Forest Service’s constrained budget. Left unchecked, the share of the budget devoted to fire in 2025 could exceed 67%, equating to a reduction of nearly $700 million from non-fire programs, compared to today’s funding levels. The trend is not in our favor.
The greatest loss: firefighter fatalities
The greatest loss is the fatalities of wildland firefighters who have paid the ultimate sacrifice. Thirteen firefighters lost their lives in 2015. Eight of them were with the U.S. Forest Service. We want to recognize the significant work of all the women and men supporting the fire effort and the outstanding job they do, every day.
Since 1910, there have been nearly 2,000 wildland fire fatalities, but 25% of those have occurred in the last 15 years. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, wildland firefighters are killed at a rate 6 times higher than structure fire fighters. At the Forest Service, we feel increasing anxiety about these outcomes in the wildland fire environment and are convinced that continual learning and adaptation is the key to keeping pace with the rate of increasing complexity in the wildland fire system.
For 2016, USFS Chief Tom Tidwell’s direction is to reduce unnecessary exposure of our fire responders, to increase the odds that everyone comes home. He has asked all of us to focus our efforts intently on the decisions we make as agency administrators, commanders, and individual responders. The definition of success in the Chief’s letter of direction is to implement strategies and tactics that commit responders only to operations where and when they can be successful and under conditions where important values actually at risk, are protected with the least exposure necessary while maintaining relationships with the people we serve.
This direction requires more work before fire comes. How many times do we keep saying that? To build broad understanding and acceptance of intense fire behavior may mean we won’t protect values at risk under all circumstances. We expect that during such periods, protecting lives of the responders is the objective. In Mark Finney’s work, these quiescent periods is what we want to look for. We don’t expect responders to risk their lives, attempting the improbable. So, we’ve initiated some dialogues. We did some testing of some engagements and dialogues with our greater wildland fire community, line officers, and partners and community leaders.
The shorthand is we’re calling these “life-first” engagements. And it’s about really getting under this direction of reducing, if not eliminating unnecessary exposure. It really doesn’t mean being less aggressive. It means being more aggressive—doing the right thing in the right time period. And being more aggressive to know when we can’t engage and we need to fall back to point protection and other tactics. Hopefully, many of you will be engaged in those dialogues, to open up some of these factors when we do have influence in this wildland fire system and to have better outcomes in the future.
We know our situation is not static and projections are our trend will increase, certainly with the change in climate. This summer [2015], Chief Tidwell was out here in the Northwest, and it’s not a good thing when the Chief keeps coming to an area in the middle of summer. That usually means bad things are happening. My colleagues here in Region 6, Becky Heath and Bobby Sculpa, were with the Chief, who kept saying, “This is our new normal,” and Bobby, the Assistant Fire Director, said, “Well then, Chief, why do we keep responding in old ways?” Which just gives a little bit of the point—the finer point—of what our dilemma is.
Personal History, Professional Challenges
So, let me digress just a little bit and go back a decade or so, and give you a little bit of my journey through—my maneuvering through—this system and what my “A-ha-s” were.
In 2006, it was a big fire year, certainly here in the Northwest and in other places and a particularly gnarly fire—the Tripod Complex primarily in the Okanogan-Wenatchee Forest. It was two fires that burned together in severe beetle kill and in total it consumed 175 million acres and cost $110 million. It was one of these, “we can’t take a direct stand” fires, certainly. I had a 26-year career with Washington DNR and had been appointed state forester earlier in that year. We knew on the east side of that fire it needed to burn onto state protected lands that happened to be state trust lands where we had been doing some active thinning and it was a place where the fire would lay down out of the bug kill and we could get it as a ground fire.
My fire suppression budget is based on an eight-year average, similar to Forest Service on a 10-year rolling average. That year, the eight-year average gave me a $13 million suppression budget. Now, I know that’s nothing compared to the federal suppression budget, but we have usually been able to operate within those averages. Tripod alone cost—the little piece (it wasn’t really little) but the compared magnitude with the part that came onto state protection, cost us $14 million—just for that piece of Tripod. There were other fires. It happened to be that year that many of them rolled off federal land and onto state protection. When it was all said and done, it was a $60 million fire suppression year. I could over expend—it was a different story when I got to Arizona, but I had to go back to the legislature and ask for a supplemental.
