The Urgent Need to Reform America’s Fire Policy

On January 7th, the Palisades Fire broke out in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, propelled by the Santa Ana winds.

As of this writing, at least eleven are dead and thousands of structures have been destroyed. The devastation is the latest tragic reminder of how decades of policy decisions have transformed our relationship with fire. Step into a national forest today, and you’ll find a landscape far removed from what early twentieth century Americans might have recognized. Dense, unhealthy forests stretch for miles, many untouched by fire for generations. These conditions are the legacy of nearly a century of fire suppression policies. Over the past forty years, wildfires have moved out of the wilderness and into our backyards, becoming a fixture of life in the West.

Throughout the last weeks of August 1910, numerous small fires dotted northern Idaho and western Montana. As hurricane-force winds swept the areas, the small fires became firestorms. The conflagrations raged across more than three million acres, claimed at least eighty-six lives, and destroyed several towns in two short days. Dubbed thereafter “The Great Fire of 1910,” the disaster cemented the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) as chiefly an agency for the control and management of wildfires.

Beginning in 1911, the USFS adopted an aggressive fire suppression policy to remove fire from federal forests to protect valuable timber and natural resources. Over the next hundred years, the agency developed elite firefighting crews and military-grade equipment to combat flames on the ground and from the air. Yet, as forest fires were extinguished, fuels like dead wood and undergrowth accumulated unchecked. By suppressing natural fires, forests became overgrown and primed for more destructive blazes. [1]

This strategy remained virtually unquestioned until 2000, when the USDA and DOI recognized that things needed to change. The federal agencies implemented plans that focused on fuel reduction and prescribed burning, which would help contain fires. It has proven very difficult to try to reverse ninety years of fire suppression damage thus far. [3]

Fire suppression wasn’t the only factor contributing to the current wildfire situation. A very sharp reduction in the amount of timber harvested from federal lands further contributed to today’s problem. Harvest levels went from 12 billion board feet per year in the late 1970s to just 1 billion board feet today. [2] In concert with the absence of natural fire, this decline has left forests strangled by diseased and dying trees.

Efforts at restoration of timber harvesting face insurmountable obstacles. The decline in logging led to widespread mill closures in the United States, while Canada picked up much of the slack. American entrepreneurs are unlikely to repatriate much of the industry given the uncertain political climate over conservation and environmental policies, meaning large-scale logging is an unlikely solution to the crisis. 

As forests have grown denser, they’ve also grown more populated. The intermountain states of the West continue to experience some of the most rapid population growth in the country, with many residents moving to the WUI—the areas where human development meets wildlands. This migration has created new challenges as more communities find themselves in the path of wildfires. [3]

The presence of homes in fire-prone areas makes letting natural fires burn a difficult proposition. Those that threaten human life and property must be brought under control as rapidly as possible, even if doing so perpetuates the cycle of fuel build-up. In many ways, this dynamic has brought us full circle, back to the USFS’s original “10 a.m. policy,” which called for fires to be extinguished by mid-morning the day after they were reported.

This is a problem with no quick fixes. The West contains over 200 million acres of federal forestland, much of it in need of intervention. Even at an ambitious restoration pace of 10 million acres per year—beyond our current capacity—it would take four decades to address the backlog. Private landowners have strong incentives to manage their forests to prevent catastrophic fires, as their livelihood depends on the health of their timber resources. Policies aimed at reducing barriers to private management might help reduce fuel load, but logging alone cannot solve the problem. Prescribed burns are effective yet resisted by nearby communities due to air quality concerns.

Other key factors that have been absent in the debate about wildfires have included zoning laws and restrictive land-use policies, which have pushed housing development into the tinderbox-like WUI areas. By offering greater density incentives in urban areas, the market could balance growth in fire-prone regions by increasing the supply of housing in lower-risk areas. This would eventually shift growth to safer locations and decrease pressure on sprawling into areas that are vulnerable to fire.

In the meantime, wildfires are an unfortunate reality—the direct result of a century of well-intentioned but flawed policies.  

Notes

[1] Busenberg, G. 2004. Wildfire Management in the United States: The Evolution of a Policy Failure. The Review of Policy Research 21:145–157.

[2] Riddle, A. 2022. Timber Harvesting on Federal Lands. Congressional Research Service.

[3] U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service & U.S. Department of the Interior. 2000. Managing the Impact of Wildfires on Communities and the Environment.