Deliberately setting fires is now an accepted fire mitigation strategy that lessens the impact of natural fires, but the U.S. lags behind and needs to catch up to avoid further disaster, a Northeastern expert says.
In the aftermath of the wildfires that devastated Los Angeles, politicians and citizens alike are looking for ways to prevent future disasters from hitting the region. As strange as it might sound, fighting fire with fire may be one of the best solutions, an expert says.
Strategically setting fires, a practice known as controlled or prescribed burning, is a common practice in many countries, but the United States has been slow to catch on, says Anncy Thresher, an assistant professor of public policy, urban affairs and philosophy at Northeastern University.
Moving forward, the practice could help make the difference between a manageable wildfire and an uncontrollable burn in fire-prone areas like Southern California, Thresher says.
“We have a tendency in the modern day to just try to stop fires, and we think fire is bad, full stop,” Thresher says. “Fires are a natural part of the Southern California ecosystem cycle.”
America’s more military-like approach to fire suppression that became common practice in the 1930s is built to eradicate fires. Over the years, federal and state firefighters became incredibly effective at snuffing out fires to the point that the U.S. Forest Service proudly declared a 98% fire suppression rate in 2022.
But Thresher says that strategy actually comes with some dangers, which Los Angeles felt in full force.
“When you prevent fires, you get a buildup of brush and bush, which means when fires happen, they’re much worse,” Thresher says. “The received wisdom these days is actually we should be setting our own fires, and you do that on a short enough cycle that you clear out all the brush.
“It would just be easier to manage and easier to, say, keep out of your suburbs because they’d move not as fast, they wouldn’t be as hot, they wouldn’t flare up so quickly,” she adds.
Now an accepted method of fire mitigation, controlled burns have been used for centuries by indigenous populations to stave off the impact of wildfires. Indigenous people continued the practice for long enough that the ecosystem actually adapted to deliberately set fires.
The lack of frequent burns, along with the introduction of invasive species into Southern California that occurred with colonization and, later, industrialization, complicates that ecosystem. The Los Angeles wildfires were the perfect storm of climate change induced conditions and powerful winds, but the invasive species in the area only added fuel to the fire, Thresher says.
Southern California’s native plants are perennials –– they live year-round –– while many invasive species are annuals that die in the winter and come back in the spring or summer.
“What that means is you get these periods like winter in California where you’ve got a bunch of dead material laying around because all these invasive plants have died off,” Thresher says.
More frequent controlled burns clear out the dead foliage, which acts as tinder, and hinder the pace and intensity of natural wildfires. The practice also opens up opportunities to more aggressively control invasive species that naturally tend to thrive in the aftermath of wildfires.
“A burned area means you have more access to these places,” Thresher says. “There’s less brush, so you can get people in there to try and pull weeds, get rid of things and handle invasive species and minimize their impact.”
Thresher notes that instituting proactive burn schedules, similar to what her home country, Australia, does, is one of the most necessary shifts in the way U.S. fire mitigation works.
“In the offseason, all of our firefighters are out setting their own fires and burning things in ways that are not common in the American system,” Thresher says. “America tends to treat firefighting work as a seasonal thing, where in other parts of the world that are very affected by forest fires it’s a full time of the year thing.”
There is also a need to change the public perception around controlled burns. In the U.S., “people tend to be very itchy when you start trying to light fires in their backyards,” while in Australia people have, through government policy and education, learned to view fire as a firefighting tool that they can use themselves, she observes.
“People in Australia, even on their properties, will let the fire department know, ‘I’m setting a fire today. Heads up,’” Thresher says. “You’ll get permission and then set a fire on your property and manage it yourself.”
The policy conversation in the U.S. is slowly starting to shift toward controlled burns, although Thresher expects that could change in the aftermath of the recent fires.
“It’s becoming more and more of a conversation in SoCal about prescribed fires and proactive burning, and I suspect in the wake of this set of fires there will be more conversation about [it],” Thresher says. “You can’t have mega massive fires if there’s nothing to burn because we burned it two years ago.”