So, going back and asking for a $47 million supplemental at the height of a recession, is not a comfortable spot to be in. Hearing after hearing after hearing, what was I going to do to fix the Forest Service? What was I going to do, new State Forester, to take care of these unhealthy landscapes? After all the smoke had cleared, county commissioners were coming into my office saying, “You’re the new State Forester, what can you do to help us take back those federal lands, so you know, you can manage them better—see all these state trust lands you’re managing?”
You all have heard the conversations. That same fall, the OIG (Office of Inspector General) put out a report about the rising cost of federal wildland fires and their conclusion was: it was those darn state and local officials that were not doing enough to control growth in the WUI and that was the reason for increased costs.
You know the set up. The fingers were pointing. The smoke had cleared and the fingers were pointing and I literally can remember being at the diocese in a hearing and I was a part of the “Yeah, yeah” and having this physical moment of looking over my shoulder to see who was going to come fix this and then I realized that I — I needed to take a different mantle of leadership, because I needed to take responsibility and change the conversation; that it was climate change, it was growth in the WUI, it is unhealthy landscape conditions.
We could argue and we could spend energy all we wanted about what portion or part of those drivers were causing our increasing trend in wildfire in this nation — or we could spend our energy towards a greater collective solution, and it literally embodied me to take a different perspective. It reminds me of a quote from Warren Buffet: “In a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is more [useful] than energy devoted to patching leaks.”
So, my analogy of changing vessels — I had some influence, as the State Forester, to start to change the conversation. I was appointed to the National Association of State Forester’s Wildland Fire Committee and I was the only woman (not that that was any big deal) but I was new and I was somewhat young then and I was bold enough to speak up at my first meeting and say, “We’ve got to change this conversation and here’s how I think we need to start to change it.”
Lo and behold, Mr. Tom Harbour was sitting across the table and said, “Yup, we do and I am glad somebody on the state side is willing to change it.”
There were synergies created right there and then. We formed ourselves into a little ad-hoc group that we called the National Interagency Wildland Fire Framework and we knew we were getting new federal administration and we wanted to set ourselves up to have a different conversation as a new administration was going to be coming forward in the next nine months. We did some work over a few months, setting up the problem, and then 13 of us convened: Tom, myself, some of my other state forester colleagues, leaders from the interior U. S. fire administration. We convened at Emmitsburg and we envisioned a different path forward. It wasn’t extremely different from the national fire plan, but it had more strategy and it needed to have more linkages of how we work together in communities, landscapes and our response to fire. I would say that that small group of folks and our efforts there reminds me of this quote:
“People who change after change, will survive. People who change with change, will succeed. People who cause change, will lead.”
Now, I am not suggesting that I think wildland fire in this nation is causing the change, but how we are responding to it is what really makes the difference.
So, that administration change I talked about at the federal level—I got caught up in that. I was a political appointee by the time I was State Forester in Washington and a new Commissioner of Public Lands was elected and I did have some offers to stay with the agency, but Arizona (Governor Napolitano) had invited me to come down and be their State Forester. I took the leap and I went to Arizona, but just after I got there, Governor Napolitano was appointed Secretary of Homeland Security and the then Secretary of State, Jan Brewer, became governor, to finish out that term.
I was embraced by Governor Brewer, she quite frankly, had some concerns about wildfire —it was one of her worst fears when she knew she would likely become governor—wildfires in Arizona—but she was of a different party and she was not inclined to keep things around that Governor Napolitano had already initiated—but there was a major fire that many of you know—the Rodeo-Chediski fire in 2002, that burned 460,000 acres, lost 490 structures and more than 30,000 people up in the Show Low area had to evacuate, and this got the attention of all Arizonans—and it brought together traditional adversaries. They knew that there had to be a different response if we were going to have different outcomes than the Rodeo-Chediski fire and Governor Napolitano took action and she created a Governor’s Forest Health Council and they worked through two and half years to develop a statewide strategy for restoring Arizona’s forests. Again, it was the environmentalists, the county commissioners, the communities, and the little bit of industry that was left that came together and said, “We’ve got to make a new mark on this landscape to have different outcomes.”
