The Northeast didn’t see it coming, but suddenly we are putting out a lot of wildfires: The state of New York is in the midst of its most active wildfire season in more than a decade. A wildfire in southwestern Massachusetts grew to 1,000 acres this week, the second fire in the region to reach that size this month. New Jersey has suppressed 500 wildfires and counting this fall.
As droughts and heat intensify, the risk of wildfires like these becoming catastrophic is growing across the United States. And more Americans who face this risk are tired of merely hoping they survive these events. So in places everywhere from Texas to California to North Carolina, citizens are organizing themselves and wielding a powerful tool: setting fires under controlled conditions.
The United States Forest Service has been ramping up its use of this kind of fire, also known as prescribed burns; last year, the agency nearly doubled the area of National Forest lands it burned to two million acres. But after generations of suppressing fire, many millions of acres of brush and tree fuels have built up, increasing the risk of large, dangerous wildfires. And so private landowners and community associations from across the political spectrum are trying to make up the difference: Between 1998 and 2018, these groups, as well as state and municipal agencies, were responsible for 93 percent of the increase in controlled fires in the country, not only reducing the threat of destructive wildfires, but also restoring prairie and forest landscapes that have adapted to fire over millenniums.
Landowners who want to manage the land with fire can face myriad obstacles: confusing agency bureaucracies, lengthy permitting processes, prohibitive liability exposure and restrictive air quality regulations. Prescribed-burn associations — neighbors helping neighbors burn — are addressing some of these issues by pooling community members’ resources, experience and time. Think of it as a barn raising with smoke and flame. But they are constrained in the good they can do. In an era of greater wildfire risk driven by fuel accumulation and global warming, governments should be swiftly removing barriers to the use of prescribed fires on private land.
One morning last March in central Nebraska, I experienced the thrill of a community burn firsthand when I joined a group of 18 volunteers age 10 to 70 years old, stamping their boots in the cold and cracking jokes. Parked behind us was a motley assortment of fire engines, trucks and an old five-ton military supply truck with a thousand-gallon water tank.
That day, the members of the Custer Prescribed Burn Association set ablaze 973 acres of prairie. My job was to carry a metal canister filled with fuel and set fire to patches of bluestem grass. It was, as one volunteer put it to me, “just authentic fun.”