THE WILDFIRE CRISIS UNDERLYING BARRIERS THAT IMPEDE MITIGATION
BY JERRY WILLIAMS
This opinion piece is dedicated to the memory of Robert (Bob) W. Mutch (1934-2024), proud smokejumper (1954, 1955), esteemed fire ecologist, friend.
Difficult and dangerous wildfires can and do occur across a wide variety of fuel types, all over the globe. But many of the worst fires occur in the western United States. Nowhere in the world is firefighting capability and capacity greater, yet the impact of wildfires is becoming worse.
Despite enormous increases in funding for fire fighting, wildfires have become more destructive and more deadly since the United States government organized for wildfire protection in 1905. Civilian fatalities have not been higher since the turn of that last century. Take that in for a moment.
The convergence of uncharacteristically dense biomass, over-accumulated fuels, droughts, extreme weather, and unconstrained growth at the wildland-urban interface have brought the western United States to this crisis.
Since 2000, more than 300 wildfires, each with reported suppression costs of $20 million or more, have burned over the 11 western states. The fires burned out of control until firefighters got some relief in weather or could exploit a break in fuels. These incidents blackened more than 25 million acres and cost more than $13 billion to suppress. As staggering as these costs were, they represented only a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars in property losses, infrastructure destruction, natural resource damages, human health impacts from smoke and other wildfire related consequences that go mostly unaccounted.
The wildfire crisis in the western United States is defined by the scale and scope of present dangers and future threats. Mega-fires have deep and long-lasting social, economic, and ecological impacts and can no longer be dismissed as aberrations; they require actions that are more far-reaching and more comprehensive than we are accustomed to thinking about.
The crisis is not so much a fire-management crisis as it is a land-management crisis that traces to the deterioration of fire-adapted ecosystems and the vulnerable condition of fire-prone landscapes, including houses. Building resilience in these ecosystems will be key to reducing wildfire severity.
“NOWHERE IN THE WORLD IS FIREFIGHTING CAPABILITY GREATER—YET NOWHERE ARE WILDFIRES GROWING MORE DESTRUCTIVE.”
An open Ponderosa forest of 1897, frequently underburdened by lightning fires or tribal burning, and a changed Ponderosa pine forest circa early 1990s, where fire has been excluded. It is on these dense, dry sites that fire managers and communities have experienced some of the most dangerous, destructive and costly wildfires in the United States.
A recent assessment that I conducted with my colleague Matt Panunto, a GIS specialist with the Bureau of Land Management, found that while many of the worst wildfires in the western United States occurred in perennially dangerous chaparral brushlands, two-thirds of the highest cost incidents were in conifer forests within the natural distribution of Ponderosa pine. A century ago, these open forests were among the most benign in terms of potential wildfire severity. Today, these same forests are choked with laddered, overabundant biomass and over-accumulated fuels. These sites are high risk because they are commonly where people and development are most concentrated in the forested areas of the intermountain western United States.
Changes in species composition, stand structure, and ecological function underpin the wildfire crisis.
The most aggressive firefighting tactics, the largest airtankers, and the most novel re-organizations cannot buck these changes or ignore the ecologies involved. The biggest challenge confronting government is not continuing to build greater, faster firefighting capacity, but instead building a mitigation workforce and reconciling the myriad regulatory requirements, fiscal rules, land management policies, social disincentives, and other factors that impede restoring resilient conditions on fire-adapted, fire-prone landscapes.
Some examples:
1. Under current environmental requirements, wildfires are treated as excepted events; their impacts are presumed to be unavoidable accidents of nature. Although man’s influence in predisposing many wildfire outcomes establishes an argument against this exception, the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Air Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1974), and other regulations do not anticipate, measure, or consider wildfire impacts with respect to the intent of the laws. Consequently, today’s wildfire impacts are often imperiling the very values these laws set out to save.
If this is a crisis, governing environmental regulations need to level the playing field. Proposed mitigation treatments should be weighed against probable wildfire outcomes in the absence of those treatments. A mechanism to comprehensively compile the cumulative impacts from wildfires needs to be established as the means to measure the consequences of avoiding mitigation treatments over the long term.
2. Under current fiscal rules, wildfires are considered emergency events, funded from unlimited reserve accounts. National shared resources (aviation assets, retardant bases, smokejumpers, hotshot crews, incident management teams, tool caches, dispatch centers, fire training facilities) and other firefighting assets are funded off the top, as a priority. A total mobility concept supports the firefighting effort. Resources from anywhere in the United States (and sometimes from the military and other countries) can be brought to bear in dealing with a wildfire emergency.
On the other hand, mitigation work operates from a constrained budget, often subject to several overhead cost deductions throughout the organization and dependent on whatever local resources can be obtained. Projects requiring the sequencing of selective harvest, understory thinning, and pile burning, followed by lower intensity prescribed burning are especially difficult to budget for. Although US Forest Service researcher Kimberly Davis and her team, in a recent 30-year meta-analysis, found this approach to be the most effective in reducing wildfire severity, it is seldom attempted in the western United States. Sequenced treatments have the added benefits of improving margins of safety, reducing prescribed burn intensities, lowering smoke impacts, and reducing the risks of escape.