So, in I come in late 2008 and it took some work, but I convinced Governor Brewer she could put her stamp of implementation on the statewide strategy for restoring Arizona’s forests, and I am pleased to say that the work continued and one of the biggest outcomes of that effort was the Four Forest Restoration Initiative—of the four national forests across the Mogollon Rim, 2.6 million acres—a vision to restore and here, just a year ago, there was a million-acre NEPA analysis and it was supported by the stakeholder group and there was not one appeal of that million dollar NEPA analysis. Now that is making some difference and that is working at scale in a way that we have to, to get different outcomes.
Building a Cohesive Strategy
So, I was feeling like we had some real opportunities and I was getting a little more vocal in my personal stance on this. I’d become Chair of the State Forester’s Wildland Committee. I served on the Wildland Fire Leadership Council and now that work of the 13 of us in Emmitsburg had come to bear a request by Congress to develop a cohesive strategy. So, we had fed some of the concepts that we’d been developing inside the Beltway and lo and behold, now we had directions to develop a cohesive strategy.
About the same time, Mr. Harbor convinced me to switch hats. He says, “You want to be cohesive—let’s go over to the Forest Service.” So, an invitation to put my name in the hat, and I became Tom’s Deputy Director of Fire and Aviation, but still working on these important concepts of cohesive strategy and as you know by now, the cohesive strategy was a recognition that the wildland fire problem required a different approach. All stakeholders came together to develop a truly shared, national strategy. To effectively overcome these management challenges, we needed a broad-based collaborative response to enhance our collective ability to manage risk, based on the three national goals. It was an all-lands national blueprint for creating greater synergy.
I think you all know that the point of the three goals—they need to work together across broad landscapes, inclusive of communities. The desired conditions are that landscapes are resilient to fire-related disturbances and it was understood that this would have a different look, based on different land management objectives or missions of different agencies across landscapes; that communities were fire-adapted, not fire-proofed—but adapted to live with fire, and that we had to have a safe and effective wildland response that based decisions on risk analysis for all ownerships.
But how do we operationalize this thing? David Calkin and Matt Thompson remind us all the time that an unavoidable tenet of risk management is that choices made today affect all future options and that management choices made in the past have disrupted historical fire regimes such that wildfires today are of much different character, magnitude, and extent than those that burned a century ago. A more ideal solution is a trajectory that marginally increases risk in the short term, but begins paying long-term benefits relatively quickly and keeps risk at manageable levels.
Reducing risk significantly will require that existing resources are used more efficiently, from a national perspective. This may require reallocation of resources across agencies, geographical areas or program areas and we must have a greater tolerance or acceptance of increased, short-term risk. Significantly reducing fuels across broad landscapes will require expanded use of wildland fire to achieve our management objectives. But using fire has some inherent short-term risks to achieve greater long-term benefits. And quite frankly, we may need greater collective investment, or at least put our collective investments to make a more marked difference on the landscape, and invite other partners whom we aren’t always accustomed to partnering with. Water districts and utility companies are just a couple to mention.
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[To support these initiatives,] I want to acknowledge the work of the Cohesive Strategy National Science and Analysis Team. We have wall-to-wall data across the country that does some risk analysis and delves into some significant national challenges, underlying causes, and the management opportunities available to address them. Here is an example of national priorities for community planning and coordination. Its prioritization is based on counties that are characterized by higher than average annual area burned, structures lost, and homes exposed within the WUI.
