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Wildfires & Colonization
Another record-breaking fire season has rocked the American west, driven by climate change and the legacy of settler colonialism. This year 3.5 million acres burned across California, Oregon, and Washington, with an astonishing 963,309 acres coming from a single blaze, the Dixie Fire. The human cost of wildfires is apparent from the thousands of structures lost to the near-unbreathable air during extreme seasons, and the ecological consequences are widespread.
Colonization and climate change have fundamentally changed the relationship between North American landscapes and fire, contributing to the dangerous mega-fires we see today. While fire is a naturally occurring phenomenon in many ecosystems, the wildfires of recent decades are anything but natural, and represent a significant departure from fires of the past.
Before European colonization, many, but not all, forests in western North America regularly burned due to wildfires ignited by lightning and fires used by Indigenous people to manage natural resources. These intentionally set, frequently-occurring surface fires cleared understory vegetation in forests, which provided protection against hazardous fires and promoted edible plants like huckleberry, blueberries, and mushrooms. These fires burned at low severity, clearing the forest floor of debris but sparing much of the forest soil and rarely climbing into the canopies. That’s not to say that extreme fires did not occur historically. They certainly did, but were less frequent than we see today. Fires and wildfires alike maintained forests and landscape mosaics, supporting the growth of large trees and the creation of North America’s landscapes.
Following the violent arrival of predominantly white settlers across western North America, fire suppression became widespread, imposing European ideas about fire and forest management onto North American landscapes. In the late 18th century, Spanish colonizers disregarded Indigenous land management practices and issued proclamations to criminalize intentional burning. From the perspective of colonizers and settlers, fires were a threat to timber resources and associated economic opportunities. In reality, however, fire helped to create and maintain those same resources.
In 1850, the first California legislature passed An Act for the Government and Protection of Indians. This act outlawed intentional burning and recommended fines or punishment for failing to “use proper exertions to extinguish the fire.” In 1911, following the “Great Fires of 1910,” the Weeks Act facilitated government purchase of millions of acres of land and cemented fire suppression as federal policy.
The mega-fires burning recently across the west are linked to this legacy of fire suppression, which was so successful that vegetation and brush built up in the understory and connected previously patchy landscapes of forest, grassland, and shrubland. Logging and other forest management practices created uniform, similarly aged forests that could easily carry and spread fire. When wildfires eventually burned these areas, the accumulated, continuous vegetation allowed the fire to burn more severely and deeper into the soil. Such wildfires were more likely to climb into forest canopies and between trees. These wildfires killed forests instead of maintaining forests like the fires that burned in these ecosystems for millennia.
Wildfires & Climate Change
Climate change has increased the threat enormously across western North America when it comes to wildfires. The history of fire suppression created dangerous forest conditions, and now climate change is creating environmental conditions that amplify that risk. Smaller snowpack can create water-stress for ecosystems. Higher temperatures and prolonged droughts further dry out and kill vegetation, priming them to burn.
In western North America, human-driven climate change has raised the likelihood of extreme fire weather, strengthened the drying power of the atmosphere, and increased the number of high fire danger days over the past 40 years. It has disrupted historical patterns of rainfall precipitation regimes, with more rain in the winter leading to the growth of wildfire fuels like grasses. This grass can quickly become tinder for wildfires when hotter and drier summers follow. Seasonal patterns have also shifted, meaning warmer, drier autumns that extend the risk of extreme, late-season fires.
Our climate is changing, and the best available science suggests that the climate emergency and large, intense wildfires will persist into the future. Lightning strikes, the ignition source of many large wildfires, are expected to increase with a warming climate. Severe fires that burn deep into the soil may lead to regeneration failures, where forests do not regrow as forests, reducing land-based carbon sinks that draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These forest conversions can change how water moves through ecosystems and modify habitat availability for wildlife.
The legacy of settler colonialism and a rapidly warming climate have disrupted the fire regimes that created and maintained many of western North America’s landscapes. Restoring frequent, low-severity fire to specific landscapes is one way we can begin to make these ecosystems resilient to climate change. This means removing the bureaucratic barriers that echo colonizer’s policies of the past and inhibit Indigenous communities from reintroducing cultural burns in some areas.
We can limit these fires if we don’t lose the forest for the trees when it comes to climate change and forest management. Without reducing fossil fuel use and reimagining management at the broadest scales, extreme wildfire seasons are likely to continue.