Wildfire misinformation season in the West starts soon
We're getting close to peak wildfire season in the West again, so it's time to get ready for wild misinformation smoke blowing in from all directions.
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You've seen it on every news station in the country — the West is on fire! All news outlets have a battery of language they use to describe these conditions like clockwork: The wildfire is a disaster, it's decimation, an inferno, a tragedy, and a catastrophe — and wildfire in the West today is always described as unprecedented.
The one thing you won't hear in the media, social media, and individual interviews with the affected is how wildfire in the West is not just normal, it's necessary — it's a vital ecosystem function here.
I listen closely when news stations talk about wildfire in the West and exactly zero percent of the broadcasts include viable information for understanding the nature of wildfire, why it's happening, and how it is a core ecosystem function.
Even more interestingly, almost all recent broadcasts about wildfire attribute wildfires in the West to climate change, which is only interesting because climate change isn't a -cause- of wildfire. Climate change is a network of variables that modify and amplify other variables that can alter the way wildfire behaves.
Wildfire is a direct function of fuels, wind, the ecosystem, and the whole system of events over time that have shaped the area that is burning.
When it comes to wildfire in the West, misinformation is the norm
The whole story of wildfire in the West is a huge topic, which is one reason why we don't see a lot of good information about it in the news. It's far easier to explain the situation in terms of what people are feeling, what the mass audience's intuition about the situation will allow them to relate to, and absent any of the complex explanations that an ecosystem scientist would tell you.
In that, we're stuck with misinformation that spreads like wildfire.
It challenges intuition to think that entire swaths of a continent are covered in ecosystems that are not just tolerant to wildfire, they're completely dependent on wildfire for their health, survival, and maintenance.
The scenes ported into view of the mass public include whole stands of trees burning, people fleeing, firefighters covered in soot in dense smoke-filled clouds, and houses and businesses burning. Amplified by imagery we've been steeped in from childhood, from Smoky the Bear campaigns to help prevent forest fires, to Disney's depictions of wildfire killing innocent wildlife in Bambi, our intuitions don't serve us well when it comes to wildfire. Most of the American understanding and perception of it has been shaped by misinformation on the subject.
A couple years ago, I was listening to a local NPR affiliate's post-fire coverage of a wildfire that spread in Colorado, and every single one of their interviewees were transplants living in the area around Glenwood Canyon. This was just after the Glenwood Canyon fire, which burned through Colorado's famous canyon that interstate 70 runs through near Glenwood Springs and Colorado's famous transplant colony / enclave, Aspen. Every single interviewee lamented the "damage" to the canyon, how "devastating" the fire was, and a couple even declared that ‘climate change is the cause of this fire and the impending comeuppance.’
Wild. Misinformation is clearly the rule, not the exception1.
The West’s environment is fire-dependent
In none of these broadcasts will you ever hear that most ecosystems west of the Mississippi are fire-dependent.
You'll never hear that our grasslands and forests are genetically programmed for frequent fire return intervals of 1-5 years, and that the mountains of the western U.S. burn catastrophically when the return of wildfire exceeds about 20 years by design. Without fire to come clear out detritus, underbrush, and weakened trees over about 20 years, poof … crown fire2.
A forest ecosystem scientist would likely regard that statement as too general and imprecise, but as far as generalizations go, it's far closer to true than anything you're seeing in the news or from those interpreting wildfire events from the pedestal of their urbanized intuition that tells them that wildfire is destruction.
One of the first media blurbs that our ideological acolytes released after the Marshall Fire in Louisville, Colorado, was that ‘the fire was caused by climate change.’ The statement is super hard to disagree with because any rebuttal would be too complex to convey in soundbite form, and well ... over time and the extensive study that will ensue over that incident, it could be found to be a climate change-amplified incident3.
If it's not clear how troublesome the claim was within minutes of the incident from a scientific standpoint, here's why; It takes years of research to clearly tie a disaster incident to a climate-related cause. The incident has to be proven on a dizzying number of variables and dimensions to be proven in a causal relationship.
Sure, you could say ‘the scientists are too slow’, or say ‘it's intuitively obvious that this was a climate-caused event.’ But that falls apart entirely when you look at the context of that incident, including region-wide actions during the dozens of years preceding it, such as multi-decades long fire suppression of the grassland ecosystem between Louisville, CO, and the foothills to protect seas of new homes in this novel place with a view.
