In recent decades, wildfires have gotten larger and more intense, and community-destroying blazes – like the Marshall and Camp fires – are an increasingly common occurrence.
But new research looking at centuries of wildfires shows that compared with fires in the 19th and earlier centuries, today’s blazes pale in comparison – at least in terms of size.
“The scale of fire today is not unprecedented. If anything, it's on kind of the low side,” said Don Falk, a professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment.
He was part of a team that looked at how frequently sites in the North American tree-ring fire-scar network (NAFSN) burned.
“Overall, contemporary fires (1984–2022) burned NAFSN sites less frequently than fires during the historical reference period (pre-1880), indicating that a substantial fire deficit persists and is still accumulating across many forests and woodlands across the United States and Canada,” the paper reads. “Based on the historical fire-scar record, NAFSN sites collectively would be expected to have burned 4,346 times from 1984–2022, yet they burned 989 times, or only 23% of what would be expected under the historical fire regime.”
The very heavy recent wildfire year of 2020 burned 6% of tree-ring fire-scar sites, which was the average for the period between 1600 to 1880.
“What is unprecedented, however, is the severity of these fires,” Falk said. “And that severity is the direct result of our having excluded wildfire as an essential ecosystem process for thousands of years. By keeping fire out of the landscape, fuels accumulate.”
And when wildfires inevitably come, he explained, they can be catastrophic.
Falk said the findings point to the urgent need for more prescribed, cultural and other forms of beneficial fire.
“The amount of money that we're investing in suppressing fire – which creates these huge catastrophic events – if we put that same amount into returning fire safely to the landscape, we would see a revolution in land management, because forests would be healthier and more resilient,” Falk said, adding: “You have to learn to think about fire in a different way. You have to learn to think of fire as your friend.”
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio (KNPR) in Las Vegas, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
