Fire with Purpose: A Practical Guide to Prescribed Burns
Fire with Purpose: A Practical Guide to Prescribed Burns
With roots in Indigenous practices, prescribed fires offer crucial wildfire prevention. Explore how to prepare, stay informed, and even get involved.
Climate Solutions // ISSUE # 99 // HOTHOUSE 2.0
With the news of the devastation that Hurricane Helene has wrought on the lower quadrant of the eastern seaboard, we’re thinking of our readers in the disaster area and hoping for your safety.
As the east coast reckons with a Category 4 hurricane, wildfire season is starting out west.
Kentucky’s forest fire season begins on October 1st. In Wyoming, Big Horn Mountain residents have been given evacuation orders from Elk Fire, which was first reported on Friday. In Greece, 27 forest fires erupted over a 24 hour period this weekend. That’s more than one fire an hour.
I apologize for starting this newsletter with a grim catalogue of natural disaster. If anything, perhaps it is a reminder of how nowhere is immune from the realities of climate disasters. This edition of Hot House is actually about disaster preparedness. It follows in a tradition journalist Colleen Hagerty kicked off for us last year writing guides on community disaster preparedness. It’s well-worth reading the original guide.
But for this edition of Hot House, Colleen wrote about the practice of controlled or prescribed burns, which can help protect communities from wildfires. I’ll let Colleen tell you more about it in her Blueprint. But also check out her original feature on prescribed burns here. If you’re in an area impacted by wildfires, we hope this guide is useful. If you have a loved one in an impacted area, send this to them.
Stay safe, dear reader. Take care of yourselves. And hopefully someone else too. — Tekendra
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Blueprint: Protecting Communities Through Fire
Prescribed burns, inspired by Indigenous practices, are essential for reducing wildfire risks. Learn how you can participate in fire management in your area.
By Colleen Hagerty
In our Prescribed Fires issue, we explored how intentional ignitions help reduce the severity and impact of wildfires across the United States. These controlled burns draw from the traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous communities, who have long lit their own purposeful fires for spiritual and ecological aims.
The first time I attended a prescribed fire, I felt awe accompanied with a tightness across my chest as I watched the flames catch in a wooded forest. I’d so often reported on wildfires and what went wrong in these scenarios that it was hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that this fire was burning exactly as planned.
I wrote this blueprint with that memory in mind.
Informed by insights from those who set fires and those who live in fire-prone areas, this practical guide offers a starting point for considering how fire might play a role in the ecosystem where you live. Read on for advice on staying safe, informed, and engaged with future prescribed burns.
First, familiarize yourself with the basics
Dig into your area’s fire history. Fire has a long history on many landscapes around the world, but the role it plays differs in various ecosystems. To understand if prescribed fires might be a useful tool in your neighborhood, do a bit of research to see what sort of tribal, agricultural, and wildfire history you can find for your area. This knowledge of the past can reveal the role fires have historically played in shaping your local landscape, so you can understand how it might be beneficial in the natural spaces around your community.
Learn the lingo. Both firefighters and fire lighters love jargon, and you’ll likely encounter some unfamiliar lingo as you explore this space. So, a quick introduction: For starters, “prescribed fires” and “controlled burns” are often used interchangeably to refer to the practice of lighting intentional fires for ecological benefits, while “cultural burning” refers to the traditional Indigenous practice. If you want to further expand your vocabulary, CalPBA.org has a great glossary.
Figure out who is in charge of setting fires in your area. Knowing who is in charge of the land around you is an important part of getting informed about future prescribed fires, but a fair warning — there are a lot of different players who might be involved, so this step can be tricky. The federal government, state governments, and tribal governments all have their own workforces to deploy for prescribed burns. If you see projects happening on private land, you might have a Prescribed Burn Association (PBA) in your area. These groups help private landowners organize fires through community involvement. Organizations like The Nature Conservancy might also work with local landowners to conduct burns on at-risk areas. Some universities also have their own arms that teach and practice burning. And in many cases, a coalition of various agencies, organizations, and firefighters will come together to conduct burns due to the highly bureaucratic and resource-heavy process it can entail.
Prepare for a prescribed fire in your area
Figure out where to get your prescribed fire news. Each of the agencies and organizations mentioned above that are involved in prescribed fires have their own approach to promoting their work, so this can be another challenging step. Still, there are a few go-to places where you’re likely to find prescribed fire announcements and updates:
Local media. Regional TV stations and neighborhood newspapers or blogs often get a heads-up before controlled burns and can keep you posted on when the fire is scheduled to be lit.
Social media. Following official pages and users are a good option for both announcements and updates. Make sure the accounts you follow are verified and associated with agencies or organizations like the US Forest Service or your state’s fire agency.
Apps. Watch Duty is a wildfire-tracking app that also posts updates about prescribed burns in select US states. The app’s map-based interface is easy to navigate and is updated around the clock.
Emergency alerts and warnings. Some municipalities might give you a heads-up using these tools to tell you about a planned burn, but most importantly, emergency alerts will tell you if a prescribed fire escapes its intended zone and poses a threat to your community. Check your phone’s settings to make sure you’re opted in for emergency alerts and visit your local emergency management agency’s website (you can search by city or by county) for more information on their offerings.
Get smoke-ready. Agencies and organizations that conduct prescribed burns create a smoke plan to safeguard surrounding areas. So, if all goes well, smoke from a prescribed burn should not impact you the same way a wildfire would. Still, it’s worth having a plan in place to deal with any increase in smoke. This fact sheet from AirNow.gov — a site you can also bookmark for checking your local air quality — offers a comprehensive list of customizable suggestions for dealing with smoke based on your living space and personal health concerns.
Bonus: Join the fire line
Reach out and see how you can get involved. Many PBAs and other fire-focused community groups host regular meetings, and they often are looking for new volunteers. Even if you don’t want to go through the training necessary to set a fire yourself, there are many other ways to engage. For example, you can help clear and clean up the burn site ahead of the prescribed fire or be in charge of sharing updates with the public.
If you’re a landowner, consider your own property’s needs. Do you have a lot of overgrowth and dead plants in your yard? Have you been evacuated due to fire concerns before? While there are a lot of factors to consider, answering “yes” to these questions could mean you’re a good candidate for having your property evaluated for a future burn. Contacting a PBA or other fire-specific organizations in your area is the best way to learn about your options.
Consider creating a PBA yourself. Interested in this PBA business and not seeing one in your area? Oklahoma State University has a practical guide to getting a new one started.
This edition of Hothouse is edited by Tekendra Parmar and published by Cadence Bambenek. We rely on readers to support us, and everything we publish is free to read. Follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn.
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