If you ignore the total annihilation of the fire regime in the West to make way for homes with a view of the highly flammable Rockies, the role of fuel loading, the fire regime of this ecosystem; And how normal 100+ mph winds are in this area multiple times per year — sure, speculate as if you’re such a good scientist that you can just call it in the air — call it climate change. The claim could be right in the end, but anyone committed to the right answer knows why crying climate change in the heat of every disaster incident is a socially and intellectually harmful mistake.
Misinformation helps to create more demand for fire suppression
Wildfire in the West can't be adequately interpreted with intuition, especially through the eyes of someone just getting to know this place or being exposed to it for the first time through the myopic lens of media broadcasts. Even some of our rooted locals in the region don't carry a deep understanding of the environment we live in.
If you don't know that nearly all of our native trees produce highly flammable terpene4 resins in their needles, drop those needles to create tinder, or that many of the native plant and tree species are dependent on fire for seed germination, you'll always mistakenly look at wildfire in the West as "destructive" and “unprecedented.”
In that, the way onlookers see the West helps to shape it. And when your perception lends to belief that fire is bad, fire suppression is good, and fire-related disasters are caused by evil-doings from everything from climate change to bad campers, you help to create demand for more fire suppression in a fire-dependent environment.
As we enter peak wildfire season in the West, the misinformation campaign is staged to begin. And while I don't suspect there is conscious intent to mislead, it sure is interesting to see how the mind of the public has been shaped entirely by provably, clearly, and historically wrong information.
Take a look at the Museum of Boulder’s timeline page and scroll down to 1871 — perhaps the last point in history where Boulder’s mountains had an intact fire regime. Tree density on Boulder’s iconic mountains is now likely in the zone of 10 times what it was when the fire regime was still functioning:
https://museumofboulder.org/time/ (sorry, this link doesn’t work well on mobile devices)
It's true that when you see whole stands of trees burning in the West, something went wrong along the way — there is a catastrophic loss occurring at the ecosystem level — but the reason you're being told and what your intuition is telling you about wildfire are very likely wrong. Those whole stands of forest are burning because the forests are over-grown and the fuel loads weren't cleared gradually with an intact fire regime.
Fire suppression increases fuel loads, which increases the intensity of wildfires
Wildfire is an inherent part of the West's environment, which isn't being sold in the boosterism, marketing, and influencer spheres driving people to the West in mass as the next great Neverland, USA destination.
Without regularly occurring wildfire in the West, every fire becomes a crown fire where every tree burns and the soil sterilizes. Every grassland fire on a 100 mph windy day has the chance to take out dozens or hundreds of homes in the way. And sure, the changing climate is almost definitely an influencing variable, but in every single wildfire in the West that has made national news, there were vastly more dominant leading variables helping to turn the fire into a human catastrophe.
Next time you see a wildfire in the West grace the news headlines, just know that if it's west of the Mississippi, it's a vital and normal ecosystem function. And if you're seeing whole stands of trees burning into their canopies, know that the fire return interval and regime has definitely been disrupted and fuel loads are vastly higher than they would be under normal conditions.
Suppression of wildfire in the West is a direct function of human structures being put in the way of fire-dependent ecosystem functions, and as fuels continue to build up naturally, the potential for multi-billion dollar disasters increases in-kind5. When considering the cause or the harm of these incidents, there is a network of variables that are driving the scary imagery of burning forests and homes, and attribution of these incidents to single variables such as climate change is almost definitely misinformation until proven otherwise.
The West is an entirely fire-dependent place and when we disrupt the maintenance regime that the entire landscape is adapted to, the ecosystem just goes bigger and badder to overcome resistance. Smoky the Bear and Bambi may not have been the good guys after all.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted westerner acculturated with generations of local knowledge about our lands, and years of study in ecosystem sciences and natural resource management, with an intensive interest in wildfire-dependent environments.
Footnotes and Citations
More about wildfire misinformation here …
Crown fire is the term for fires burning into the canopy of the trees, effectively burning the whole tree from the ground to the top. In an area with an intact fire regime, these fires are typically rare, and only occur when the forest density is high and energy can build up to the point of killing whole trees and sterilizing soils. High fuel loads, dehydrated trees, and and a variety of other variables help bring surface fires into the tree canopy.
Terpenes are highly flammable hydrocarbons produced by plants in fire adapted ecosystems. Yep, flammable hydrocarbons that all evergreen trees in the West produce naturally to help them burn and clear the forest floor by dropping their needles to help encourage fire.
Ugh, decades of mismanagement, suppression of natural fires, ya can’t make this stuff up!
Let's not forget those PSPS power outages! They used to just be a California thing, but now everybody is jumping on. Hey why spend millions on system maintenance when you can just turn the power off. Avoided cost, right?