Now, nearly always, a wildfire is a higher priority for funding, skilled personnel, and specialized assets than a prescribed burning or other mitigation work.
If this is a crisis, federal and state government needs to fully fund restoration work at scales commensurate with the wildfire threat, even if it requires multiple entries to mechanically thin or reduce fuels ahead of prescribed burning. The agencies need to mobilize for prescribed burning opportunities and other mitigation work the same way they now mobilize for wildfire emergencies with a dedicated workforce. It can no longer be “easier”’ to fight bad fires than it is to mitigate the hazards that fuel them.
3. The US Forest Service is a functionally oriented organization that operates from a budget arranged on line items. Budgets for wildlife habitat, timber production, watershed management, fuels reduction, and other activities are allocated with an expectation for acres treated or board-foot volume outputs. There is no line-item allocation or target that measures the health and resilience of fire-adapted ecosystems. Many natural resource objectives – by design or by default – aim for or result in undisturbed conditions. Ironically, under drought conditions, managing for undisturbed conditions in deteriorated fire disturbance regimes often threatens the resource aim.
If this is a crisis, the US Forest Service needs to better align natural-resource objectives with the dynamics of fire-adapted ecosystems and instead of attempting to maximize outputs, aim to optimize outcomes in the context of fire’s ecological role. (Across long-needle pine forests in the southern United States, foresters have successfully integrated frequent, low-intensity burning to optimize several goals, including those for wildlife, timber and wildfire protection; it has been a common practice since the early 1930s.)
4. Perhaps no place challenges wildfire protection more than the wildland-urban interface. Roles and responsibilities for protection are often confused or altogether abrogated. There are few incentives for homeowners to take precautions. In many places in the western United States, insurance companies have dropped coverages because they see the risks as too great.
Protecting lives and private property is almost always the priority, the vulnerability of the wildland-urban interface is told by the property losses and fatalities that continue to climb. Increasingly, this vulnerability has the federal government prioritizing the protection of private property at the expense of public values (air quality, watersheds, critical wildlife habitat, and others). The impacts to these public values are becoming more significant but are mostly overlooked.
“THE SOLUTION ISN’T MORE SUPPRESSION— IT’S RESTORATION, RESILIENCE, AND THE COURAGE TO CHANGE HOW WE MANAGE FIRE.”
If this is a crisis, federal, state, local governments, and homeowners need to reconcile roles and responsibilities for wildfire protection. Government needs to find incentives for private property owners to reduce the flammability potential of their properties and their communities so governments can better redeem their responsibilities for protection of public values.
The costs of mitigation are high, contentious, and not without risk, but total wildfire costs, losses, and damages are much higher and are likely to go higher still.
The wildfire crisis is a systemic problem. Aspirations to mitigate wildfire threats and restore resilience are hamstrung by regulations, fiscal rules, institutional behaviors, behaviors at the wildland urban interface, and other factors. Until these factors are comprehensively confronted and reconciled by lawmakers and policymakers at all levels of government, it is difficult to see how the wildfire crisis will ever be brought to heel.
If this is a crisis , the nation’s political leadership needs to act on the factors that stifle mitigation work. The country’s wildland fire leadership needs to help them.
If this is a crisis, the United States needs to organize, staff, and fund for the scale of mitigation work needed much like the wildfire emergency response is now organized, staffed, and funded.
As a nation, the United States is asking much of its firefighters. Wildland firefighters represent the best of a can-do spirit. But there are narrow margins that separate can-do from make-do, and make do from tragedy. It is time to stop making do, get serious about mitigation, and do wildfire protection right.
To think the United States can meet greater wildfire threats with greater suppression force seems to miss the mark. In 1991, wildland fire researchers Stephen Arno and James Brown introduced the wildfire paradox; it holds that the better we get at putting fires out during moderate years, the worse wildfires become in extreme years. On the mitigation side, there is a corollary: The less we use prescribed fire and other mitigation work when we can, the harder it is to put fires out when we have to. Think Sun Tzu, not Clausewitz, where the least costly, least dangerous, most sustainable wildfire protection approach fights on favorable terms or avoids having to fight at all.
This article was drawn from the keynote address, at invitation, for the Zig Zag Hotshot crew’s 50th reunion in Zig Zag, Oregon, May 9-11, 2025.
Jerry Williams’ career in the United States Forest Service (1969-2005) spanned the transition between the fire control model and the fire management concept. Williams began as a firefighter and smokejumper; he received his career appointment as a supervisory smokejumper. Following completion of his master’s degree in forest fire science (University of Washington, 1979), Williams went on to lead fire management programs at the district, forest, regional, and Washington-office levels. Williams worked toward bringing an ecological basis to fire management policies and programs. Williams retired from the senior executive service as the Forest Service national director of fire and aviation management.
