How has the Smokey the Bear campaign, which attempted to eliminate wildfires from forested areas altogether, damaged forest health? What is the importance of fire in ecosystem management? What is the cost of fire suppression for ecosystem health?

Question

What is the alternative to fire suppression?

Answer 1

For over a century, the Forest Service and other land management agencies have suppressed fire whenever and wherever it has broken out. Yet ecological research now clearly shows that many ecosystems depend on fire to maintain themselves. Certain plants have seeds that germinate only in response to fire, and researchers studying tree rings have documented that many ecosystems historically experienced fire with some frequency. Ecosystems dependent on fire are adversely affected by its suppression; open pine woodlands become cluttered with hardwood understory that ordinarily would be cleared away by fire, for instance, and animal diversity and abundance declines in such cluttered habitats. In addition, fire suppression increases the likelihood of catastrophic fires that truly do damage forests and that destroy human property and threaten human lives. This is because fire suppression allows the buildup of years' worth of limbs, logs, sticks, and leaf litter on the forest floor—excellent kindling for a catastrophic fire. Such fuel buildup helped cause the 1988 fires in Yellowstone National Park and thousands of other fires across the continent, and it is why catastrophic fires have become more of a problem than in the past. To reduce this fuel load and improve the health and safety of forests, the Forest Service and other agencies have in recent years been burning areas of forest under carefully controlled conditions. These prescribed burning programs have worked where they have been applied, but they require so much time and effort that a relatively small amount of land has been treated. Sometimes controlled burns can get out of control, as happened in 2000 in New Mexico. Efforts at controlled burns also have been complicated by public misunderstanding and by interference from politicians who have not taken time to understand the science behind the approach.