And our analytics keep getting better and better—the Forest Service Fire and Modeling Institute developed this wildland hazard map to support assessments of wildfire risk and prioritization of fuels management needs across large landscapes. These areas mapped with higher wildland fire hazard potential values represent areas with a high probability of fire and fuels conditions that are likely to result in extreme fire behavior.
Fire and water = solutions
Fire isn’t our only entry into engaging communities. Often water—both a source for drinking water and for flood protection—can get folks’ attention. More than half the water Americans get originates on forested landscapes, so the health of those forested landscapes is important.
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An example I’d like to give a shout out to is the Ashland Forest Restoration Initiative. It’s a model of collaboration where the entire community has come together with strong leadership and it is the epitome of the cohesive strategy principals all working together. They have an array of complex issues on this watershed: erosive soil, steep terrain, old growth, endangered species—oh, and by the way, it is their water source. Mayor John Stromberg will stand next to Rob MacWhorter, the Forest Supervisor, and he will say, “95% of our community’s water comes from this forest” and he says, “Rob doesn’t charge us a penny, not a penny for the water. The least we can do is help him take care of it and restore it.” That’s just a small example of how that community is engaged in a big way.
Other examples are the Rio Grande Water Fund where they are charging water users a small supplemental toll to protect watersheds upstream. Their goal is to scale up thinning and prescribed fire from 6,000 acres a year to 30,000 acres a year.
And the Flagstaff Water Protection Project: Their primary motivation was flooding and protection of their community and they overwhelmingly approved a $10 million bond to invest primarily on the National Forest and a small bit on the State Forest because they wanted to take responsibility for their own community.
Resilience: an institutional and national mission
So, why are we in this? Well, it’s right smack in the center of the Forest Service’s mission. Our job at the Forest Service is to help sustain the ability of American forest and grassland, both public and private, to deliver a full range of ecosystem services for generations to come.
And we’ve got to take the long view, and we’ve got to deal with this wildfire paradox where fire is a bad boss, but a good servant. How do we deal with that? Accept the inevitability of fire visiting our landscapes, and prepare, so when it does, the consequences are not devastating. And we have to acknowledge that we need to do it in this wildland fire system. We cannot plan fire management plans or land management plans in a vacuum if we don’t acknowledge this wildland fire system.
This is where resilience and sustainability become even more important as broader, interrelated, organizational concepts. When we think of resilience and sustainability in this complex system, we’re looking at where ecological, economic and social sustainability need to balance together under a rapidly changing atmospheric, demographic and political climate.
So, what’s ahead at the national level? The Wildland Fire Leadership Council is mostly senior political leaders across federal, state, and tribal governments appointed by the Secretaries of Interior and Agriculture and Homeland Security, that think at the highest policy level about wildland fire in this nation. They are the movers and the pushers for a cohesive strategy and they have taken on their own work plan. These are not the goals or priorities of the cohesive strategy. These are the priorities of the Wildland Fire Leadership Council where they can use their positional power and their policy contacts to open up greater understanding about smoke management and air quality.
They’ve had some significant breakthroughs with the EPA about the choice of smoke in this nation—how we take our smoke. They are working with the White House and other places on reducing risk to communities, resilience work that this administration has embraced, and they are working on how to move and promote larger landscape collaboration and remove the barriers on environmental compliance—not that there won’t be environmental compliance, but they’re asking how we can be more effective, efficient, and work at scale?
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The Fire Problem: Gnarly but not Hopeless
Fire may be a gnarly problem, but I don’t think it’s a hopeless problem. Gnarly means difficult; if it was easy we would have fixed it already. Difficult means we have to stick with it. It’s a societal issue that requires contributions and synergy created from multiple disciplines and we can anchor to our specific community of practice —and I really encourage all of us to be willing to embrace other disciplines, including governance, civic engagement, and public policy—because it’s going to take all of us embracing ours and others’ disciplines to overcome these gnarly challenges.
And finally, I will just leave you with a quote that in days of distress and craziness, I often reflect on. It’s from the first Chief of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot:
“The vast possibilities of our future will become realities only if we make ourselves responsible for the future.”
